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In this lesson we will examine the development of thought, including such skills as remembering, problem solving, classifying, and imagining. We will compare Piaget's stage theory of cognitive development to information-processing theories and discuss the merits and shortcomings of each.
After completing this lesson, you will be able to
* identify the differences between Piaget's theory and information-processing
theories of cognitive development;
* define the characteristics of a stage theory and explain how it differs from
a theory of quantitative development; and
* understand the several main areas of focus in the study of child development,
particularly classification, memory development, and problem solving.
Read through the study notes first; then read chapters 9 and
12 (pages
444-66 only) in your textbook.
egocentrism
stage theory
sensorimotor
preoperational
concrete operations
formal operations
reversibility
information processing
strategies
short-term memory
long-term memory
domain-specific knowledge
appearance/reality
scripts
The term cognition refers to the inner processes and products of the human mind that lead to knowing. Thus, cognition covers such disparate skills as thinking, remembering, relating, classifying, symbolizing, imagining, problem solving, fantasizing, and dreaming. In this lesson we will examine two different approaches to understanding the development of cognition: Piaget's stage theory and information processing.
Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, developed the most
comprehensive and well-known theory of child development by observing and
documenting the behavior of his own and other children. Piaget was interested
in how children develop the capacities to think, reason, understand, and
remember. His theory is a stage theory; he proposed that children go through
qualitatively different stages as they develop into mature adult thinkers. This
is an important point in comparison to most other theories of cognitive
development (such as information processing), which emphasize quantitative
differences between children's thinking and adult cognition.
Piaget proposed that the function of intelligence is that it allows
humans to adapt to different situations.
Although Piaget's theory is fairly complex, there are only a few principles
that you will need to remember in order to understand how he viewed cognitive
development.
Piaget divided intelligence into three main parts: function, structure, and content. Piaget proposed that the function of intelligence is that it allows humans to adapt to different situations. This adaptation occurs in two ways: assimilation and accommodation (these will be discussed below). The structure aspect refers to an organization of cognitive structures. It is this aspect of Piaget's theory that makes it "constructivist." These structures begin with the earliest basic reflexes, and they change (through adaptation) and become reorganized over the course of development. The structures in this theory are similar to a grammar for language: They contain the rules for working on information. Finally, the content of intelligence refers to the actual pieces of information and specific knowledge involved. To continue the language metaphor, the content would refer to the words of a language. Piaget proposed that the cognitive structures he described were content-free (which becomes very important when we talk about criticisms of this theory).
Piaget's theory is one of the best known stage theories in child development (Freud's theory is another). A stage theory is distinguished by the fact that each stage occurs in an invariant order. Because each stage builds on the advances of the previous stage, it is impossible to skip a stage or pass through them in any other order. Although we tend to think of stages in terms of the age during which a child passes through them, Piaget warned against relying too heavily on age norms. It is plausible that a child may, for example, show evidence of concrete operational thought before the age of seven; the important thing to remember is that the order is invariant. For ease of understanding, I will mention the normative ages for each stage, but keep in mind that these shouldn't be seen as restrictions.
The four stages of cognitive development in Piaget's theory
are as follows:
* Sensorimotor (approximately birth to two years old)
* Preoperational (approximately two to seven years old)
* Concrete operational (approximately seven to eleven years old)
* Formal operational (approximately eleven to fifteen years old to adulthood)
The hallmark achievement of this first stage is the development of mental
representation.
During the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development the infant
develops from having only basic reflexes and little capacity for understanding
the world to a creature who can mentally represent ideas and objects. Piaget
focused on several tasks that illustrate this development. The most famous is
the A-not-B task, which illustrates the achievement of object permanence (for a
reminder about this work, review lesson 3). Another achievement of the
sensorimotor period is intentional (or goal-oriented) behavior. At the
beginning, infants' actions are not intentional; during the sensorimotor stage,
infants begin to do things intentionally, like imitating other people and
playing games. The hallmark achievement of this first stage is the development
of mental representation. Mental representation refers to the ability to make
one thing stand for something else. Representation is apparent in infancy when
the child will do deferred imitation (for example, imitating a tantrum one
evening that he saw another child throw in the afternoon) and make-believe play
(such as pretending a banana is a phone).
Operations refers to the ability to mentally act on information.
Once the child has attained the ability of mental representation, she passes
into the preoperational stage. As its name suggests, the stage of
preoperations is defined more by what abilities the child doesn't have, rather
than what she does have. The term operations refers to the ability to
mentally act on, or transform, information. Without this ability, children have
very limited understanding of the world. For example, this stage is
characterized by egocentricity, or the inability to take the viewpoint of
another (see Piaget's three-mountain task on page 319). Some of you may have
experienced another form of egocentricity if you have ever talked with a
preschooler on the phone and the child points to something she wants you to
"see." Most importantly for this stage, preoperational children fail
Piaget's conservation tasks. The conservation tasks are explained in greater
detail in your textbook, but the main points are that preoperational children
fail because they tend to focus on states rather than transitions, they become
centered on one characteristic of the display, and they focus on the outward
appearance of the display.
The next stage, called concrete operations, is when the child can do
mental transformations and pass the conservation tasks. One important point
about operations in general is that they exhibit reversibility. This
means understanding that if water is poured from a tall, thin glass to a short,
fat glass (so the level of water will change), when the water is poured back
into the tall, thin glass, it will rise to the same level as it was at first.
This stage is called concrete operations because children can only do mental
operations on concrete, tangible information they can perceive. Children at
this stage cannot do operations on abstract ideas.
The ability to do operations on operations, abstract thinking, and
metacognition is the mark of formal operations, the last stage of
cognitive development. During this stage, children can do hypothetical
deductive reasoning (or test theories in order to solve problems), and thought
is propositional (children can think about verbal assertions and abstract
ideas).
Until about fifteen years ago, Piaget's theory was the only
one to attempt to fully explain cognitive development, and even today it
remains the most comprehensive. But certain aspects of the constructivist
account have been questioned in recent years, and alternative accounts have
been offered. Many of these theories are gathered under the heading of
information processing.
Information-processing approaches share a model of cognition that looks
like this:
/-----------------Executive Control------------------------------------\
Env'tal Input --> Sensory Store --> Short-Term Memory --> Long-Term
Memory
The figure shows how information goes from the environment into short-term (or
working) memory, and then into long-term memory. The sensory store refers to
taking in information through our senses. If attention is paid to that
information, it goes into short-term memory, where a small amount of
information can be held for less than thirty seconds, unless it is rehearsed.
Any information that is operated on in short-term memory will then pass into long-term
memory, which is a permanent storehouse of information and operating
strategies. Keep in mind that these words are only metaphors; there is no area
in the brain that could be identified as the "short-term memory"
lobe. Finally, executive control is where we regulate our attention, select
strategies for solving problems, and monitor what we are thinking about.
Information-processing approaches are quantitative, whereas Piaget's
theory is qualitative.
Information-processing approaches are quantitative, whereas Piaget's theory is
qualitative. In other words, information-processing approaches argue that
children's thought processes change quantitatively over childhood--what changes
is how much information they have and how it is organized. These theories do
posit some changes in a few basic cognitive skills, such as memory and
attention, but again, these changes are quantitative; the skill is the same throughout
the life span, but there is an increase in the amount of information that can
be handled.
Piaget thought that children fail to solve certain problems and appear to think
differently from adults because they lack important cognitive structures. How
would information processing explain the results that Piaget found? We will
look at the development of the cognitive processing skill of attention as an
example of an alternative explanation for why children fail at some of Piaget's
tasks.
The ability to pay attention develops gradually over
childhood, and it is important to understand this when testing children of
different ages. Infants have a very short attention span; they will often pay attention
to a display for only a matter of seconds before looking away. In the preschool
years children can do a task for a few minutes before being distracted, even
when the task is something they enjoy, like watching TV. You may remember on
cartoons and children's shows that when they break for a commercial, they say,
"After these messages, we'll be right back." This is because
preschool children cannot pay attention for long periods of time, and they are
likely to wander off during the commercial break.
The short attention span of children from birth to age five is an alternative
explanation for some failures in Piaget's cognitive tasks. Consider the
conservation tasks: It is possible that preschoolers fail these tasks simply
because they do not pay attention long enough to gather all the relevant
information.
By the age of five, children are much more persistent in trying to solve
problems, but their strategies are unsystematic. By the age of eight, children
are much more systematic, but they sometimes show a lack of planning. These
skills related to attention may have an effect on how children perform on
problem-solving tasks such as the conservation tasks.
One of the purposes of attention is to filter out unwanted information. Right
now you are trying to read a lesson on attention, but you can also feel the
chair you are sitting on, maybe see out of a window, and think about what you
need to buy at the grocery store. In order to successfully learn this lesson,
though, you must try to "tune out" this other information and pay
attention to what is relevant at the moment.
The ability to use attention as a filter develops over childhood.
The ability to use attention as a filter also develops over childhood, and may
seriously affect children's performance on cognitive tasks. Young children tend
to take in everything around them, even when you teach them what to pay
attention to. In one study, seven- and thirteen-year-old children were told to
remember the number and location of pictures of animals under different flaps.
Under some of the flaps were household objects. The thirteen-year-olds did much
better than the seven-year-olds at remembering where the animals were. But when
the researchers tested for memory of where the household objects were, the seven-year-olds
did better than the older children. This is called "incidental
learning" because the younger children picked up information they didn't
need to. The older children were much better at attending to only the relevant
information and filtering out the information they didn't need.
As adults we have strategies for paying attention to things. If we were in the
study just mentioned, we would probably only look at the animal cards; we might
try to find a pattern to remember where they were, and we might even repeat
their locations to ourselves. What do children know about their ability to pay
attention? When the researchers asked the children in the study what they
should do to remember the information in the task, even the seven-year-olds
said that they should look at the animals first and label them in order to
remember them. However, even though they knew this strategy, they didn't
perform very well. The same effect is found in memory, where children know some
strategies for remembering earlier than they can successfully use them.
Memory is another example of a cognitive skill that is studied in
information-processing terms. Following the example of attention, it is easy to
see how differences in the amount of information that can be remembered would affect
performance on many (if not all) of Piaget's tasks. In addition to focusing on
quantitative changes in cognition, information-processing approaches have found
differences in what is called "domain-specific knowledge." Remember
that Piaget claimed that mental structures were content-free, in other words,
any information can be fed into the mental structures and worked on in the same
way. However, recent studies have shown that children can often do better on
tasks that are familiar to them. For example, when given lists of dinosaurs to
remember, and facts about them, eight-year-olds will sometimes perform better
than college students. For other types of information (like a grocery list) an
eight-year-old cannot remember as well as a college student. When the
information is relevant, or interesting to them, children perform better. This
too may have had an effect in Piaget's tasks.
1. A five-year-old is given the conservation of liquid test.
He fails to conserve, in that he says when the water is poured into the short,
fat glass that there is now less water than there was in the tall, thin glass.
What is Piaget's specific explanation for this failure? (In other words, what
is the child doing wrong?) What would an information-processing theory suggest
might be the child's problem?
2. Think about how to test the information-processing explanation you came up
with for question 1. What additional questions would you ask the child? How
would you change the task to show that the alternative explanation for the
child's failure is more accurate?
3. Write a script (as explained in the textbook) for eating in a restaurant
from (a) a preschooler's point of view and (b) a college student's point of
view. How do the scripts differ?
4. How does studying the development of play throughout childhood give us
insight into cognitive development? Give three specific examples of how play
develops and how it is related to cognition.
5. Your textbook describes preschool cognition as uneven; what does that mean?
Why is this unevenness a problem for some theories of development (be
specific)?
Write a two- to three-page (typed, double-spaced) essay on one of the
following topics. Your essay needs an introduction to the problem, a body that
discusses the issues in a clear manner, and a conclusion that sums up what you
have discussed. You can gather the relevant information from your textbook (you
may want to read ahead) and study guide. Be sure to address all parts of the
question you choose. The essay is due before you begin
lesson 9.
1. Discuss the mother-infant attachment relationship. What are the differences
between securely and insecurely attached children? What factors lead to
different attachment relationships? Why is attachment important for
development? Can a child's attachment with another person change over time?
What are the differences between the mother-infant and the father-infant
attachment relationships?
or
2. Using an example from each stage of development, show how differences in
children's play in infancy, the preschool period, and middle childhood are
related to advances in cognitive ability. Give specific examples of types of
play and specific cognitive skills. What cognitive changes allow the child to
play differently in preschool from the way she did as an infant? What cognitive
advances in the development to middle childhood affect children's play
patterns? What do children learn from playing during each of these
stages?
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