Social and Cognitive Development

Lesson 4

Valentina Fantasia

Cognitive theories of development

1. Conceptual development (reasoning and knowledge) drives development

2. Cognitive processes have the primacy on other developmental processes/abilities

3. Universal developmental paths, biologically constrained and poorly linked with socio-cultural aspects

àBiology provides skeletal principles for conceptual knowledge (Hatano & Inagaki, 2002)

• Specific brain areas are not entirely dedicated to single functions nor unaffected by environment

• Plasticity as key to understand development

Piaget’s Cognitive Theory of

Development

Jean Piaget1896 - 1980

Background

• Piaget: how fundamental concepts like the very idea of number, time, quantity, causality, justice and so on emerged developed in children;

• Before Piaget: children are merely less competent thinkers than adults.

• Piaget: children are born with basic mental structure

The child as a scientist or explorer

1. Constructs her own knowledge from experimenting on the world.

2. Learns things on her own without the intervention of older children or adults

3. Is intrinsically motivated to learn and do not need rewards from adults to motivate learning

• Intellectual (cognitive) development builds up through a series of stages and substages

• Structures of thinking are called schemas (similar to concepts)

• Through ADAPTATION: accommodation, assimilation and equilibration

1. Sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years)Knowledge tied to sensory and motor abilities Fails tests of the object concept - no full “Conservation” concept

Main achievement during this stage is object permanence - knowing that an object still exists, even if it is hidden

Piaget’s conservation task

2. Preoperational stage (2 to 7 years)

• Toddlers and young children acquire the ability to internally represent the world through language and mental imagery.• During this stage, young children can think about things

symbolically. This is the ability to make one thing, such as a word or an object, stand for something other than itself.

• A child’s thinking is dominated by how the world looks, not how the world is.

Pre-operational stage experiment

3. Concrete operational stage (7 to 12 years)

• Children can reason logically about concrete objects and events.

• Fails to engage in systematic hypothesis testing

• begin to understand the concept of conservation; understanding that, although things may change in appearance, certain properties remain the same.

• can mentally reverse things (e.g. picture a ball of plasticine returning to its original shape)

Piaget’s operational stage experiment

4. Formal operational stage (12 years and up)

• Children can reason abstractly and hypothetically

• Concrete operations are carried out on things whereas formal operations are carried out on ideas.

• During this stage, adolescents can deal with abstract ideas (e.g. no longer needing to think about slicing up cakes or sharing sweets to understand division and fractions).

• They can follow the form of an argument without having to think in terms of specific examples.

Schemas • basic building blocks of intelligent behaviour• “units” of knowledge, each relating to one aspect of the

world, including objects, actions, and abstract (i.e., theoretical) concepts.• "a cohesive, repeatable action sequence possessing

component actions that are tightly interconnected and governed by a core meaning.” Piaget (1952, p. 7)

Properties of stages: What does not change

Three processes work together from birth to account for continuities:

• Assimilation: People translate incoming information into a form they can understand.

• Accommodation: People adapt current knowledge structures in response to new experience.

• Equilibration: People balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding.

What changes

• Qualitative change: Children of different ages (and at different stages) think in different ways. • Broad applicability: The type of thinking at each stage

pervades topic and content areas. • Brief transitions: Transitions to higher stages of thinking

are not necessarily continuous. • Invariant sequence: The sequences of stages are stable for

all people through all time. Stages are not skipped.

Processes of adaptation (adjustment)

Assimilation• using an existing schema to deal with a new object or situation.

Accommodation• This happens when the existing schema (knowledge) does not work,

and needs to be changed to deal with a new object or situation.Equilibration• This is the force which moves development along.

à Equilibrium occurs when a child's schemas can deal with most new information through assimilation.

General Criticism

• Piaget very greatly underestimated children’s abilities • by using needlessly misleading tasks• Even using Piaget’s tasks, changes in performance were not stage-

like• No mention of the social influences on developmental

processes – child living in a bubble?• Universal instead of culturally and socially specific• Discrete stages – no graduality

Cognitive theories of development: Modularity

• Core domains of knowledge based on innate mental model

•Mind composed of innate neural structures or mental modules which have distinct, established, and evolutionarily developed functions

• J. Fodor: mental module (1983) often associated with specific areas of the brains

• N. Chomsky: innate capacity to acquire language (or language acquisition device, 1986)

• Domain specific. Modules only operate on certain kinds of inputs (relative to their domain)

• Informational encapsulation. Modules operate individually, they need linking to other psychological systems in order to operate

• Hardwiring. Modules process in a mandatory manner (biologically pre-determined)

• AutomaticityModules are encapsulated (only consult a restricted database) and

mandatory (do not need to decide whether or not to process incoming input)

• Characteristic development and breakdownModules show a regularity of development

• Fixed neural architectureBiologically constrained

Theories of Theory of Mind:

Naïve psychology of cognitive

development

What does ToM mean?

• Refers to the ability to understand the mental states of others and to recognize they may differ from our own.

• Developing a theory of mind is a key stage of child development.

• In typical development, ToM is used to resolve conflicts, develop social skills, and reasonably predict other people's behaviour

Naïve psychologyTheories of Theory of Mind

Theories of Theory of mind:

1. Theory-theory: basic or 'naïve' theory of psychology (" folk psychology ") to infer the mental states of others

2. Simulation theory: humans anticipate and make sense of the behaviour of others by simulating their mental processes; or activating mental process that would produce similar behaviour.

Simulation theory• Simulation theory is based in philosophy of

mind, a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind and its relationship to the brain.

àspecific neuronal networks devoted to simulating the other’s actions: mirror neuron systems

• Role of the mirror-neuron system in action understanding, emotion and other social functions.

ToM pre-requisites

• Joint attention• Intentionality• Pretend play• Understanding others’ perspective/perspective taking ability

Frith, U:

“Theory of Mind is an pervasive human ability that we didn’t even suspect exhisted until we studied autism”

“Understand what others feel in their heads – from totally invisible things in your head, but you have a theory in your mind”

Uta Frith on Autism and ToM

Baron-Cohen, S:

“ the ability to put oneself into someone else’s shoes, to imagine their thoughts and feelings. When we mindread or mentalise, we not only make sense of another person’s behaviour (why did their head swivel on their neck? Why did their eyes move left?), but we also imagine a whole set of mental states (they have seen something of interest, they know something or want something) and we can predict what they might do next.”

S. Baron-Cohen, 2008, https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-21/edition-2/theories-autistic-mind

Joint Attention (JA)

Two or more people direct their attention towards the same thing of interest

When infants understand this gesture, they are simultaneously processing another person’s mental state à beginning phases of the theory of mind (Baron-Cohen, 1991)

Joint Attention (JA)

• A typical 14-month-old shows joint attention (such as pointing or following another person’s gaze)• look at another person’s face and

eyes, but also attention to what the other person is interested in

Intentionality

• knowing that people act according to the things they want• understanding that others’ actions are goal-directed and arise out

of unique beliefs and desires, as defined by philosopher Daniel Dennett (1983).• Toddlers as young as 2 years old exhibit an understanding of

intentionality (Luchkina et al., 2018) as do chimpanzees and orangutans (Call & Tomasello, 1998).

Pretend play

• The typical 24-month-old engages in pretend play, using their mindreading skills to be able to understand that in the other person’s mind, they are just pretending (Leslie, 1987).

Perspective-taking ability

• Ability to understand the other’s mental states as beliefs and intentions• Often referred to as the cradle of empathy and intersubjectivity• How one makes inferences about another person's inner state using

theoretical knowledge about the other's situation.

How to measure ToM: false beliefs tasks

• Psychologists often assess a child's developing theory of mind by performing the false beliefs task. • The most common version of this task is the Sally and Anne

test

False belief

False belief task: testing beliefs that contrast with reality

Typical 4 year-old child passes the ‘false belief’ test, recognising when someone else has a mistaken belief about the world (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). Tests of ToM

ToM and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): the mindblindness theory

• Studies on atypical development showed tht children with ASD lack of ToM, so they are mindblindness;àThey find other people’s behaviour confusing and unpredictable, even

frightening

• ASD children have difficulties in reciprocal gaze, social engagement, joint attention, understanding emotions and attributing false beliefs

Baron-Cohen and his colleagues: impaired ToM, indexed by impaired ability to pass FB tasks, is the psychological cause of social interaction and communication impairments in ASD

àsomeone who lacks understanding of other people’s knowledge and beliefs will be socially and communicatively egocentric (BaronCohen et al., 1985).

à Many studies of the children with ASD succeeded on the Sally Ann task (Happe´, 1995; Boucher, 2012). Impaired ToM might not be a universal feature of ASD

• Children with autism and Asperger’s syndrome show reduced frequency of joint attention, in toddlerhood (Swettenham et al., 1998)

• Children with autism and Asperger’s syndrome show less pretend play, or their pretence is limited to more rule-based formats (Baron-Cohen, 1987).

• Most children with autism and Asperger’s syndrome are delayed in passing this test (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985).

Evidence of mindblindness in autism

Issues with ToM

• Cultural variations in ToM acquisition?

• Validity of false-belief tasks to measure ToM

• Dependency on the social and affective vocabulary

• Dependency on the cultural practices and environments• Dis-embodied, static and too inferential for developing creatures

Heider and Simmel: is there a story?

AnimationHeider, F., & Simmel, M. (1944). An experimental study of apparent behavior. The American Journal of Psychology, 57, 243–259. https://doi.org/10.2307/1416950

Three critical views against ToM

1. Reddy & Morris: Participants’ don’t need theories2. Costall: Against theory of Mind3. McGeer : Two Hypotheses: ‘‘Theory of Mind’’ Versus ‘‘Form of Life’’

(in: The thought and talk of individuals with autism: reflections on Ian Hacking, Mc Geer, V.)

1. Reddy and Morris, 2004

The central idea is that minds represent, and that interacting with minds requires, and is therefore constrained by, an understanding of representation. Such understanding is therefore seen as a prerequisite for appropriate engagement with other (minds)

The theory-theory makes some key predictions about social actions that should not be occurring in infants and toddlers

à telling lies, understanding intentions contrary to actual actions (for example false beliefs), understanding lack of knowledge, tell lies, tease, or pretend play, are all dependent on complex representational skills which do not develop until about 4 years

1. Critics to False belief tasks

• the theory-theory has typically used situations of mismatch between representation and reality in order (like False Belief test) to test for an understanding of representation (and of how representation leads to action) • Theory-theory’s predictions: infants and toddlers fail to explain,

predict or act upon actions that stem from mis-representations of the world. • If children cannot really understand representations, they should not

be able to act appropriately in situations like telling lies, understanding intentions contrary to actual actions, understanding lack of knowledge and misunderstandings

Deceiving:

• children cannot lie until they pass the false-belief task • children with autism and children under the age of 4 both fail the false-

belief task and are reported not to lie (Stouthamer-Loeber, 1986). • Chandler, Fritz and Hala (1989): children under 3 can deceive in a

laboratory task• The ability to deceive seems in fact to start in the first year: children

attempt to conceal forbidden actions much earlier than 2 years and deliberately tease with false requests and offers even before the end of the first year (Reddy, 1991); and skills at deceiving continue to develop through (at least) the middle childhood years (Talwar & Lee, 2002).

Deceiving:

• Chandler, Fritz and Hala (1989): children under 3 can deceive in a laboratory task• The ability to deceive starts in the first year: • children attempt to conceal forbidden actions much earlier than 2

years and deliberately tease with false requests and offers even before the end of the first year (Reddy, 1991); • and deceiving ability continue to develop through (at least) the

middle childhood years (Talwar & Lee, 2002).

2. Epistemic acquisition critic

• How infants know others’ minds (and what they do with them) in everyday life• Commitment to epistemic detachment is problematic: thinking of the

knower as fundamentally isolated, thus requiring some mediation—an idea, a theory, a revelation, a concept—to bridge the gap from Self to Other, or, in the case of the ‘theory-theory’, to bridge the gap from behaviour to mind.• Action is excluded from the domain of knowing: the mind is

accessible only through representations

V. McGeer: Two Hypotheses: ‘‘Theory of Mind’’ Versus ‘‘Form of Life’’ (2009)

à ToM as a mental module which works computationally

• theory of mind (or ToM) hypothesis :neurotypicals have a modularised (possibly innate) capacity for seeing others as possessing mental states, which states predict and explain their behaviour in systematic ways. • ToM approach ‘‘does not easily distinguish between, on the one hand,

seeing what someone is doing right off and, on the other, inferring or working it out from clues’’ (Hacking, 2009a, 1470).

Costall & Leudar, 2004

Interpersonal understanding in ToM: a theoretical accomplishment, involving a person constructing and using a ‘theory’ of other people’s minds, as well as their own.

Applying the theory to observable behaviour enables the individual to interpret that behaviour in intentional terms and as the product of specific mental states.

Problematic assumptions in a nutshell

• The mind is detached from the body (and from actions) (Cartesian dualism)• Others’ beliefs, intentions, emotions are not visible or understandable

BUT through representations (hidden)• Infants’ behaviours are mere reflexes or unintentional – they lack in

psychological quality• ToM inappropriately intellectualizes everyday social activities

An alternative explanation: engagement

• Normal adult humans are sensitive in interactions with others to the subtleties of contingency and responsiveness• of emotional attentiveness, of responsive or emotion-filled pauses, of

the coordination of different aspects of the other’s expressions—widening of the eyes, partial opening of the mouth, sudden stilling of the limbs, the quality of the attention directed to us—• Reciprocal instead of individualistic• Dynamic instead of static

An alternative explanation: engagement