Cognitive Development

1. Cognitive Development Learning, Reasoning and Language Development over the Life Span

2. Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development • Jean Piaget (1896-1980) Swiss psychologist who became leading theorist in 1930’s • Piaget believed that “children are active thinkers, constantly trying to construct more advanced understandings of the world” • These “understandings” are in the form of structures he called schemas

3. Development of Schemas • Schemas are frameworks that develop to help organize knowledge • Assimilation - process of taking new information or a new experience and fitting it into an already existing schema • Accommodation - process by which existing schemas are changed or new schemas are created in order to fit new information

4. Piaget’s approach • Primary method was to ask children to solve problems and to question them about the reasoning behind their solutions • Discovered that children think in radically different ways than adults • Proposed that development occurs as a series of ‘stages’ differing in how the world is understood

5. Sensorimotor Stage (birth - 2) • Information is gained through the senses and motor actions • In this stage child perceives and manipulates but does not reason • Symbols become internalized through language development • Object permanence is acquired

6. Object Permanence • The understanding that objects exist independent of one’s actions or perceptions of them • Before 6 months infants act as if objects removed from sight cease to exist • Can be surprised by disappearance / reappearance of a face (peek-a-boo)

7. Preoperational Stage (2-7 years) • Emergence of symbolic thought • Centration • Egocentrism • Lack the concept of conservation • Animism • Artificialism

8. Conservation • Number In conservation of number tests, two equivalent rows of coins are placed side by side and the child says that there is the same number in each row. Then one row is spread apart and the child is again asked if there is the same number in each.

9. Conservation • Length In conservation of length tests, two same-length sticks are placed side by side and the child says that they are the same length. Then one is moved and the child is again asked if they are the same length.

10. Conservation • Substance In conservation of substance tests, two identical amounts of clay are rolled into similar-appearing balls and the child says that they both have the same amount of clay. Then one ball is rolled out and the child is again asked if they have the same amount.

11. Concrete Operational Stage (7-12 years) • Understanding of mental operations leading to increasingly logical thought • Classification and categorization • Less egocentric • Inability to reason abstractly or hypothetically

12. Formal Operational Stage (age 12 - adulthood) • Hypothetico-deductive reasoning • Adolescent egocentrism illustrated by the phenomenon of personal fable and imaginary audience

13. Piaget’s Theory Challenged • New studies indicate infants do more than sense and react • One study had 1 month old babies suck one of two pacifiers without ever seeing them • When shown both pacifiers, infants stared more at the one they had felt in their mouth • This requires a sort of reasoning

14. Critique of Piaget’s Theory • Underestimates children’s abilities • Overestimates age differences in thinking • Vagueness about the process of change • Underestimates the role of the social environment • Lack of evidence for qualitatively different stages

15. Information-Processing Perspective • Focuses on the mind as a system, analogous to a computer, for analyzing information from the environment • Developmental improvements reflect • increased capacity of working memory • faster speed of processing • new algorithims (methods) • more stored knowledge

16. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective • Emphasized the child’s interaction with the social world (other people) as a cause of development • Vygotsky believed language to be the foundation for social interaction and thought • Piaget believed language was a byproduct of thought

17. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective • Vygotsky - children learn from interactions with other people • Zone of proximal development - what a child can do by interacting with another person, but can’t do alone. • Critical thinking based on dialouge with others who challenge ideas • Piaget - focused on children’s interaction with the physical world

18. Language Development • Preview • Universal Characteristics of Human Language • Course of Development • Supports for Language Development • Language Learning among Nonhuman Apes

19. Universal Characteristics of Human Language • Language development similar across cultures. What are the common elements? • Morphemes - smallest meaningful units of language • content morphemes (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) • grammatical morphemes (e.g., articles, conjunctions, some prefixes and suffixes)

20. Universal Characteristics of Human Language • Phonemes - elementary vowel and consonant sounds • Grammar - rules of language • phonology - how phonemes can be combined to make morphemes • morphology -how morphemes can be combined to make words • syntax - how words can be combined to make phrases and sentences

21. Language Development • Infant preference for human speech over other sounds • before 6 months can hear differences used in all languages • after 6 months begin to hear only differences used in native language • Cooing - vowel sounds produced 2-4 months • Babbling - consonant/vowel sounds between 4 to 6 months • Even deaf infants coo and babble

22. MONTH Speech Characteristic 2 Cooing vowel sounds 4 Babbling consonant/vowel 10 Babbling native language sounds 12 One-word stage 24 Two-word stage 24 + Sentences Language Development

23. Features of Young Children’s Speech • Telegraphic • Overextension • Underextension • Mean length of utterance (MLU)

24. Supports for Language Development • Chomsky’s language-acquisition device (LAD) - innate foundations for grammar and learning the unique rules of a culture’s language • Language-acquisition support system - aspects of the social world that help infants acquire language (e.g., parentese)

25. Animal communication • Can animals learn language? Depends on definition of language. • primate studies--because of articulatory difficulties, many were taught sign language • can acquire vocabulary with much effort, similar to a child’s learning of first words • cannot acquire grammar • do not understand turn-taking in conversation • answer questions with words contained in the questions