CHAPTER 7 COGNITION

1. CHAPTER 7COGNITION

2. Learning Objectives • What is cognition? • How did Piaget define intelligence? • According to Piaget’s theory, how do organization, adaptation, and disequilibrium function in the development of intelligence? • According to Piaget’s theory, what are the stages through which cognition develops?

3. Cognition • Cognition is the activity of knowing and the processes through which knowledge is acquired and problems are solved • Humans are cognitive beings throughout the lifespan, but cognition changes in important ways

4. Piaget’s Constructivist Approach • Piaget noticed that children of the same age often made similar kinds of mental mistakes • Studied how children think, not just what they know • Piaget’s initial studies were his naturalistic observations of his own infant children • Piaget also used a clinical method, a flexible question-and-answer technique, to discover how children think about problems

5. Piaget’s Constructivist Approach – What Is Intelligence? • Piaget’s definition of intelligence: a basic life function that helps an organism adapt to its environment • Piaget viewed infants as active agents, learning about people and things by observing, investigating, and experimenting • Through exploration, the brain responds by creating schemes/schema/schemata • Cognitive structures – organized patterns of action or thought that people construct to interpret their experiences • Rules or procedures that structure our cognition

6. Piaget’s Constructivist Approach – How Does Intelligence Develop? • Knowledge is created by building schemes from experiences using two inborn functions, organization and adaptation • Organization – existing schemes are systematically combined into new and complex schemes • Adaptation – process of adjusting to the demands of the environment that occurs through assimilation and accommodation

7. Piaget’s Constructivist Approach – How Does Intelligence Develop? • Adaptation • Assimilation – an adaptive process through which we interpret new experiences in terms of existing schemes or cognitive structures • Example: we have a scheme for dogs and fit our experience with a new animal into our existing scheme for dogs

8. Piaget’s Constructivist Approach – How Does Intelligence Develop? • Accommodation – an adaptive process of modifying existing schemes in order to better fit new experiences • Example: We have a scheme for dogs, but the animal we see is larger or barks in a different way, so we must change our scheme in order to account for the animal

9. Piaget’s Constructivist Approach – How Does Intelligence Develop? • According to Piaget, cognitive conflict occurs when new events seriously challenge old schemes or prove our existing schemes to be inadequate • Stimulates cognitive growth • Motivated to reduce cognitive conflict through equilibration • Process of achieving mental stability so that our internal thoughts are consistent with the evidence in the external world

10. Piaget’s Constructivist Approach – How Does Intelligence Develop? • Humans progress through four invariant stages of cognitive development • Sensorimotor stage: birth to approximately 2 years of age • Preoperational stage: approximately 2-7 years of age • Concrete operations stage: approximately 7-11 years of age • Formal operations stage: approximately 11 years of age and beyond

11. Caption: Process of change in Jean Piaget’s theory

12. Learning Objectives • What are the major achievements of the sensorimotor stage ? • How do infants progress toward these achievements?

13. The Infant • Sensorimotor Stage • The world is understood through the senses and actions • The dominant cognitive structures are the behavioral schemes that develop through coordination of sensory information and motor responses

15. The Infant – Substages of the Sensorimotor Stage • Reflexes – first month • Reflexive reaction to internal and external stimulation • Primary circular reactions – 1-4 months • Infants repeat actions relating to their own bodies • Secondary circular reactions – 4-8 months • Repetitive actions involving something in the infant’s external environment

16. The Infant – Substages of the Sensorimotor Stage • Coordination of secondary schemes – 8-12 months • Secondary actions are coordinated in order to achieve simple goals (i.e., pushing or grasping) • Tertiary circular reactions – 12-18 months • Experimentation; actions are repeated with variations • Beginning of thought – 18 months • Symbolic thought permits mental representation, imitation, and recall

17. The Infant – The Development of Object Permanence • Object permanence develops during the sensorimotor period • The understanding that objects continue to exist when they are not visible • From 4-8 months, “out of sight, out of mind” • By 8-12 months, make the A-not-B error • Infants will search for an object in the place they last found it (A), rather than in a new place (B) • By 1 year, A-not-B error is overcome, but continued trouble with invisible displacement • By 18 months, object permanence is mastered • The infant can mentally represent an invisible action (a toy is being hidden) and conceive of the object in its final location

18. The Infant – The Development of Object Permanence • Research suggests that infants may develop at least some understanding of object permanence far earlier than Piaget believed • By 3 months, infants appear to understand that objects have qualities that should permit them to be visible when nothing obstructs them • Success on object permanence tasks also may be influenced by task conditions, such as the time interval between seeing something hidden and being able to search for it • Infants improve their looking and reaching skills between 8 and 12 months • By 24 months, infants can play complex hide-and-seek games

19. The Infant – The Emergence of Symbols • Symbolic capacity is the crowning achievement of the sensorimotor stage • Ability to use images, words, gestures to represent or stand for objects and experiences • Can use internal behavioral schemes to construct mental symbols that can guide future behavior • By 24 months, children are deliberate thinkers with a symbolic capacity that lets them solve problems in their heads

20. Learning Objective • What are the characteristics and limitations of preoperational thought?

21. The Child – The Preoperational Stage • Symbolic capacity is the greatest cognitive strength of the preschooler • Can refer to past and future • Pretend or fantasy play flourishes • Can include imaginary companions • Focus on perceptual salience – the most obvious features of an object or a situation – means that preschoolers can be fooled by appearance • Have difficulty with tasks that require logic

22. The Child – The Preoperational Stage • Reliance on perceptions and lack of logical thought means that children have difficulty with conservation • The idea that certain properties of an object or substance do not change when its appearance is altered in a superficial way • Piaget’s conservation-of-liquid-quantity task • Children younger than 6 or 7 typically do not understand that the volume of liquid is conserved despite the change in the shape it takes in different containers

23. The Child – The Preoperational Stage • Why do preschoolers have difficulty with the conservation task? • Unable to engage in decentration, the ability to focus on two or more dimensions of a problem at once • Preoperational thinkers engage in centration, the tendency to center attention on a single aspect of a problem • Preschoolers lack reversibility, the process of mentally undoing or reversing an action • Preoperational thinkers engage in static thought, thought that is fixed on end states rather than the changes that transform one state into another • They lack transformational thought, the ability to conceptualize transformations or processes of change from one state to another

24. The Child – The Preoperational Stage • Comparison of a preoperational thinkers and concrete-operational thinkers on the conservation task • Younger children do not understand conservation because they engage in centration, irreversible thought, and static thought • Older children understand conservation because they have mastered decentration, reversibility, and transformational thought

25. The Child – The Preoperational Stage • Additional limitations of preoperational thinkers • Egocentrism • A tendency to view the world solely from one’s own perspective and to have difficulty recognizing other points of view • Difficulty with classification • Using criteria to sort objects on the basis of characteristics such as shape, color, function • Lack class inclusion, the ability to relate the whole class (furry animals) to its subclasses (dogs, cats) • The preoperational child does not understand that the subclasses are included within the whole class

26. Caption: A typical class inclusion problem in which children are asked whether there are more dogs or more animals in the picture

28. The Child – The Preoperational Stage • Did Piaget underestimate the preschool child? • Researchers have used simple tasks to identify cognitive abilities • Gelman (1972) discovered that children as young as 3 have some grasp of the concept that a number remains the same even when items are rearranged spatially • Preschoolers may not be as egocentric as Piaget claimed • Preschool children seem to have more understanding of classification systems than Piaget believed

29. Learning Objective • What are the major characteristics and limitations of concrete-operational thought?

30. The Child – The Concrete-Operations Stage • Concrete operations involve mastering the logical operations missing in the preoperational stage • Conservation • The concrete-operational child can decenter and can use reversibility and transformational thought • Operational abilities evolve in predictable order • Horizontal décalage – different cognitive skills related to the same stage of cognitive development emerge at different times

31. The Child – The Concrete-Operations Stage • Seriation enables the concrete-operational child to arrange items mentally along a quantifiable dimension such as weight or height • Transitivity is the understanding of relationships among elements in a series • If John is taller than Mark, and Mark is taller than Sam, who is taller—John or Sam? • School-age children are less egocentric and are better at recognizing the perspectives of others • Classification abilities improve and subclasses are understood to be included in a whole class

32. Caption: Some common tests of the child’s ability to conserve

33. Learning Objectives • What are the main features of formal operational thought? • In what ways might adult thought be more advanced than adolescent thought?

34. The Adolescent – The Formal-Operations Stage • Formal operations are mental actions on ideas • More abstract than concrete operations • Formal operations permit systematic and scientific thinking about problems, hypothetical ideas, and abstract concepts • Piaget’s pendulum task illustrates the use of hypothetical-deductive reasoning • Involves reasoning from general ideas or rules to their specific implications • Forming hypotheses and systematically testing them through an experimental method

35. The Adolescent – The Formal-Operations Stage • According to Piaget, the transition from concrete operations to formal operations takes place gradually over years • Adolescents may show an awareness of scientific reasoning but may not be able to produce logical scientific reasoning skills until later • Intuitive and scientific reasoning coexist in older thinkers • Being able to shift between the two forms of reasoning provides flexibility in problem-solving situations • With age, adolescents are increasingly able to decontextualize, or separate prior knowledge and beliefs from the requirements of the task at hand • The achievement of formal-operational thinking depends on opportunities to learn scientific reasoning, as through exposure to math and science education

36. The Adolescent – The Formal-Operations Stage • Formal operations contribute to positive aspects of adolescent development. • Sense of identity, complex thinking, appreciation of humor • Formal operations contributes to not-so-positive aspects of adolescent development • Questioning can lead to confusion and to adolescent idealism and rebellion against ideas that are not logical • Can lead to adolescent egocentrism, difficult differentiating one’s own thoughts and feelings from those of other people

37. The Adolescent – The Formal-Operations Stage • Adolescent egocentrism can take two forms • Imaginary audience • The phenomenon of confusing one’s own thoughts with those of an hypothesized audience for your behavior • Characterized by self-consciousness • “They’re all thinking that I am a slob” • Personal fable • A tendency to think that you and your thoughts are unique • “You could never understand how I feel!” • Characterized by a sense of specialness • High scores on measures of adolescent egocentrism are associated with risky behavior • The self-consciousness and the sense of specialness are most evident in early adolescence and decline by late high school • However, adolescent egocentrism may persist when adolescents have insecure relationships with their parents

38. Learning Objectives • How do theories of postformal thought explain cognitive development in adulthood? • What happens to cognitive capacities in later adulthood?

39. The Adult – Limitations in Cognitive Performance • Research has revealed limitations in adult cognitive performance • Only about half of all college students show firm and consistent mastery of formal operations on Piaget’s scientific reasoning tasks • Many American adults do not solve scientific problems at the formal level • There are some societies in which no adults solve formal-operational problems • Adults are likely to use formal operations in a field of expertise and to use concrete operations on unfamiliar problems

40. The Adult – Growth Beyond Formal Operations • Theorists have proposed two forms of postformal thought or ways of thinking that are more complex than formal operations • Relativistic thinking – understanding that knowledge depends upon its context and the subjective perspective of the knower • Dialectical thinking – detecting paradoxes and inconsistencies among ideas and trying to reconcile them • Advanced dialectical thinkers challenge and change their understanding of what constitutes “truth”

41. The Adult – Aging and Cognitive Skills • Cross-sectional comparison studies have shown poorer cognitive performances by elderly individuals relative to young and middle-aged adults • The results should be interpreted with caution • Poorer performance could result from a cohort effect: older adults may have less formal education than the younger adults • Training can reactivate cognitive abilities • The tasks may not be relevant to older adults • Older adults may use modes of cognition that are useful in daily life but that are not helpful in laboratory tests • Cultural differences can affect older adults’ performances • Summary: an age-related decline in operational abilities has not been firmly established

42. Piaget in Perspective – Piaget’s Contributions • Piaget’s theory has stimulated much research and continues to guide the study of human development • Piaget showed us that infants are active in their own development • Piaget showed us that infants and children think differently at each stage of development • Piaget’s account of the direction of cognitive development (sequence) was basically correct, even though cultural factors may influence the rate of cognitive growth

43. Piaget in Perspective – Challenges to Piaget • Piaget seems to have underestimated the cognitive abilities of young minds • Piaget failed to distinguish between competence and performance • Overemphasized the idea that knowledge is an all-or-nothing concept • Piaget wrongly claimed that broad stages of development exist • That thinking within a stage is coherent or consistent and that transition between stages is swift and abrupt • Piaget failed to adequately explain development • Perhaps a better job of describing development than explaining development? • Piaget gave inadequate attention to the social influences upon cognitive development

44. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective • Culture and society are pivotal in Vygotsky’s theory • Knowledge depends on social experiences • Cognitive development varies from society to society depending upon the mental tools such as language that the culture values and makes available • Children acquire mental tools through interaction with parents and other more experienced members of society and by adopting their language and knowledge

45. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective • Vygotsky’s ideas about how social interaction fosters cognitive children’s growth • Zone of proximal development • The gap between what a learner can accomplish independently and what she can accomplish with the guidance and encouragement of a more skilled partner • Guided participation • Children’s active participation in culturally relevant activities with the aid and support of parents and other knowledgeable guides • Parents provide scaffolding when they give structured help and gradually reduce the help as the child becomes more competent

46. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective • Vygotsky believed that mental activity is mediated by tools • Spoken language, writing, using numbers, applying problem-solving and memory strategies • Vygotsky argued that thought changes fundamentally once we begin to think in words • Private speech – speech to oneself that guides one’s thoughts and behavior • Helps children think their way through challenging problems • Allows them to incorporate into their own thinking the problem-solving strategies learned during collaborations with adults

47. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective – Evaluation • Vygotsky has been criticized for placing too much emphasis on social interaction and insufficient attention upon individual construction of knowledge