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Dev Psych C4 - Coggle Diagram
Dev Psych C4
Central developmental issues
Nature and nurture interact to produce cognitive development
Nurture
: also includes every experience child encounters
Nature
: includes a child's maturing brain and body, ability to perceive, act, learn from experience and tendency to integrate particular observations into coherent knowledge
Schemas
Mental container we build to hold our experiences
Can be images, models, and/ or concepts
Eg. child formed a COW schema → uses it to think about animals of a certain shape and size. Assimilates experience of a cat into her schema by referring to cat as dog. Accommodate her animal schema by separating the cat, and diff dogs into separate schemas
Main sources of continuity
Assimilation
: process where people incorporate incoming info into concepts they alr know
Accommodation
: process which people improve/ adapt current understanding in response to new experiences
Equilibration
: process when people balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding
Equilibrium
Initial satisfaction w understanding
NO discrepancies btw observations and knowledge
Stable state of understanding
Disequilibrium
Introduce new info
Realize inadequacy in current understanding
State of confusion and recognition of shortcomings
Advanced equilibrium
Develop more sophisticated understanding
Addressing shortcomings of the old knowledge
Ability to make sense of a broader range of observations
Sources of discontinuity
Sensorimotor (0 - 2 yo)
Sensorimotor intelligence
Term for way infants think - by using sense and motor skills
0 - 1 month
Beyond first few months
8 months
Beyond first year
1 year
18 - 24 months
A not B task
Tendency to reach for hidden objects where it was last found
Rather than in the new location that it was last hidden
Preoperational (2 - 7yo)
Centration
: Focusing on single, perceptually striking feature of object or event to the exclusion of other relevant but less striking features
Symbolic representation:
Using one object to stand for another
Egocentricism
: perceiving world only from one's POV
Conservation concept:
Changing the appearance of objects does not necessarily change its properties --> children in this stage do NOT have this
Concrete operational (7 - 12yo)
Children begin to reason logically about concrete features of world
Limited to concrete situations
Systematic and hypothetical thinking is difficult
Formal operational (12 yo onwards)
Begin to think abstractly and to reason hypothetically
Piaget believed this stage was not universal (not all reach it)
Adolescent thinking expands nad enriches intellectual life
How are executive functions applied throughout the life span
Inhibiting tempting actions can cause difficulties
Enhancing working memory through strategies like repeating phone number
Being cognitively flexible and taking another’s perspective in an argument
Strategies
Rehearsal
: process of repeating info over and over to aid memory
Selective attention
: process of intentionally focusing on info that is most relevant to current goal
Content knowledge
Increased info improves recall and integration of new info
Prior content knowledge improves encoding, provides useful associations, guides memory in useful directions
Development of problem solving
Children are depicted as active problem solvers
Use of strategies allows them to overcome limitations of knowledge and processing capacity
Overlapping waves theory
: info processing approach that emphasizes the variability of children’s thinking
Children are not good at planning, planning improves as PFC matures
Problem solving most successful if people can plan before acting
But children not good bc it requires inhibiting desire to solve problem immediately in favour of trying to choose the best strategy
Children tend to be overly optimistic about abilities and believe they can solve problems without planning
Themes addressed by theories of cognitive development
Piagetian
Information processing
Core-knowledge
Sociocultural
Dynamic systems
Information Processing Theories
Focus on the structure of cognitive systems and mental activities
Used to deploy attention and memory to solve problems
Sees children's cognitive development as occuring incrementally, gradually, day by day and task by task WHILE Piaget sees it as distinct, qualitative stages
Task analysis
Research technique
Identify goals, relevant info in the environment, and potential processing strategies for a problem
Computer simulation
Type of mathematical model
Expresses ideas about mental processes in precise ways
Views of children’s nature
Child as limited capacity processing system
Cognitive development arises from children’s gradually surmounting processing limitations via
Expanding amount of info process at time
Increasing processing speeds
Acquiring new strategies nd knowledge
Child as a problem solver
Active problem solving
→ process of attaining a goal by using a strategy to overcome an obstacle
Examine how nature and nurture work together to produce development
Emphasize precise descriptions of how change occurs
Focus on
Development of memory
Developent of problem solving
Working memory
: Actively attending to, gathering, maintaining, storing, and processing info is limited in both capacity (amount that can be stored) and length of time info is retained
LT memory → knowledge that people accumulate over lifetime
Executive functioning → controls of cognition, esp via PFC
Piaget's Theory
What accounts for theory’s longevity
Observations and descriptions convey texture of child’s thinking at diff ages
Exceptional breadth of theory → examines conceptualization of time, space, distance, and number, language use, memory, perspective-taking, problem solving and scientific reasoning
Offers intuitively plausible depiction of interaction of nature and nurture in cognitive development, and continuities and discontinuities characterizing intellectual growth
Theory posits that cognitive development involves a sequence 4 stages constructed through the processes of assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration
Sensorimotor
Preoperational
Concrete operational
Formal operational stages
Fundamental assumptions
Children are mentally active since birth
Mental and physical activity contribute to development
Children are intrinsically motivated to learn and do not need rewards from others to do so
Constructivist approach to cognitive development
Construct K for selves in response to experiences
Constructive processes: generating hypotheses, performing experiments, drawing conclusions from observations
Central properties of Piaget’s Stage Theory
Qualitative change
→ believed that children of diff ages think in qualitatively diff ways
Broad applicability across topics and contexts
→ ways children think in each stage of development affects how they think about various things and situations
Brief transitions
→ children experience a brief transitional period when moving to new stage, they switch btw thinking patterns of old and new stages
Invariant sequence
→ everyone progresses through stages in same order without skipping any
Piaget’s Theory’s Application to education
Child-centered approach
Consider various stages of cognitive processing to determine when info should be taught
Children learn best when interacting w environment, both mentally and physically
Children’s knowledge of numbers when they enter kindergarten predicts math achievement later
Piaget's Legacy
Contributions: remains influential in understanding cognitive development
Weaknesses
Theory is vague about mechanisms giving rise to children’s thinking and produce cognitive growth
Infants and young children more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized
Thoery understates contribution of social world to cognitive development
Stage model depicts children’s thinking as more consistent than it is
How to explain memory: Basic processes
SImplest and most frequently used mental activities
Associate events w one another
Recognize objects as familiar
Recallign facts and procedures
Genrealizing frmo one instance to another
Encode specific features of objects and events
Improving processing speed
Myelination and increased connectivity