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1 3: Cognitive Development - Piaget Outline – What is cognition? – Piaget’s Theory Features of the theory Sensorimotor stage Preoperational stage Concrete operations stage Formal operations stage – Problems with the theory – Learning Outcomes

1 3: Cognitive Development - Piaget Outline –What is cognition? –Piaget’s Theory Features of the theory Sensorimotor stage Preoperational stage Concrete

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Page 1: 1 3: Cognitive Development - Piaget Outline –What is cognition? –Piaget’s Theory Features of the theory Sensorimotor stage Preoperational stage Concrete

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3: Cognitive Development - Piaget

Outline– What is cognition?– Piaget’s Theory

Features of the theory Sensorimotor stage Preoperational stage Concrete operations stage Formal operations stage

– Problems with the theory– Learning Outcomes

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What is cognition?

Virtually everything we do involves thinking or cognitive functioning– Recalling a phone number– Remembering a list– Following directions– Reading your watch (how much time until…?)

How do children become able to do all these things?

Why are some better at some tasks?Why are some quicker to develop?

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A Constructivist Approach

Jean Piaget’s theory remains the standard against which all other theories are judged– Often labeled constructivist

because it depicts children as constructing knowledge for themselves

Children are seen as– Active– Learning many important lessons

on their own– Intrinsically motivated to learn

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Nature and Nurture

Piaget believed that nature and nurture interact to yield cognitive development

– Adaptation: The tendency to respond to the demands of the environment to meet one’s goals

– Organization: The tendency to integrate particular observations into coherent knowledge

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Sources of Continuity

Three processes work together from birth to propel development forward

– Assimilation: The process by which people translate incoming information into a form they can understand

– Accommodation: The process by which people adapt current knowledge structures in response to new experiences

– Equilibration: The process by which people balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding

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Discontinuities

The discontinuous aspects of Piaget’s theory are distinct, hierarchical stages

Central properties of Piaget’s stage theory:

– Qualitative change

– Broad applicability across topics and contexts

– Brief transitions

– Invariant sequence

Hypothesized that children progress through four stages of cognitive development, each building on the previous one

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Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

Sensorimotor Birth to 2 years

Infants know the world through their senses and through their actions. For example, they learn what dogs look like and what petting them feels like.

Preoperational 2 - 7 years

Toddlers and young children acquire the ability to internally represent the world through language and mental imagery. They also begin to be able to see the world from other people’s perspectives, not just from their own.

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Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

Concrete Operational

7 - 12 years

Children become able to think logically, not just intuitively. They now can classify objects into coherent categories and understand that events are often influenced by multiple factors, not just one.

Formal Operational

12+ years Adolescents can think systematically and reason about what might be as well as what is. This allows them to understand politics, ethics, and science fiction, as well as to engage in scientific reasoning.

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Sensorimotor Substages

Sub Age Description

1 Birth – 1 month

Infants begin to modify the reflexes with which they are born to make them more adaptive.

2 1 – 4 months

Infants begin to organize separate reflexes into larger behaviors, most of which are centered on their own bodies.

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Sensorimotor Substages

Sub Age Description

3 4 – 8 months

Infants becoming increasingly interested in the world around them. By the end of this substage, object permanence, the knowledge that objects continue to exist even when they are out of view, typically emerges.

4 8 – 12 months

During this substage, children make the A-Not-B error, the tendency to reach to where objects have been found before, rather than to where they were last hidden.

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Object permanence

Objects are tied to infant’s awareness of them– “out of sight, out of mind”

Hidden toy experiment– 4 months: no attempt to search for hidden

object– 4-9 months: visual search for object – 9 months: search for and retrieve hidden object

A-not-B task (Diamond, 1985)– 9 months: A/B error after 1/2 second delay– 12 months: 10 second delay needed to produce

error

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Piaget’s A-Not-B Task

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Sensorimotor Substages

Sub Age Description

5 12 – 18 months

Toddlers begin to actively and avidly explore the potential uses to which objects can be put.

6 18 – 24 months

Infants become able to form enduring mental representations. The first sign of this capacity is deferred imitation, the repetition of other people’s behavior a substantial time after it occurred.

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Preoperational Stage

A mix of impressive cognitive acquisitions and equally impressive limitations

– A notable acquisition is symbolic representation, the use of one object to stand for another, which makes a variety of new behaviors possible

– A major limitation is egocentrism, the tendency to perceive the world solely from one’s own point of view

– A related limitation is centration, the tendency to focus on a single, perceptually striking feature of an object or event

– Preoperational children also lack of understanding of the conservation concept, the idea that merely changing the appearance of objects does not change their key properties

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Piaget’s Three-Mountain Task

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Egocentric Conversations

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The Balance Scale: An Example of Centration

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Procedures Used to Test Conservation

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Concrete Operational Stage

Children begin to reason logically about the world

They can solve conservation problems, but their successful reasoning is largely limited to concrete situations

Thinking systematically remains difficult

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Inhelder and Piaget’s Pendulum Problem

The task is to compare the motions of longer and shorter strings, with lighter and heavier weights attached, in order to determine the influence of weight, string length, and dropping point on the time it takes for the pendulum to swing back and forth

Children below age 12 usually perform unsystematic experiments and draw incorrect conclusions

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Formal Operational Stage

Cognitive development culminates in the ability to think abstractly and to reason hypothetically

Individuals can imagine alternative worlds and reason systematically about all possible outcomes of a situation

Piaget believed that the attainment of the formal operations stage, in contrast to the other stages, is not universal

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Implications for Education

Piaget’s view of children’s cognitive development suggests that children’s distinctive ways of thinking at different ages need to be considered in deciding how best to teach them

In addition, because children learn by mentally and physically interacting with the environment, relevant physical activities, accompanied by questions that call attention to the lessons of the activities, are important in educational practice

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Critique of Piaget’s Theory

Although Piaget’s theory remains highly influential, some weaknesses are now apparent

– The stage model depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it is

– Infants and young children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized

Object permanence in 3-month-olds (Bower, 1974)

Number conservation in 4 year olds (McGarrigle & Donaldson, 1974)

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Critique of Piaget’s Theory

– Piaget’s theory understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development

Piaget’s tasks are culturally biasedSchooling and literacy affect rates of development

– e.g. Greenfield’s study of the Wolof

Formal operational thinking is not universal– e.g. Gladwin’s study of the Polynesian islanders

– Piaget’s theory is vague about the cognitive processes that give rise to children’s thinking and about the mechanisms that produce cognitive growth

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Learning outcomes

Demonstrate an understanding of Piaget’s theory.

Be familiar with the experiments carried out by Piaget

Show an awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of the theory.

Reading● Siegler, Deloache & Eisenberg, Chapter 4● See .pdf handout for further reading