Chapter 6 Cognition the inner processes and products of the mind that lead to knowing It includes all mental activity attending remembering symbolizing and categorizing planning reasoning problem solving creating and fantasizing o Schemes organized ways of making sense of experience changes with age In the sensorimotor stage they are action patterns o Mental representations internal depictions of information that the mind can manipulate Most powerful are images mental pictures and concepts categories o Adaptation building schemes through direct interaction with the environment Assimilation use current schemes to interpret the external world Accommodation create new schemes or adjust old ones after noticing that our current way of thinking does not capture the environment completely Equilibrium o Organization form new schemes rearrange them and link them with other schemes to create a strongly interconnected cognitive system Sensorimotor first 2 years of life o Circular reaction o Intentional or goal directed behavior o Object permanence o A not B error if they reach several times for an object at one hiding place then see it moved to another they still search for it in the first hiding place o Deferred imitation the ability to remember and copy the behavior of models who are not present Preoperational 2 to 7 years old o Make believe play o Sociodramatic play make believe with others o Drawings o Dual Representations viewing a symbolic object as both an object in its own right and a symbol o Not capable of operations mental representations of actions that obey logical rules o Egocentric o Inability to conserve o Lack of hierarchal thinking o Ability to categorize Concrete 7 to 11 Years o Logical flexible and organized o Conservation o Classification o Seriation the ability to order items along a quantitative dimension such as length or weight o Transitive inference seriate mentally o Spatial reasoning i e cognitive maps Formal 11 and older o Abstract systematic and scientific reasoning o Hypothetico deductive reasoning start with a hypothesis from which they deduce logical testable inferences o Propositional thought adolescents ability to evaluate the logic of propositions verbal statements without referring to real world circumstances o Imaginary audience belief that they are the focus of everyone else s attention and concern o Personal fable inflated opinion of own importance Core Knowledge Perspective infants are born with innate special purpose knowledge systems core domains of thought which is a prewired understanding to grasp similar but new concepts supporting the rapid development of cognition Vygotsky infants are endowed with basic perceptual attention an memory capabilities that they share with others o Develop the first 2 years of life with environmental interaction o Unlike Piaget he emphasized on the effects of rich social and cultural concepts of thinking so looking at the influence of the environment Piaget emphasized more on a biological influence o Private speech self directed speech used when tasks are more challenging o Zone of proximal development Vygotsky believe learning takes place within this A range of tasks too difficult for a child to do alone but possible with the help of adults and more skilled peers i e parents teachers o Key points of social interaction Intersubjectabiliy two participants begin something with different viewpoints but eventually come to a mutual understanding Scaffolding adjusting the support offered during a teacher session to fit the child s current level of performance Guided participation broader concept of scaffolding between less expert and more expert without specifying communication features and guidelines o Make believe play a unique broadly influential zone of proximal development in which children advance themselves as they try out a wide variety of challenging skills Learn to act in accord with internal ideas and not just an external stimulus Strengthens the capacity to think before children act Chapter 7 Store model focuses on the general units of cognitive functioning assuming that we hold or store information into three parts of the mental system for processing o Central Executive directs the flow of information and controls all 3 parts Stimulus input sensory register attention STM storage LTM response output Retrieval o Sensory register Where information enters A broad panorama of sights and sounds are represented directly but stored only momentarily o Short term memory store Second part step We retain attended to information briefly so we can actively work on it to reach our goals Basic capacity holds pieces of information for only a few seconds Basic STM task measures verbatim digit span the longest sequence of items a person can repeat back in the exact order adult average is 7 digits Working memory i e verbal memory span test o Long term memory store permanent knowledge base unlimited To aid with hard retrieval because we store so much here we apply strategies o Developmental changes Short term memory and working memory spans increase steadily with age Increases in working memory reflect gains in processing speed The faster children can repeat to be learned information the larger their memory spans Executive function the set of cognitive operations and strategies necessary for self initiated purposeful behavior in relatively novel challenging situations Controlling attention suppressing impulses in favor of adaptive response coordinating information in working memory and planning organizing monitoring and flexibly redirecting thought and behavior o 1st year attend to novel and eye catching events orienting them to track quicker and o Has to do with the rapid growth in the prefrontal cortex o Sustained attention more time focused on complex stimuli and display greater slowing of heart rate while engaged o The older one gets the more flexible their attention is to they can adapt to task requirements switching mental sets within a task o Inhibition the ability to control internal and external distracting stimuli o Strategies Production deficiency fail to produce strategies when they can be helpful Control deficiency difficulty controlling or executing the strategy Utilization deficiency performance does not improve with proper strategy use Effective strategy use use strategies consistently and performance improves Attention more efficiently o Planning Memory o Strategies Rehearsal repetition Organization categories
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