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
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