Cognitive Development

1. Cognitive Development Week 5 Psychology NJ Kang

2. The Ability to Solve Logical Problems • 7 under: preoperational logic (Conservation) • Children tend to focus on one dimension or viewpoint in problem solving rather than integrating different dimensions or viewpoints together • 7 over: concrete operational logic

3. The Ability to Solve Logical Problems 7 over: concrete operational logic Involving the use of logic such as The appearance-reality distinction and spatial cognition. conservation, class inclusion, transitive inferences, and perspective-taking.

4. Cognitive Abilities in 2 to 6 year-olds • The Appearance-reality distinction • At pre-operation level: children believe How it looks is how it is • Something looks good to eat (appearance) is good to eat (reality). • Milk in a cup with a red filter wrapped.(Flavell, 1993) • At concrete level, we know it is not always like this.

5. Phenomenism versus Realism • Ellie with a bear custom. Q: When you look at her with your eyes right now, does she look like Ellie or does she look like a bear? Q: Who is over there really and truly? Is she really and truly Ellie, or is she really and truly a bear? A: Ellie both looked like and truly was a bear A: Ellie looked like and truly was Ellie Phenomenism Realism Phenomenism answers and report the appearance of an object when asked about its real properties, or realism answers and report the reality of an object when asked about its appearance.

6. Task Variations and the effects of language Why children fail appearance –reality tasks? • They may believe that it is to evaluate the effectiveness of a disguise. • Their lack of knowledge about how to deal with the apparent contradiction between the two, • Or their misunderstanding of the experimenter’s questions (Keil, 1989) Sponge rock task (Sapp et al., 2000) • Verbal task: children under 3 are able to trick someone into thinking that a sponge that was shaped and colored to look like a rock was actually a rock. • nonverbal task: they can find the sponge can wipe the floor with.

7. Task Variations and the effects of language The conditions under which 3 year olds understand the distinction between appearance and reality are variable, by the age of 4 years children certainly do have some capacity to represent different perspectives and view points However, when asked even a simple appearance –reality question such as whether a piece of white paper placed behind a blue filter is really and truly white it is not until around age 6 or 7 that children will consistently give the correct answer.

8. Understanding spatial relations in 2 year-olds Judy DeLoache (1987, 1991, 2000) 2.7 years 0 and 3.2 year-olds  X Shown a furnished room and its scale model located in an adjoining room. Hid a large toy behind a furniture in the furnished room and a small toy in the same furniture in its scale model.

9. The credible Shrinking room • 2.7 year olds • 2.5 year-olds symbolic task Find a shrunken toy from the model room Shrinking Machine Real Room hid a Real Toy Real Room hid a Real Toy Asks to find a small toy from the model room Failed

10. Task 1 • Can you think of any other experiment reflecting this idea? • How can this be implied in ELT?

11. Conservation • Under 7 years are nonconservers • They lack an understanding of invariance, the concept that quantities remain the same despite perceptual changes if nothing is added or subtracted.

12. The different conservation problem • The different conservation tasks are typically passed at different ages • Number, liquid, length, and mass : around 6 to 7 • Conservation of mass/weight: around 9 • Volume : around 11 or 12 • Horizontal decalage: they all seem to require the same logical abilities at the similar stage

13. Alternatives to Piaget’s interpretation of the conservation problems

14. Are nonconservers “perceptually seduced”? Turtle 1 • Gelman (1982) Turtle 1 Turtle 1 Turtle 1 Turtle 1 Turtle 1 Turtle 1 Turtle 1 Turtle 1 Turtle 1 Turtle 1 Turtle 1

15. Are nonconservers “perceptually seduced”? Turtle 1 • Gelman (1982) Turtle 1 Turtle 1 Turtle 1 Turtle 1 Turtle 1 Turtle 1 Turtle 1 Turtle 1 Turtle 1 Turtle 1 They were able to give a response consistent with an understanding of conservation and the invariance principle. Turtle 1

16. Are nonconservers “perceptually seduced”? • Object to these types of studies is that children do not genuinely conserve, and do not really understand that the same amount remains regardless of transformation.

17. Conversational confusions: Do children understand the questions? • The hypothesis that children’s inability to conserve is due to a misunderstanding of the question has been addressed in several different ways. • McGarrigle and Donaldson (1974) • A naughty teddy accidentally not deliberately messed up one array of counters  aged 4 to 6 were significantly more likely to conserve. • Light et al., (1979): liquid conservation task • A group of 5 and 6-year-olds: showed two glasses of water. • Accidentally one of them was chipped and poured the liquid into a new glass that was taller and narrower, more likely to conserve • Rose and Blank (1974) use of only one question after the row transformation than asking questions two before and after transformation (Are there the same number in both rows or does one row have more?).

18. Class inclusion • That require knowledge of part-whole or inclusion relations. • Are there more roses or flowers? • Superordinate (flowers) or subset (roses) • Pragmatic understanding:

19. The Effects of changing the taskLinguistic misunderstandings? • Chapman and McBride (1992) • Gave 4 – to 10- year-olds two versions of a class inclusion task involving seven toy horses (5 brown 2 white) • 1) Are there more horses or more brown horses? (All standing) • 2) Are there more sleeping horses or more brown horses?  linguistic cues more salient and more successful  most children could not effectively justify their answers.

20. Transitive Inferences • Young children under about 7 years of age cannot reliably coordinate two separate pieces of information together in order to make a logical inference. • A>B, B> C  A>C

21. Transitive Inferences • Bryant and Trabasso (1971) • Children aged 4-6 years could succeed on this task should steps be taken to ensure that they remembered the premises. • Giving names A: Tall, B: short and tall, C: short. • More names: red>Green> blue> yellow. • Very young even 4 years olds can do it. • But has the issue of a false positive pattern of responses. • Young children after all do possess inferential abilities. But maybe simply relying on their spatial representation abilities (having a mental image of the size of the objects)

22. Perspective -taking • Egocentrism permeates young children’s thinking and is a severe, general limitation on their knowledge of the world (Piaget) • Egocentrism: child’s difficulty in understanding things from another person’s point of view

23. Perspective -taking • Three mountain task • Under 7 year old cannot describe a scene from other people’s perspective but their own vantage point. • Newcombe and Huttenlocher (1992) • Children’s difficulties on the Piagetian tasks come from their lack of knowledge or experience in selecting different perspectives from an array of pictures • With 4 toys and a doll experiment children did all well. • Children’s perspective-taking seems crucially dependent on task demands.

24. What is the cause of the transition in cognitive development? • Children 7 and most 5 year olds often do not succeed on measures of the • appearance-reality distinction, • spatial cognition, • conservation, • class inclusion, • transitive inferences, and • perspective taking. •  Lack of pre-existing schemas

25. What is the cause of the transition in cognitive development? For Piaget, Assimilation and Accommodation Assimilation: Assimilate by attempting unsuccessfully to use these structures as strategies to solve tasks involving conservation etc. children, eventually, adapt to the environment, they recognize the existence of a conflict between their present strategies and the strategies required for solving the problem at hand. Accommodation • they accommodate (change) the structure of their thinking in order to embrace a new strategy that enables successful problem solving. •  Equilibrium.

26. What is the cause of the transition in cognitive development? Information –Processing Change The development of specific Brain structures Conversational awareness. Cultural influences on cognitive development.

27. Cultural influences on cognitive development. • A transition from synthetic models to mature, culturally received mental models. • Children’s knowledge of the shape of the earth. • Naïve theory or folk theories generated by constraints that can be seen as entrenched presuppositions which are resistant to change as these are constantly confirmed by every day experience. • Synthectic model (1) the earth is a flat plane (2) unsupported objects fall down on an up-down gradient  coherence of beliefs and assumptions about something shaped by culture.

28. Questions • Think about the changes that take place in children’s thinking around the ages of 3 to 6 years. How might these developments help children solve Piaget’s concrete operational tasks? • Is it reasonable to claim that young children understand the experimenter’s questions in tests of their cognitive understanding and development? • What evidence suggests that young children are egocentric? • Can children make transitive inferences? • Think about the roles of culture and brain development in cognitive development. • Do we understand what causes the major developments in children’s thinking that occur around ages 6 to 7 years? • Think about Piaget’s conservation problems. Why do you think young children fail them, and what develops to enable the older child to succeed at these tasks?