10.3: The Developing Mind: Cognitive Development

Understand how children's thinking develops.

Explain how children acquire knowledge.
Over the past 50 or 60 years, psychologists have constructed a variety of theories to explain cognitive development across the life span.

A variety of theoretical perspectives have been created by psychologists.

Most or all areas of cognitive function are affected by changes in children's cognitive skills.

Children's cognitive skills develop independently and at different rates across different domains, such as reasoning, language, and counting, according to domain-specific accounts.

They have different views of the main source of learning.

Some models emphasize the experience of moving around in the world; others, social interaction; and still others, biological maturation.

Jean Piaget was the first person to present a comprehensive account of cognitive development.

He tried to identify the stages that children go through.
The formation of cognitive development as a distinct discipline was the result of Piaget's theory, and for decades, most research in this field focused on refuting his claims.

Piaget thought that children aren't miniature adults.

He showed that children's understanding of the world is different from adults' but is still rational.
Children assume that their teachers live at school because they've never seen their teachers before.
The first scientist to develop a theory of cogni rather active learners who seek information and observe the consequences of their actions was Jean Piaget.

The assumption that children's thinking was radical reorganization of thinking at specific transition points followed by periods not just an immature form of adult think is what he proposed.

He believed that the ability to reason logically that of adults is the achievement of the end ing.

According to the box on the next page, Piaget identified four stages, each of which is characterized by a certain level of abstract reasoning capacity, with the ability to think beyond the here and now increasing at each stage.

All areas of cognitive capacity are sliced across the stages of Piaget.
A child with a certain level of abstract reasoning in mathematics can do spatial problem-solving tasks.

He argued that children are motivated to match their thinking with their observations.

She checks if the experience fits with her understanding of how the world works.
When a child experiences the world as flat but learns in school that the earth is round, something must give way.

Physical interactions with the world are the main source of knowledge, thinking, and experience for children in this stage.

Through this, they can see and observe the physical consequences of their actions.

Mental representation is the ability to think about things that are not in the immediate vicinity.

Children can use symbols such as language and drawings as representations of ideas in this stage if they are able to think beyond the here and now.

A child is showing symbolic behavior when he holds a banana and pretends it's a phone.
His mental representation is different from his physical one.
The stage is called "preoperational" because children can't do mental operations.
They can't perform operations on them because they have mental representations.

Children have the ability to perform mental operations, but only for physical events.

They can set up a battle scene with toy soldiers.
Mental operations can't be performed in abstract or hypothetical situations.
They need physical experience to anchor their mental operations.

The most sophisticated type of thinking that children can perform is hypothetical reasoning beyond the here and now.

If I'm late for school, then I'll get sent to the principal's office.

They can begin to think about the meaning of life.

The psychology of the child is based on Jean Piaget.

New knowledge is absorbed within a stage.

She uses new experiences to fit with what she already knows when she learns new information.

The process can last for a long time.

The child can no longer reconcile what she believes with what she experiences.
Something has to change when a child can't integrate her experiences into her knowledge structures.

She's forced to live in a house.

The process of changing a belief compatible with experience is a Piagetian one.

Stage changes are the result of accommodating children will accept a new way of looking at the world.

A child who believes the earth is flat faces a challenge to her understanding when she learns that the earth is round.

She doesn't have to change her belief that the earth is flat because of this adjustment.
A child who is confronted with a globe will have a hard time understanding how flat the earth is.

The significance of Piaget's theory is that it helped us understand how children's thinking develops into more adultlike thinking.

His theory turned out to be incorrect.
Research has shown that development is more continuous than stagelike.
Less domaingeneral is what Piaget proposed.

Some phenomena he observed appeared to be a product of task demands, which is a criticism of Piaget's theory.

He relied on children's ability to reflect and report on their reasoning processes.
He probably underestimated the abilities of children.

The lack of Mental Representation is demonstrated by the child forgetting that the toy still exists after it's been hidden.

Children are asked to look at two equal displays from one perspective and then watch as the researcher manipulates one of them to get a better idea of the amount.

The researcher asked the child to look at things in a different way.
The two quantities were compared by Piaget.
The preoperational stage prevents children from top and the number task is on the bottom.
To succeed at this task.

Children can use longer and shorter strings with heavier and lighter weights to build a pendulum.

Children in the formal operations stage can manipulate weights and lengths to see how they affect the swing's speed.

Can the results be duplicated by Piaget?

The culturally biased methodologies of Piaget elicited more sophisticated responses from children in Westernized societies than from children in non-Westernized societies.

Cole, 1990; Gellatly, 1987; Luria, 1976 are just a few examples of non-Westernized children revealing sophisticated insights when interviewed in a culturally sensitive manner.
A significant proportion of adolescents and adults fail some formal operational tasks in Western societies, suggesting that Piaget may have been overly optimistic about the typical course of cognitive development.
He might have based his conclusions on a sample that was more educated.
Many of Piaget's observations were based on tests of his own children.

Despite the flaws, Piaget is still an important figure in the field of cognitive development.

Children are seen as different from adults.

Learning can be described as an active process.

Exploring general cognitive processes that may cut across multiple domains of knowl Occam's Razor edge, thereby accounting for cognitive development in terms of fewer and more parsimonious--underlying processes.

Russian researcher Lev Vygotsky was developing a different but equally comprehensive theory of cognitive development at the same time as Piaget was developing his theory.

Vygotsky was interested in how social and cultural factors affect learning.

Parents provide a structure to aid their assistance in children's learning when a building is being built.
As children become better able to their own, parents gradually remove structure as complete tasks on their own, much like taking off training wheels from a bicycle.

He suggested that if a child can't learn a skill even with assistance, they should move from a phase where they can't learn it to one where they are ready to use scaffolding.

In Vygotsky's view, children gradually learn to perform a task on their own.

There were no general stages for him.

In educational settings, where guided father is instructing his child on how to learning and peer collaboration are popular, the researchers and remains influential.

As a child, Piaget emphasized physical interaction with the world.

When the field of cognitive development got off the ground, few theoretical accounts were strictly Vygotskian.

The roots of each theory can be traced to one of these two theorists.

Modern theories emphasize general cognitive abilities and acquired rather than innate knowledge, which is similar to the theories of Piaget.

They think learning is gradual rather than stagelike.

Vygotsky argued that change would be more gradual.

The social context and the ways in which interactions with caretakers and other children guide children's understanding of the world are emphasized in these theories.

Some theorists emphasize innate knowledge while others emphasize experience-based learning.

The theory of cognitive Modular Accounts was developed by Lev Vygotsky.

Like Vygotsky's theory, this class of theories emphasizes the idea development that emphasized social and of domain-specific learning, that is, separate spheres of knowledge in different domain cultural information as the key sources of knowledge.
There is a knowledge base for understanding learning.
Although Vygotsky's scholarly language is not related to the ability to reason about space, his career was shortened by early death skills between them.

When something was easy and you didn't need help, or when something was difficult and you couldn't do it with help, use Vygotsky's idea of zone of proximal development.

Some of the major cognitive accomplishments within the realm of perception, memory, and language have already been learned.

Children need a variety of cognitive skills to comprehend their world.
We will review a few of the important events.

It's a physical reason to figure out which way is up.

Children need to reason about their physical worlds.
Children need to learn that objects are solid, they fall when dropped, and one object can disappear behind another and reappear on the other side.
Adults take all of these concepts for granted, but they aren't obvious to novices.

He found that infants don't search for objects if they are hidden under a cloth.

If given a task that doesn't require a physically coordinated search for the object, infants can understand object permanence.

There are sweeping changes in which children take a step forward in their ability to mentally represent their experiences.
Change was gradual for Vygotsky because of experience with parents and other caretakers.

There are studies on how long infants look at displays.

She believes that young children failed the object perma ruling out rival hypotheses task because they lacked the ability to plan and perform a physical search for the hidden toy.

An earlier mastery of object explanations for the findings permanence emerged when using a looking-based measure.

They know that supported objects should fall.

With experience, this knowledge becomes more refined.
As we age, we become less reliant on intuitions and more reliant on evidence of how things work.

There will be objects that fall about how the world works.

Children fail to accurately predict the trajectory of a moving object because they attribute intentions or goals to objects that are late basic physics principles.
Anyone who has ever hit a golf ball and fallen, or yelled at it for failing to move in the direction it was supposed to go, is almost certainly related to this.

Folk psychology can affect our reasoning about physical objects in other ways.

Early on, infants expect that any contact with formal science education will prevent cal events and observations to human-like goals or intentions.

As in (b), (c) and (d).

Babies learn to expect that only those in (d) and (e) will interfere with their physical reasoning.

Not only is formal majority of the weight on the support science education only partially successful, it doesn't appear to be necessary to overcome surface, won't fall.

Indigenous cultures, such as the Itza Maya in Guatemala, who are more connected to the natural world than are industrialized societies, seem to overcome these reasoning biases without any formal education.

Even though dogs come in all shapes, sizes and colors, children learn to recognize them.

They learn to distinguish between animals.

Children acquire concepts of events because they don't have to explore every object to find out what it is.

There is a young chil (see LO 8.1a).
Imagine if every time a baby was given a bottle, she had to quickly learn what was going to happen through trial and error.
Children and adults wouldn't get much during a birthday event without categories.

Babies have basic abilities to categorize.

When shown a series of pictures that depend on their expectations of birds, infants eventually get bored with them and look away, but they exhibit fresh of events that they sometimes wrongly interest in when shown a picture of a dinosaur.
This finding indicates that the feature of an event that rized birds as all of the same kind and therefore no longer new, but the dinosaur as didn't occur, is a typical feature of the event.

Conceptual knowledge becomes richer, more detailed, and more flexible over time.

Thematically related objects include a dog and a bone, because dogs eat bones.
They learn more about how members of categories connect, such as that fruits taste sweet and grow on trees.
They can use this increased conceptual knowledge to think about the world.

Developing a sense of self is important for children's development.

During the toddler and preschool years, their ability to understand themselves as unique develops.

For years, parents have been looking for a quick and easy educational.

There isn't much evidence that these methods boost their infants' intel igence.
To get a jump-start, parents must begin early.
In the 1980s, thousands of parents bombarded reason for this deficit in learning from videos because they were their newborn infants with activities designed to teach them foreign languages and advanced math in an effort to create "superbabies" When parents are involved in the learning process.
The actual finding was quite small.
According to the experts in the video, college students performed better on a spa if they had heard classical music before.

Hundreds of thousands of parents are going to start playing classical music to their babies after the media exaggerated the finding.

V is related to music at al.

The classical music is just one way to influence people's emotions, and the most parsimonious explanation is that emotional arousal temporarily boost performance in general.

As technology has evolved, infant-oriented multimedia educa tional tools have become a huge industry.

By three months of age, infants have the ability to distinguish themselves.

Babies who view videos of themselves side by side with another baby prefer to look at the other baby's image, suggesting that they are different from them.
The finding shows that babies' preference for another baby's face isn't just a result of seeing their own face in the mirror or being able to reason about what other photographs are.

Children can see their images in a mirror as early as their first birthdays, as long as they watch a video of their own.

By two years, they can recognize pictures of legs side by side with a videotape of another and refer to themselves by name.
The infant's legs will look longer at the videoplishments that appear to be tied to the junction of the other baby's brain region.
Theory of mind refers to the ability to reason about what other people think.
Their actions are less interesting to watch.

In the false-belief task, the child participant knows which person is unaware.

The child knows where the candy bar is.

Is she aware that Joey doesn't know?

Children hear a story about a child who stores a treat in one place, but a third party moves the treat to another place, and the illustrations are accompanied by a story about a child who stores a treat in one place, but a third party moves the treat to another place.

The child in the story will look for the treat when he returns.

Children who pass this task know that the child in the story holds an incorrect belief about the location of the treat.

The child in the story must know where the treat is if they fail the task.

Children don't succeed at this task until they are four or five years old.

How early children succeed on false-belief tasks varies depending on seemingly minor variations in the task, such as whether it's a story-book or real-world situation.
Children are more successful at an earlier age if researchers tell them the reason for the change was to trick someone.
The age at which children pass the Ruling Out Rival Hypotheses false-belief task is due to aspects of the task in addition to their understanding of others' knowledge.
It's clear that the ability to understand others increases with age.

Human history has seen a number of recent achievements in counting and math.

The first counting system was developed a few thousand years ago.
Children don't always develop counting and mathematics skills.
In a few nonindustrialized cultures, counting and mathematics are not common.

Many children learn to count to 10 at a very early age, and will recite "1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10" in rapid succession.

Children must learn a variety of more complex aspects of numbers, such as that numbers are about amount, that number words refer to specific quantities, and that numbers are ordered from smallest to largest in quantity.

In the top figure, the Fiction disks look like the dots, and in the bottom figure, the stimuli are different.

When the objects to be counted closely resemble each other, children are better able to match two sets of the same quantity.

They don't succeed until they are four years old when they have to match sets of sounds and visual sets.

Cross-cultural differences in how parents and teachers introduce counting to children seem to account for these differences.

There are differences in how linguistic counting systems are structured.

It's not until adolescence that we achieve our most abstract levels of reasoning ability.

There are many reasons why cognitive development continues into the teenage years.
Part of the story is about brain development, and part of it is about the kinds of problems, opportunities, and experiences we encounter for the first time during adolescence.

The brain doesn't mature fully until late adolescence or early adulthood, as discussed in LO 3.1b.

Planning, decision making, and impulse control are all done by the frontal lobes.
Some impulsive behaviors, like skateboarding down a steep incline, can be explained by the fact that the frontal lobes are still maturing during adolescence.
Teens need more brain processing than adults when it comes to simple tasks, such as suppressing the impulse to look at a flashing light.
Teens are more susceptible to peer group influences, which can lead to further risk-taking, if the brain involved in social rewards becomes more active during adolescence.
During adolescence, there are changes in brain systems.

During adolescence, some areas become more connected than others.

Both types of changes have an impact on adolescents' behaviors.

Even though their brains aren't ready to make well-reasoned decisions, adolescents encounter new adultlike opportunities to engage in potentially harmful activities.

They are often faced with decisions such as whether to have sex, engage in vandalising, or drive drunk.

Adolescents must not have a full deck of decision-making cards.
Some counting systems have enough body parts to count up to 74.

The higher rate of risky behaviors appears to be related to enhanced opportunities rather than a higher propensity toward risky decision making.

In Ruling Out Rival Hypotheses, researchers argue that the causes of impulsive behaviors in adolescents in non-Westernized cultures may be as much cultural as biological.

Teenagers are assumed to engage in risk-taking because they don't believe bad things can ever happen to them.

Most adolescents don't underestimate the risks of such behaviors as driving fast or having early or unprotected sex, even though they're aware they're taking chances, but believe they're willing to accept the consequences.

During the late high school and college years, there is a critical cognitive change in adolescents' and young adults' perspectives towards knowledge.

Students starting college are often frustrated by the lack of answers to questions in their psychology courses.

Over the course of their college years, students pass through a variety of "positions" on knowledge.

Students who expect clear right or wrong answers to all questions may initially resist changing their views and try to reconcile their expectations with what they're learning in the classroom.

The "it depends" perspective is what their professors want them to embrace.
They'll often say the "right things" on exams to get good grades, but believe that there's a right and a wrong answer to most questions.
Students can relax their expectations for answers with time and experience.
Students realize that they can't abandon the idea of "truth" or "reality" completely, but they can appreciate and respect differing points of view.

There are positives and negatives to growing older.

Older adults complain that they can't remember things.

The world's cultures honor and revere to decrease after age 30 due to the fact that many people recall information.
There is variability in the amount of memory the elderly have.

Teenagers can beat older adults at video games and other speed-sensitive tasks because people's overall speed of processing declines.

Brain changes that occur with age are likely to be the cause of these age-related declines.
The cortex and the hippocampus, which play a key role in memory, are particularly affected by age-related declines in brain volume.

Cued recall and recognition remain intact despite the decline in free recall with age.

When asked to remember material that's relevant to their everyday lives, aging adults show relatively little decline, as opposed to the random lists of words used in memory research.