Piaget’s two Cognitive Processes

Cognitive theories

• Looks at conscious thoughts

• Piaget’s cognitive development theory

• Vygotsky’s social-cultural cognitive theory

• Information-processing approach

Piaget’s Two Cognitive Processes

• Look at the back of the iceberg handout

• Jean Piaget’s theory states that children actively construct their understanding of the world and go through 4 stages of cognitive development • Organization and adaption – to make sense of our world, we

organize our experience. For example: we separate important ideas from less important ideas

• We also adapt our thinking to include new ideas – assimilation and accommodation

Assimilation

• Occurs when individuals incorporate new information into their existing knowledge

• Make a decision of how to fit new information into the old structure

Accommodation

• Occurs when individuals adjust to new information

• Change the structure to allow for new information to fit in

Examples

• A child seeing a zebra for the first time and calling it a horse. The child assimilates this information into her schema for a horse. When the child accommodates information, she takes into consideration the different properties of a zebra compared to a horse, perhaps calling a zebra a horse with stripes. When she eventually learns the name of zebra, she has accommodated this information.

• A mental representation, or schema of a certain group of people (a racist schema) -- your whole life you grew up with those around you just adding more and more information to that schema that made sense to you (assimilation) -- you only notice information that fits your schema (assimilation) and confirms it -- then you get to college and actually meet people from that group and realize what you have learned from real interactions requires a radical reorganization of your schemaregarding that group (accommodation). Your new schema is completely different, not just full of additional information

• Learning progresses from one stage to the next, from reflex to determined behaviour as information is first assimilated and then accommodated

Example of Assimilation

• A 2 year old child sees a man who is bald on top of his head and has long frizzy hair on the sides. To his father’s horror, the toddler shouts “Clown, clown” (Siegler et al., 2003).

Example of Accommodation

• In the “clown” incident, the boy’s father explained to his son that the man was not a clown and that even though his hair was like a clown’s, he wasn’t wearing a funny costume and wasn’t doing silly things to make people laugh.

• With this new knowledge, the boy was able to change his schema of “clown” and make this idea fit better to a standard concept of “clown”.

What Piaget thought:

• He thought that assimilation and accommodation operate even in the very young infant’s life

Piaget’s Four Stages of Cognitive

DevelopmentPage 48 in your textbook

Piaget's Theory Differs From Others In Several Ways:

• It is concerned with children, rather than all learners.

• It focuses on development, rather than learning per se, so it does not address learning of information or specific behaviors.

• It proposes discrete stages of development, marked by qualitative differences, rather than a gradual increase in number and complexity of behaviors, concepts, ideas, etc.

• The goal of the theory is to explain the mechanisms and processes by which the infant, and then the child, develops into an individual who can reason and think using hypotheses. 

• To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental processes as a result of biological maturation and environmental experience. Children construct an understanding of the world around them, then experience discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover in their environment.

For this theory

• Read the textbook and write notes on your own

Summary of all stages

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRF27F2bn-A

• 4 stages of understanding the world

• Different way of understanding the world that makes one stage more advanced than another; knowing more information does not make the child’s thinking more advanced

Sensorimotor stage

• Birth – 2 years

• First stage

• Infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences (seeing and hearing) with physical, motoric actions. This is where the term sensorimotor comes from

• Their discovery stage

• They learn through trial and error

Example

• If you place a toy under a blanket the child who has achieved object permanence (knowing that an object still exists – child forms mental representation of the object) knows it is there and can seek it

• The attainment of object permanence signals the transition to the next stage of development

Blanket and Ball study

• Aim: Piaget (1963) wanted to investigate at what age children acquire object permanence.

• Method: Piaget hid a toy under a blanket, while the child was watching, and observed whether or not the child searched for the hidden toy. Searching for the hidden toy was evidence of object permanence. Piaget assumed that the child could only search for a hidden toy if s/he had a mental representation of it.

• Results: Piaget found that infants searched for the hidden toy when they were around 8-months-old.

• Conclusion: Children around 8 months have object permanence because they are able to form a mental representation of the object in their minds.

Video of Blanket and Ball study

• http://www.simplypsychology.org/sensorimotor.html

Preoperational stage

• 2-7 years of age

• Children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings

• They lack the ability to perform operations – internalized mental actions that allow children to do mentally what they previously did physically

• The why stage

• http://www.simplypsychology.org/preoperational.html

The concrete operational stage

• 7-11 years old

• Children can perform operations and logical reasoning replaces intuitive thought, as long as reasoning can be applied to specific or concrete examples

• Example: concrete operational thinkers cannot imagine the steps necessary to complete an algebraic equation

• http://www.simplypsychology.org/concrete-operational.html

• Filling up 2 glasses with water – big glass / small glass (same amount of water) – which one would a kid pick?

The formal operational stage

• 11-15 years of age

• Individuals move beyond concrete experiences and think in abstract and more logical terms

• Adolescents develop images of ideal circumstances and begin to entertain possibilities for the future.

• More systematic, develop hypotheses about why something happens and then test hypotheses

• Children were asked where they would put an extra eye, if they were able to have a third one, and why.  Schaffer (1988) reported that when asked this question, 9-year-olds all suggested that the third eye should be on the forehead.  However, 11-year-olds were more inventive, for example suggesting that a third eye placed on the hand would be useful for seeing round corners.

• Formal operational thinking has also been tested experimentally using the pendulum task (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). The method involved a length of string and a set of weights. Participants had to consider three factors (variables) the length of the string, the heaviness of the weight and the strength of push.

• The task was to work out which factor was most important in determining the speed of swing of the pendulum.

Wuzzles

•  1. Falling Temperature2. Two Under Par

• 3. Fat Chance

• 4. Broken Heart

• 5. Hot Under the Collar

• 6. Head in the Sand

Now you try…

• Try figuring out the following wuzzle puzzles

Vygotsky’s Social-Cultural Cognitive

Theory

• Explained on your iceberg handout

Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934)

• Believed that children actively construct their knowledge

• But Vygotsky gave social interaction and culture far more important roles in cognitive development than Piaget did

• Vygotsky’s theory – social-cultural cognitive theory that emphasizes how culture and social interaction guide cognitive development

• Portrayed the child’s development as inseparable from social and cultural activities

• He believed that the development of memory, attention, and reasoning involves learning to use the inventions of society

• Theory thought that knowledge is situated and collaborative

• Knowledge is not generated from within the individual but constructed through interaction with other people, objects in culture

• He believed that the community plays a central role in the process of “making meaning”

• He thought that social learning tends to come before development

• Vygotsky places emphasis on culture affecting or shaping cognitive development

• Emphasis on social factors

Example

• For example, a child might be shown pennies to represent each sound in a word (e.g., three pennies for the three sounds in “man”). To master this word, the child might be asked to place a penny on the table to show each sound in a word, and finally the child might identify the sounds without the pennies. When the adult provides the child with pennies, the adult provides a scaffold to help the child move from assisted to unassisted success at the task (Spector, 1992). In a high school laboratory science class, a teacher might provide scaffolding by first giving students detailed guides to carrying out experiments, then giving them brief outlines that they might use to structure experiments, and finally asking them to set up experiments entirely on their own. 

Video to explain

• http://www.simplypsychology.org/vygotsky.html