CHILD PSYCHOLOGY Second Canadian Edition Vasta, Younger, Adler, Miller, Ellis Prepared by: Mowei Liu Chapter 7 Cognitive Development: The Piagetian Approach Learning Objectives • Learning Objective 7.1 Define the concepts from biology that Piaget used to explain cognitive development and evaluate his theory of stages. • Learning Objective 7.2 Trace the substages and benchmarks of the sensorimotor period in child development. • Learning Objective 7.3 Identify some strengths and limitations of preoperational thought in children’s cognitive development. • Learning Objective 7.4 Analyze the cognitive task masteries that characterize concrete operational thought. Learning Objectives • Learning Objective 7.5 Explain the characteristics and outcomes of formal operations compared with concrete operations. • Learning Objective 7.6 Explain the general characteristics of Piaget’s theory and evaluate the theory overall. • Learning Objective 7.7 Discuss and describe more recent research of children’s cognitive development that has been influenced by Piaget’s cognitivedevelopmental approach. Cognition Development • Cognition: Higher order mental processes by which humans understand and adapt to the world – Thinking – Reasoning – Learning – Problem solving • Developmental psychology seeks to understand how the form and function of cognition changes across the life span Piaget’s Theory • Piaget was trained as a biologist and as a philosopher – Piaget’s view of the intellectual development of the child reflected an interaction between biology and experience – Principles of knowledge: • Seek the organization by which the child understands the world • Identify the functional significance of knowledge (that is, knowledge allows a child to adapt to the world) Piaget’s Theory • Cognitive adaptation reflects the actions of two complementary processes: – Assimilation allows an existing cognitive structure to adapt to the environment – Accommodation allows the cognitive structure to change in order to handle a new environmental situation • As children progress from infancy to adulthood they develop a better understanding of the world— stages of development Piaget’s Four Periods of Development • Sensorimotor period: Birth through age 2 – Infant schemes are simple reflexes and interactions with people and objects • Preoperational period: Age 2 to 6 – Child begins to use mental representations but problem solving is limited • Concrete operations: Age 6 to 12 – Child performs mental operations (conservation) • Formal operations: Age 12 through adulthood – Child can use formal problem solving and higher level abstract thinking The Sensorimotor Period: Substages 1. Exercising reflexes (birth to one month) • Infant is limited to exercising inborn reflexes 2. Developing schemes (1–4 months) • Reflexes evolve into adaptive schemes 3. Discovering procedures (4–8 months) • Behaviour becomes outwardly oriented • Infant develops procedures for reproducing interesting events The Sensorimotor Period: Substages 4. Intentional behaviour (8–12 months) • Intentional behaviour emerges • Infant can separate means from ends in pursuit of a goal 5.Novelty and exploration (12–18 months) • The infant alters schemes to produce new effects • Trial and error is used to solve problems 6. Mental representation (18–24 months) • Capacity for mental representation emerges • Mental problem solving begins to replace overt trial and error problem solving The Sensorimotor Period: Object Permanence • Object permanence: The knowledge that objects exist when out of sight • Habituation procedure by Baillargeon • Infants habituated to A, but showed long looking times at C • Recent research suggests the existence of brain correlates for the capacity of object permanence Figure 7.1 The Baillargeon test of object permanence. Infants were first habituated to the event shown in (a). Response was then measured to either the possible event in (c), in which the screen rotates to point of contact with the box and stops, or the impossible event in (b), in which the screen continues to move through the area occupied by the box. Adapted from “Object Permanence in 3 1/2- and 41/2-Month-Old Infants,” by R. Baillargeon, 1987, Developmental Psychology, 23, 656. Copyright © 1987 by the American Psychological Association. Adapted by permission. The Sensorimotor Period: Physical Knowledge By age 6.5 months, infants spend longer time looking at the impossible event than the possible event Figure 7.3 Possible and impossible events in Baillargeon’s study of infants’ understanding of gravity and support. From Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 3 (1994), p. 134, “How Do Infants Learn about the Physical World?” Fig. 1. Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press. The Preoperational Period • Major feature of this stage is the appearance of representational thought (symbolic function) – Appearance of words – Deferred imitation of a model observed in the past – Symbolic play in which a child uses one thing to stand for something else • A hockey stick that becomes a guitar • Representational thought allows for problemsolving Limits of Preoperational Thought • Egocentrism: Child’s view of the world is centred on him or herself – Child has difficulty taking the view of others • Centration: The tendency to focus on only one aspect of a problem – Centration leads to difficulty in solving conservation problems • Conservation: The knowledge that the quantitative properties of an object are not changed by a change in appearance Limits of Preoperational Thought Figure 7.6 Piaget’s threemountains problem for assessing visual perspective taking. The child’s task is to judge how the display looks to someone viewing it from a different perspective. From The Child’s Conception of Space by J. Piaget and B. Inhelder, 1956, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 211. Copyright © by Routledge and Kegan Paul. Limits of Preoperational Thought Figure 7.7 Examples of Piagetian conservation problems. The Concrete Operational Period • “The older child is just more logical” • Concrete operational child can solve conservation problems – Number is solved first – Length and weight are solved last • Concrete operational child can also solve problems of class inclusion and seriation • Transitivity (ability to combine relations and deduce necessary conclusions) is achieved during the concrete operational period The Concrete Operational Period • Concrete operational children demonstrate decentration • Concrete operational children understand reversibility • Concrete operational children also develop perspective taking, symbolic ability and dual representation The Formal Operational Period • Child now has the capacity for hypotheticaldeductive reasoning – Can generate hypotheses – Can test hypotheses – Can draw logical conclusions from test results • Mental operations are clearly evident in the formal operational stage Evaluation of Piaget’s Theory • Underestimated the infant’s ability • Methodological issue – Observations of overt motor behaviour • Issues in stage theories – Stage theory suggests that • Behaviour is qualitatively different from stage to stage • Invariant sequence • Stages are universal • Concurrent development: if a cognitive structure underlies two or more competencies, these should be evident at the same time within the same stage New Directions • Building on Piaget, modern research has considered new issues in cognitive development • Research has indicated that while children organize their experiences into meaningful categories based on similarities (concepts), they also organize according to less obvious and less perceptually bound similarities • Research on the theory of mind has identified limitations in young children with regards to false belief and the appearance-reality distinction Copyright Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd. 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