Chapter 6 Cognitive Development 1 Structure and
Process Handout
Piaget's Basic Ideas:
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All of Piaget's basic ideas about the cognitive development of children center around one
fundamental question:
 How does the child's knowledge change with age?
Piaget's central assumption is that the child is an active participant in the development of
knowledge, and constructs his or her own understanding.
Scheme is Piaget's word for the basic actions of knowing, including both physical actions (e.g.
looking or touching) and mental actions (e.g. classifying, comparing, or reversing). An
experience is assimilated into a scheme, and the scheme is created or modified through
accommodation.
As people act on their environments, an inborn mental process called organization causes them to
derive generalizable schemes from specific experiences
Schemes organize our thinking according to categories that help us determine what kinds of
actions to take in response to variation in environmental characteristics
For example, when a infant handles a ball, the scheme she constructs will apply to similar objects
Schemes have three sub-categories:
 Assimilation
 Accommodation
 Equilibration
Assimilation is the process of taking in, of absorbing some events or experiences and making it
part of a scheme
The process complementary to assimilation is accommodation, which involves changing a
scheme as a result of new information taken in by assimilation
Equilibration is the process of bringing assimilation and accommodation into balance
For example, when new research finding come along for scientists, they assimilates them into
theories, if they don’t fit, scientists will make modification (accommodation) in the theory.
Causes of cognitive development:
 Environment
 Social transmission
 Experience
 Observation
Infancy:
 The chart below summarize Piaget's view towards sensorimotor period (age 0 to 24 months)
Sub stage
Age
Piaget's Label
Characteristics
1
Birth to 1
Reflexes
• Sucking or looking; no imitation; no
month
ability to take-in information
2
1 to 4
Primary Circular
• Accommodation of basic schemes
months
Reactions
• Beginning coordination of schemes from
3
4 to 8
months
Secondary Circular
Reactions
•
•
4
8 to 12
months
Coordination of
secondary schemes
•
•
5
12 to 18
months
18 to 24
months
Tertiary circular
reactions
Beginning of
representational
thought
•
•
•
6
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different sense (e.g. looking forward
towards a sound)
Becomes more aware of events outside of
body, and make them happen again
Beginning understanding of the object
concept
Clear intentional means-ends behavior
Combines two or more scheme (e.g.
knock a pillow away to reach a toy)
Experimentation begins
Tries out new ways of playing with toys
Development of use of symbols to
represent object or events. Child
understands that the symbol is separate
from the object. Deferred imitation first
occurs at this stage
Challenges towards Piaget's idea and view of infancy:
 Memory
o Infants are capable of greater feed of information.
o Habituation and dis-habituation are already present at birth.
o Infants can remember information (e.g. a infant gives the same reaction towards
the same object).
 Imitation
o Piaget argues that imitation of babies emerge gradually over early months.
o Studies show newborns are able to imitate at least some facial gestures, particular
tongue.
The Preschool Years:
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Egocentrism is a cognitive state in which the individual (typically a child) sees the world only
from his own perspective, without awareness that there is another perspective.
Conservation is the understanding that quantity or amount of a substance remain the same when
there are external changes in shape or arrangement
Piaget argued that preschool children cannot change their perspective when looking at an object.
Challenges to Piaget's view of early childhood
 Egocentrism and Perspective Taking:
o Children as young as 2 and 3 appear to have at least some ability to understand
that another person sees things or experiences things differently than they do. (e.g.
adapt play methods from others)
 Appearance and Reality
o False belief principle is the understanding that another person might have a false
belief and the ability to determine what information might cause the false belief.
(e.g. rock and sponge)
Theory of mind is the ideas that collectively explain other people's ideas, beliefs, and behaviour
Theory of mind helps people understand thoughts, desires, and beliefs
Children from different cultures seem to understand something general about the difference
between appearance and reality
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Neo-Piaget's theory is a theory of cognitive development that assumes that Piaget's basic ideas
are correct but that uses concepts from information-processing theory to explain children's
movement from one stage to the next
 Short-term storage space (STSS) is a neo-Piagetian term for working memory capacity
 Operational efficiency is a neo-Piagetian term for the number of schemes an individual can place
into working memory at one time
 Operation efficiency and STSS can be improved by maturation and practice
 Vygotsky's Socio-Cultural Theory:
- Infant processes mental processes that are similar to those of lower
Primitive Stage
animals
- Learns to use language to communicate
Navie Psychology
- Still doesn`t understand symbolic character (e.g. sound)
Stage
- Uses language as a guide to solve problems
Egocentric Speech
Stage
- Final period of cognitive development
Ingrowth Stage
- Develops language skills and interacts with environment
The School-Aged Child:
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Reversibility:
 One of the most critical of the operations Piaget identified as part of the concrete
operations period: the understanding that actions and mental operations can be reversed.
(E.g. Clay made sausages can be made back into rocks)
 Class inclusion is the principle that subordinate classes of objects are included in superordinate classes. (E.g. Bananas → Fruits → Foods)
 Inductive logic is reasoning from the particular to the general, from experience to broad
rules, characteristic of concrete operational thinking
 Deductive logic is reasoning from the general to the particular, from a rule to an expected
instance or from a theory to a hypothesis, characteristic of formal operational thinking
Horizontal Decalage:
 Piaget's term for school-aged children's inconsistent performance on concrete operations
tasks
 For example, a 9 years old might be able to do simple math problems but unable to
remember where he left his bag when it is lost
Robert Siegler showed that individuals may use different types of rules and methods to solve the
same problem
Min strategy is a more sophisticated rule in which the child starts with the larger number and then
adds the smaller numbers
Decomposition strategy involves dividing problems into simpler ones
With the increase of age, children will use more difficult methods to solve a problem with less
time
Piaget’s concept of constructivism → children are active thinkers, constantly trying to construct
new strategies and more advanced understandings
Siegler → children will continue to construct new strategies even when they know the exact
answer
Adolescence:
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Systematic Problem Solving:
 Children will find more inefficient ways of collecting data
 An adolescent uses formal operational thinking to collect data for the same lab, which is
more likely to be organized and takes less time
Logic:
 Hypothetico-deductive reasoning is Piaget’s term for the form of reasoning that is part of
formal operational thought and involves not just deductive logic but also the ability to
consider hypothesis and hypothetical possibilities
 E.g. “If all people are equal, then you and I must be equal”
 Concrete operational child can be inductive reasoning → arrive at a conclusion based on
experience
 The preoperational child will slowly move away from egocentrism and be able to view
things from physical or emotional perspectives of others
Development of Information Processing Skills:
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Memory is not a mental tape recorder, it is a constructive process
Constructive memories can be made more vivid and our confidence in their veracity increase, by
repetition
Important event trends to maintain in our memory longer than less important events
In human memory system, the limiting factor is the short term memory
Short term memory increases as the brain and nervous system developing in early life
E.g. children can remember longer list of numbers, letters or words
Processing efficiency increases steadily with age
Over time, the brain and nervous system change physically in some fundamental way that allows
increase in both response speed and mental processing
Automaticity is the ability to recall information from long term memory without effort
Metamemory is knowledge about one’s own memory process
Metacognition is general and rather loosely used term describing knowledge of one’s own
thinking processes
Memory Strategies:
Strategy
Description
Rehearsal
 Involves either mental or vocal repetition or repetition of movement
 May be used by children under 2 years old
Clustering
 Rouping ideas, objects, or words into clusters to help in remembering
them
 Benefit from experience with a particular subject or activity
Elaboration
 Finding shared meanings or a common referent for two or more things
to be remembered
 Not used spontaneously by all individuals and is not used skillfully until
fairly late in development
Systematic
 Scanning the memory for the whole domain in which something might
Searching
be found
 Begin from age 3 or 4 when children start to search for actual objects in
the real world but are not good at doing this in memory