Exam 2 Study Guide Assimilation use current schemes to interpret world Schemes organized ways of making sense of experience Adaption building schemes through direct interaction with the environment Includes all mental activity attending remembering symbolizing categorizing planning reasoning problem solving creating and fantasizing Mental representations Internal depictions of information that the mind can manipulate such as images or concepts Accommodation When we create new schemes or adjust old ones after noticing our current way of thinking isn t sufficient in our environment Cognition The inner processes and products of the mind that lead to knowing Chapter 6 Cognitive Development Piagetian Core Knowledge and Vygotskian Perspective 1 Key terms 2 Piaget s Cognitive Development Theory A general theory of development based on the idea that chidren go through 4 stages These stages are invariant or in a fixed order and universal or assumed to apply to all children Sensorimotor stage The first stage from birth until 2 years Based on the belief that toddlers think with their eyes ears and hands since they cannot carry out many mental activities yet Infants know so little that they are unable to explore purposefully The circular reaction is a means infants use to adapt to their first schemes and involves accidentally experiencing new things as a result of motor activity or movement It is circular because infants try and repeat the experience over and over again until it eventually forms a new scheme Intentional behavior Occurs around 8 12 months Able to combine schemes into new and more complex action sequences New schemes are no longer hit or miss or caused by accidental behaviors Object Permanence understanding that objects continue to exist when out of sight and ability to retrieve hidden objects Mental representations Begin around 18 months and allow for deferred imitation the ability to remember and copy modeled behavior and make believe play in which children act out everyday and imaginary activities As this stage comes to an end mental symbols become major instruments in thinking Organization A process that occurs internally apart from the environment that changes schemes Equilibration movement between equilibrium assimilate more and disequilibrium accommodate more Follow up research Studies indicate that infants display a variety of understandings earlier than Piaget believed Infants control and explore their external world far before 8 4 to 8 months even from birth Violation of expectation method How researchers discover what infants know about hidden objects and other aspects of physical reality One way to do so is habituating a baby to a physical event to familiarize them with the situation and then testing them on it Another is showing babies an unexpected event or variation of the first event and checking their awareness or surprise This method is controversial because it may only indicate limited and implicit awareness of physical events Analogical problem solving Applying a solution from one problem to other relevant problems by 10 12 months Displaced reference A momentous milestone in development that occurs around 1 year and is the realization that words can be used to cue mental images of things not physically present Video deficit effect Infants confuse video images with reality Studies show video deficit effect on toddlers Poorer skill performance deferred imitation and word learning and poorer problem solving Experts recommend against mass media exposure before age 2 Preoperational stage 2 to 7 years Big increase in mental representation most obvious change from sensorimotor language is the most flexible means Characteristics what they can do Make believe play drawing dual representation and language Make believe play develops during this stage Play detaches from the real life conditions associated with it is less self centered and includes more complex combinations of schemes such as sociodramatic play where children can combine schemes with peers around 2 years Benefits of make believe play Contributes to children s cognitive and social skills Drawing also develops and progresses from scribbles to first representative forms and eventually more realistic drawings Dual representation viewing a symbolic object as both an object in it s own right and a symbol Limitations of cognitive thinking in preoperational thought Piaget described preschool children in terms of what they cannot rather than can understand such as cannot perform mental operations Operations are mental representations of actions that obey logical rules Egocentrism and animistic thinking Egocentrism is the inability to distinguish the symbolic thinking of others from own Three Mountain Problem Animistic is the tendency to attribute thoughts feelings and emotions to inanimate objects Example usually use motion as a cue to something being alive Inability to conserve certain physical characteristics of objects remain the same when outward appearance changes Centration is the focusing or centering of attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others Irreversibility can t mental reverse steps Lack of hierarchical classification Cannot organize objects into classes and subclasses based on similarities and differences Concrete Operational Stage 7 to 11 years Major turning point in cognitive development Children are more logical flexible organized The ability to complete conservation tasks provides clear evidence for operations Decentration is the ability to focus on several aspects of a problem and relating them to one another Reversibility is the capacity to imagine returning something to its original state as a proof of conservation Classification is the ability to focus on relations between as general and two specific categories at the same time three relations at once Seriation is the ability to order items along a quantitative dimension Limitations of this stage Children think in an organized logical fashion only when dealing with concrete information they can perceive directly Their mental operations work poorly with abstract ideas The continuum of acquisition or gradual mastery of logical concepts over time is another limitation Transitive inference Being able to seriate mentally Spatial reasoning School aged children s understanding of space is more accurate than preschoolers Cognitive maps Mental representations of familiar large scale places such as a school Since it cannot all
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