Chapter 11:
Cognitive
development
Slides prepared by
Randall E. Osborne, Texas State University-San Marcos,
adapted by Dr Mark Forshaw, Staffordshire University, UK
1
Nature Versus Nurture:
An Unnatural Division
2
Nature vs Nurture
• Tabloid mentality: must be one or the other
• Reality is that genes influence development
in relation to the environment
• Clownfish can change sex
– When dominant female in a school dies, the
dominant male changes ex and takes over
• Epigenesis
• Canalization
3
Prenatality: A Womb
with a View
4
Prenatal Development
• Zygote
• Germinal stage
• Embryonic stage
• Fetal stage
– Myelination
• Building a brain from the neural tube
5
Prenatal Environment
• Teratogens
– Toxins that affect foetal development
• Fetal alcohol syndrome
– significance of “syndrome”
• Unlike most things which require building before
they start working, the human brain functions as
it is being built
6
Postnatal Life: wiring and firing
• Brain development after birth
– Arborization
– Synaptogenesis
– Myelination
– Synaptic pruning
• Brain plasticity
– Experience-expectant and experiencedependent
– Sensitive periods
7
The Science of
Studying Change
8
Changing Patterns
9
Developmental Designs
• Longitudinal research
– Based on sample of children studied over
time
• Cross-sectional research
– Based on groups of children from different
ages
• Cohort bias
– Major problem affecting cross-sectional
studies
10
How To Study Young Children
• Clinical method: Piaget
• Habituation: watching children learn
• Visual preference paradigm
– Based on where babies look
• Preference for novelty
• Violation of Expectancy
– Watching children get surprised
11
Beyond the Blooming,
Buzzing Confusion
12
Making Sense of the World:
Sensation
• Vision
– Newborns are legally blind
• Audition
– Hearing reaches adult levels at 5 to 8 years
• Taste and smell
– Amniotic fluid can take on taste that
influences later food preferences of infants
• Touch
13
Sorting Out the World:
Perception
• Forming mental representations
• Newborns show perceptual constancies
– Seem to understand that a moving object is
the same thing as when it is still
14
Acting on the World: Motor
Development
• Reflexes
– Rooting and sucking
• Stereopsis
– Perceiving depth by combining images from
both eyes
• Visual cliff
15
Acting on the World: Motor
Development
16
Understanding the World:
Cognitive Development
• Jean Piaget
• Cognitive development
• Sensorimotor stage — discovering our world
– schemas
– assimilation
– accommodation
– object permanence
17
Cognitive Development
• Childhood — discovering our minds
• Consists of 2 stages:
• (1) Preoperational stage — discovering
our minds
• (2) Concrete operations stage
– conservation
– mental representations
18
Cognitive Development
• Formal operational stage —11 years
through adulthood
• Childhood ends when formal operations
begin
– abstract reasoning
– some mental representations have no
physical referent
19
Piaget’s Four Stages
20
Information Processing
Approaches
•
•
•
•
Strategies
Executive Functions: co-ordinating activities
Memory
Deferred Imitation Paradigm
– Shows long-term memory in infants
• Causal Reasoning
• Three year olds can re-order pictures of an
apple being cut into pieces (Gelman et al., 1980)
21
Core Knowledge Theories
• Suggest that a child is born with some
‘hard-wired’ understanding about the world
• So-called instincts
• Navigation, counting skills, understanding
solid objects
• Intuitive Theories
– Frameworks for understanding that are not
taught
22
Sociocultural Theories
• Lev Vygotsky
• Zone of proximal development
– a child is capable of acquiring a wide — but
bounded — range of skills at a given age
– experience matters but within limits
23
Adolescence: Minding
the Gap
24
Adolescence — Brain and Body
Changes
• “Adolescence”
defined
• Puberty
– bodily changes
– brain changes
• Primary sex
characteristics
• Secondary sex
characteristics
25
Adulthood: The Short
Happy Future
26
Adulthood: Changing Abilities
• Adulthood — begins at 18-21
• Changing abilities
• General declines in:
– subcortical connections of prefrontal cortex—
controlled processing
– working memory (keeping things in mind for a short
time to use)
– episodic memory (particular events)
– retrieval of information
27
Adulthood
• Most older adults compensate effectively for
these declines
• Change in bilateral symmetry?
– brain of younger adult trying to remember
shows strong activation in localized areas
– brain of older adult trying to remember
shows activation of multiple areas
28
Older Adulthood
• Memory is also affected
by changing orientations
(what we focus on)
• Socioemotional selectivity
theory
– focus on the future versus
focus on the moment
– useful information versus
positive information
29
Older Adulthood
• Despite our youthoriented culture,
older adults are
happy
– fewer “peripheral”
friends
– just as many close
friends
• And less negative
30