How Does Our Thinking Change With Age?

Chapter 6-Theories of Cognitive Development

MODULE OBJECTIVES:

‐How does thinking change as children develop?

‐What are Piaget’s 4 stages Cognitive Development?

‐What is Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive Development?

Wouldn’t you love to know what he’s thinking?

It was once accepted that because babies cannot

speak, then they must not think.

Jean Piaget questioned this concept and examined the development of thought in

children, beginning in infancy

How does thought develop?Piaget’s theory focuses on how people think rather than what they think.

Piaget believed that children play an active role in their cognitive development.

‐ Piaget’s theories emphasized biology,

which allow them to be applied to any culture

Piaget’s Three Basic Assumptions

1. Children’s constructive processes are generating hypotheses, performing experiments, and drawing conclusions

‐ The child as a scientist

2. Children lean many important lessons on their own, rather than depending on instruction from adults or older children

3. Children are intrinsically motivated to learn and do not need rewards from adults to do so

Piagetian ApproachPiaget proposed a “stage approach” to development and he claimed that all children pass through a series of four universal stages in a fixed order from birth through adolescence

‐ Sensorimotor (birth to 2 years)

‐ Preoperational (2 to 7 years)

‐ Concrete operational (7 to 12 years)

‐ Formal operational (12 years and beyond)

How do we make sense of the world?

Piaget believed that infants spend a LOT of time trying to make sense of the world.

A schema (theory) is a mental structure, a way of organizing and categorizing thoughts and experiences.

Schemas allow children to make comparable generalizations.

Schema

Piaget believed that children develop and modify schema or theory by two processes:

‐Assimilation

‐Accommodation

Assimilation incorporates new experiences into existing mental structures and behaviors

Example: a baby who is familiar with grasping will soon discover that the grasping works for toys as well as blocks, balls, and other small objects.

Wait…I changed my mind!Accommodation occurs when a child’s theories are modified based on an experience

Example- The baby with a theory of dogs is surprised the first time she sees a cat- it resembles a dog, but meows instead of barks and rubs up against her rather thank licking

The baby must REVISE her previous theory to include this new kind of animal

John has a dog…his schemata for dog is an animal with four legs and a tail. John’s theory of dogs also includes the concept that dogs are friendly and like to lick people’s faces. One day John is bitten by a neighbor’s dog-

Think on your own….how could his theory change to accommodate this new info?

Why is this process important?

As adaptation continues, the child organizes his/her schemata into more complex mental representations, linking one schema with another.

Assimilation and accommodation are usually in balance (equilibrium), but periodically the balance is upset which results in disequilibrium

Children find that their theories are not adequate because they spend so much more time accommodating than assimilating.

Children restore equilibrium by replacing obsolete theories with new more advanced theory.

Sensorimotor thinking involves adapting to the

environment, understanding objects,

and becoming able to use symbols.

This form of thought begins with the infant experiencing the world

through their reflexes

Sensorimotor Intelligence

The intelligence of infants during the first period of cognitive development when babies think by using their senses and motor skills

Piaget proposed that these rapidly changing perceptual and motor skills in this first 2 years of life form the Sensorimotor Stage

Piaget believed that in this stage, the infant progresses from simple reflex actions to symbolic processing

Simple ReflexesDuring the first month of life, the various reflexes that determine the infant’s interactions with the world are at the center of its cognitive life

‐ As infant uses his/her reflexes – the reflexes become more coordinated

Infants begin to modify their reflexes to make them more adaptive and reflexes become modified by experience

‐ Example – thumb sucking

For example,an infant might combine

grasping an object with sucking on it, or staring at something

with touch

This 2 year period of rapid change is divided into 6

sub-stagesStages 1 and 2:

-Primary circular reactions

Stages 3 and 4:-Secondary circular reactions

Stage 5 and 6-Tertiary circular reactions

Stages 1 and 2Primary circular reactions

Stage 1- (Birth to 1 month)‐ The focus in this stage is learning to

interact with their own body‐ Everything that occurs in this stage is

reflexive‐ Sucking, grasping, staring

Stage 2- (1-4 months)Infants accidentally produce a pleasing event and then try to recreate it. ‐ Assimilation and coordination of reflexes

‐ Example: Grabbing a bottle to suck it or thumb sucking

Stages 3 and 4:Secondary circular reactions

Secondary Circular Reactions are novel actions that are repeated. These actions represent the infant’s attempt to learn about objects in their environment.

Stage 3 occurs during 4-8 months in age infants switch from interacting with their own body to interacting with an object or a person.

The infant is responsive to other people and to toys and other objects that can be manipulated

Infants begin to interact with people and objects to

produce exciting experiences

For example, realizing that a rattle makes noise-they shake their arms and laugh whenever someone puts a rattle in their hand

Stages 3 and 4:Secondary circular reactions

Stage 4 (8 months-1yr)

Babies think about a goal and understand how to reach it

Much more sophisticated way of thinking that occurs, infants become more purposeful in responding to people.

Example: 10 month-old girl who enjoys baths- may crawl into the bath tub with a bar of

soap and remove all her clothes to communicate to Mom that she wants a bath.

Why is peek-a-boo fun for babies?

The game loses its excitement once we know the person hiding their face has not really disappeared. How do you know an object still exists when you can’t see it?

This is a cognitive milestone that develops in the sensorimotor stage called Object

Permanence

Why ISN’T it fun for adults?

Out of Sight, Out of Mind…Object Permanence allows infants to now recognize that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight.

-This usually develops around 8 months

Think on your own… five month-old Jack is playing with your car keys, but now you want to leave. You distract the infant and take your keys. How does the infant react?

The infant responds by doing NOTHING. The infant will not even look for the keys. They

will act as though the keys do not even exist anymore-

because they DO NOT have object permanence

For this 5-month-old, “out of sight” is literally out of mind. The infant looks at the toy monkey (top), but when his view of the monkey is blocked (bottom), he does not search for it.

Click on the baby to view a video on object permanence

Stage 5 and 6Tertiary circular reactions

Stage 5 (12-18 months) is defined by “active experimentation” which is a way to learn about the world

‐ (when babies get into everything)

Infants explore a wide range of activities. They take on the role of the “Little scientist”- who experiments in order to see

‐ What else can I do with this thing?‐ Scientific method of trial and error

Tertiary circular reactions

Stage 6 –(18-24 months)Rather than just repeated enjoyable activities as in substage 4, infants appear to carry out miniature experiments to observe the consequences

Example:‐ A child will drop a toy repeatedly, varying the

position from which he drops it, carefully observing each time to see where it falls

Toddlers begin to anticipate and solve simple problems by using mental combinations

They try out various actions mentally before performing them and

think about the consequences of their

actionsThey hesitating before yanking a cat’s tail or dropping an egg on

the floor

Infants also have the ability to use symbols and

engage in pretend play

Preoperational Period (2-7years)

The period in which children become able to represent their experiences in language, mental imagery, and symbolic thought

Preschool children gradually become proficient at using common symbols – such as words, gestures, graphs, maps, and models

The development of egocentrism and centration are milestones in this period

Development of Symbolic Representation

The ability to use scale models develops early and by age 3 it has developed.

If young children watch an adult hide a toy in a full size room, then try to find the toy in a scale-model of the room that contains the same features as the full-size room 3-year-olds can find the toy but 2.5-year-olds cannot.

Me, Me, Me….A key element in the preoperational stage is egocentrism, which is the inability to perceive a situation from another’s point of view.

Children in this stage, cannot put themselves in another person’s position and are unable to understand that the world does not exist to meet their needs.

Over the course of the preoperational period, egocentric speech becomes less common.

Example of Egocentrism

Three-year-old Jamila loves talking to Grandma Powell on the telephone. When Grandma Powell asks a question, Jamila often replies by nodding her head. Jamila’s dad has explained that Grandma Powell can’t see her nodding, that she needs to say “yes” or “no.” But, no luck. Jamila invariably returns to head-nodding.

Click on picture to watch egocentrism video (also included in the text DVD)

CentrationPreoperational children have the tendency to narrowly focus on a single, perceptually striking feature of an object or event.

‐ The psychological equivalent of tunnel vision

For example, a three-year old may choose a nickel over the dime because the nickel is bigger

Concrete Operational Stage

A milestone of this stage is understanding Conservation

This ability allows children to recognize that objects can be transformed visually or physically, yet still be the same in number, weight, substance, or volume

Click on picture to view a video on conservation (available on text DVD)

Conservation Tasks

Appearance as Reality

Preoperational children cannot distinguish between appearance and reality. Preschool children believe an object’s appearance tells what the object is really like.

‐ They think if people look happy, they are really happy.

At the latter end of the stage, Decentration

begins. This is a change from a self-oriented view to recognizing the view of

others.

Test Your Knowledge A child in this stage saw a classmate crying and someone asked, “why is Marcus crying?” What is the child displaying?

The child responds by saying, “I don’t know…I’m OK.”

With the same scenario, a child responds, “Marcus is sad”

Did You Get It?A child in this stage saw a classmate crying and someone asked, “why is Marcus crying?” What is the child displaying?

The child responds by saying, “I don’t know…I’m OK.”

With the same scenario, a child responds, “Marcus is sad”

Egocentrism

Decentration

Concrete Operational Period

The period in which children become able to reason logically about concrete objects and events.‐ They become more adultlike and less

childlike

Children first use mental operations to solve and to reason

Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are familiar arithmetic operations that concrete operational children use

Classifying Objects, Ideas and PeopleChildren can also classify or divide things

into different sets or subsets and consider their interrelationships.

Classification is the process of organizing things into groups according to some property they have in common

‐ Children that can categorize can analyze problems, derive correct solutions and ask follow-up questions

Concrete operations allow children to order objects in terms of more than one dimension. ‐ Example: size, shape, volume

ReversibilityThe concrete operational child can operate an action, and then go back to the original condition. ‐ 3 + 2 = 5 and 5 – 2 = 3

Reciprocity is another logical principle in which two things may change in opposite ways, in order to balance each other out.‐ 4x6 is the same as 2 x 12

This is relevant to the development of mathematical processes

Formal Operational Stage 12+

In this stage, the individual can think hypothetically, consider future possibilities, and use deductive logic

‐ Children understand that reality is not the only possibility

‐ Capable of deductive reasoning

Do adolescents think like adults yet?

Teenagers have more skillful selective attention, expanded memory, and ability to understand and learn more complex topics

The development of hypothetical thought emerges during this period.

‐ This type of thought involves reasoning about imagined possibilities. Teenagers can ignore the “real” and think about what is possible. This is evidence of abstract thought.

More complex reasoningDuring adolescence, teens are more able to think hypothetically, which allows for deductive reasoning.

Deductive reason is the ability to draw appropriate conclusions from facts. ‐ Ex: “If it’s a duck, it will quack and waddle.”

In other words, from specific proven laws or rules we can deduce certain truths. This is often displayed in principles of science and math.

Click on the picture to view a video on deductive logic (also available on text DVD)

The return of egocentrism!We know adolescents can display very logical thought, but are they characterized by the use of this logic?

NO…most teens who reach formal operational thought have a logic detachment. They are worried about how others see them, they are constantly consumed with conflicting feelings.

Analyzing private thoughts and feelings reflect the enhanced capacity for self-centeredness, which characterizes this period of life.

What would you do?

Suppose that you were given a third eye and that you could choose to place this eye anywhere on your body. Where would you put the extra eye and why would you put it there?

What does your thinking say about you?

Concrete Operational Child (9-year-old)‐ All of these children placed their third

eye on the forehead between their two natural eyes

Formal Operational Child (12-year-old)‐ These children gave a wide variety of

answers with imaginative rationales‐ Some answered palm of the hand or

inside the mouth and explained why.

Think and review on your own…

Piaget provided psychology with very important information on child

development. But what were some problems with his theory?

Review and analyze the weaknesses of Piaget’s theory.

Modern Theories of Cognitive Development

The Sociocultural Perspective:Vygotsky’s Theory

Vygotsky’s ApproachIn contrast to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, Vygotsky believed that children are the products of their culture. Children are not boldly exploring alone, but rather are influenced by social interaction

Vygotsky saw development as an apprenticeship in which children advance when they collaborate with others who are more skilled.

Children are shaped by and are shaping their cultural contexts

‐ They are intertwined with other people who are eager to help them gain skills and understanding

Sociocultural theorists believe the social nature of cognitive development is captured in

the concept of intersubjectivity

A shared, mutual understanding among participants in an activity

Guided ParticipationA process in which more knowledgeable individuals organize situations in ways that allow less knowledgeable individuals to learn

Often occurs in situations in which the explicit purpose is to achieve a practical goal – such as assembling a toy – but in which learning also occurs as by-product of the activity

Vygotsky’s ideas of so influential because they fill in the gaps of Piaget’s

workVygotsky three most important contributions are the concepts:

‐Zone of Proximal Development‐Scaffolding‐Private Speech

Zone of Proximal Development

The difference between the level of performance a child can achieve when working independently and the higher level of performance that is possible when working under the guidance of more skilled adults or peers.

Range of tasks too difficult for children to master alone but which can be learned with the guidance and assistance of adults or more skilled children

Think of a preschool child who is asked to clean her

bedroom. She doesn’t know where to begin.

Think on your own…How do you guide her?

Review the video clip from your text DVD!

By structuring the task for the child – “start by putting away your books, then your toys, then your clothes” – an adult can help the child accomplish what she cannot do by herself.

Just as training wheels help children learn to ride a bike by allowing them to concentrate on other aspects of bicycling

‐ collaborators help children perform effectively by providing structure, hints, and reminders

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Zone of Proximal Development

Potential DevelopmentActual Development

ScaffoldingScaffolding is giving help but not more than is needed – this promotes learning

Providing instruction that matches the learner’s needs exactly – neither too much nor too little‐ Early in learning a new task (when the child knows

little), the teacher provides a lot of direct instruction

‐ When the child begins to catch on to the task, the teacher provides less instruction and only occasional reminders

A temporary framework that supports children’s thinking at a higher level than children could manage on their own

Vygotsky and Language

Children must use language to communicate with others before they can focus inward on their own thoughts

Children must communicate externally and use language for a long period of time before transitioning from external to internal speech

Private Speech

Speech that is not directed as others but instead guides the child’s own behavior

At first, children’s behavior is regulated by speech from other people that is directed toward them

‐ When children first try to control their own behavior and thoughts, without others present, they instruct themselves by speaking aloud

As children gain ever-greater skill, private speech becomes inner speech (thoughts)

Example…

A child working on a puzzle says to herself (out loud), “Start with the edges, look for pieces with straight sides.”

Vygotsky Piaget

Sociocultural context

Strong emphasis Little emphasis

StagesNo general stages of

development proposed

Strong emphasis on stages (sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal

operational)

Key processes

Zone of proximal development, scaffolding, private speech, tools of

the culture

Assimilation, accommodation, circular reactions (primary,

secondary, tertiary), hypothetical-deductive

reasoning

Role of languageMajor role, language plays important role in shaping

thought

Minimal role, cognition primarily directs language

View of education

Education plays a central role, helping children learn the tools of the

culture

Education merely refines the child’s cognitive skills that

already have emerged