Children’s Thinking

1. Children’s Thinking Lecture 3 Methodological Preliminaries Introduction to Piaget

2. Observation vs. Experimentation, redux • Naturalistic observation allowed researchers to establish norms for basic milestones of physical & behavioral growth. • BUT observation alone is very limited in explanatory power – cannot probe behavior to uncover its mental foundations. • Experimentation (especially w/infants) provides compelling vistas on children’s thinking and has provided radically new views on infants’ and children’s cognitive capacities and functioning.

3. Research strategies:Longitudinal vs. Cross-Sectional Longitudinal Age 1 Age 2 Age 3 Cross-sectional Age 1 Age 2 Age 3

4. Longitudinal Research: Benefits • Most ‘natural’ strategy – grows from case studies • Provides individual history – can see developmental & environmental precedents • Common in observational studies • Individuals serve as their own controls – minimize individual differences that add noise to comparisons and maximize statistical power

5. Longitudinal Research: Costs • Slow – have to wait for subjects to reach appropriate ages • Subject “mortality” – families lose interest or move out of area, etc.; consequently, the sample at the end of the study is inevitably (much) smaller than the initial sample.

6. Cross-Sectional Research • Benefit: by observing different groups of children at different ages, research can be completed more efficiently. • Assumption: as members of the same species, we share essential cognitive abilities, processes, and representations • Most common in experimental research • Costs • Individual differences are not just “noise” • Sense of history is lost

7. Fundamental Definitions:What is Development? • Change of a certain sort • Orderly • Directional • Cumulative • Behavior becomes more flexible and complex • Behavior involves increasing differentiation and integration

8. Fundamental Definitions:What is Cognition? • We usually use “thinking” to refer to higher order mental processes like judgment, problem solving, conceptualizing, etc. • Here, we are concerned not only with these, but also with basic aspects of everyday mental processing. • These include: • remembering • recognizing objects as exemplars of particular categories of objects • representing the external world

9. Part 2 • How can we put together observational and experimental findings, using both longitudinal and cross-sectional strategies, to derive an account of children’s cognitive development? • Let’s start with the seminal figure in the field, Jean Piaget

10. Jean Piaget: Master Observer

11. The Object Concept Implicit beliefs we all hold about objects. • We, and all other objects, coexist as physically distinct and independent entities within a common, all enveloping space • The existence of our fellow objects is fundamentally independent of our own interaction or non-interaction with them • An object’s behavior and existence is independent of our psychological contact with it

12. Infants’ Object Concept, Stage 1(0-1 months)

13. Object Concept, Stage 2(1-4 months) • Passive expectation: if object disappears, infant will continue looking to the location where it disappeared, but will not search. • In the infant mind, the existence of the object still very closely tied to schemes applied to experience

14. Object Concept, Stage 3(4-8 months) • Visual anticipation. • If infant drops an object, and it disappears, the infant will visually search for it. • Will also search for partially hidden objects • But will not search for completely hidden objects.

15. Object Concept, Stage 4(8-12 months) • Infant will search for hidden object. • Does the infant understand the object as something that exists separate from the scheme applied to find the object? (“Scheme” is the term that Piaget used for “action” or “behavior”) • No. Evidence? “A-not-B” error.

16. The A-not-B task 1 A trials

17. The A-not-B task 1 A trials

18. The A-not-B task 1 A trials

19. The A-not-B task 2 A trials

20. The A-not-B task 2 A trials

21. The A-not-B task 2 A trials

22. The A-not-B task B trials

23. The A-not-B task B trials

24. The A not B task ?? B trials

25. A-not-B error • Infant continues to search at the first hiding location after object is hidden in the new location. • This indicates that objects are still understood only subjectively. • Reappearance of the object remains associated with a previously successful scheme.

26. Object Concept, Stage 5.(12-18 months) • Can solve A-not-B. • Cannot solve A-not-B with invisible displacement. • Can only imagine the object as existing where it was last hidden. • Invisible displacement requires the infant to mentally calculate the new location of the object. • Mental representation appears as the hallmark of Stage 6.

27. Piaget, The Theorist • Piaget made observations on a wide variety of behavioral phenomena, often inventing informal experiments to draw out critical performances. • Piaget offered a grand constructivist theory of cognitive development, in which the child is seen as an active agent of his or her own mental growth.

28. Active view of development • Child as scientist • Mental structures intrinsically active  constantly in need of being applied to experience • Leads to curiosity and the desire to know more • Development proceeds as the child actively refines his/her knowledge of the world through many “small experiments”

29. How does Piaget describe developmental change? • Development occurs in stages, with a qualitative shift in the organization and complexity of cognition at each stage. • Thus, children not simply slower, or less knowledgeable than adults  instead, they understand the world in a qualitatively different way. • Stages form an invariant sequence.