PSYC 2500H Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Lev Vygotsky, Cultural-Historical Psychology, Egocentrism
26 Jun 2018
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Chapter 8: Cognitive Development
p. 245-265
-Cognition: the activity of knowing and the process through which knowledge is acquired.
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
-Cognitive development: changes that occur in mental activities such as attending,
perceiving, learning, thinking, and remembering.
-Genetic epistemology: the experimental study of the development of knowledge,
developed by Piaget.
-Intelligence: in Piaget’s theory, a basic life function that enables an organism to adapt to
its environment.
oHis point was simply that all intellectual activity is undertaken with one goal in
mind: to produce a balanced, or harmonious, relationship between one’s thought
processes and the environment (cognitive equilibrium)
oPiaget’s view of intelligence is an interactionist model that implies that
mismatches between internal mental schemes (existing knowledge) and the
external environment stimulate cognitive activity and intellectual growth ****
-Cognitive equilibrium: Piaget’s term for the state of affairs in which there is a balanced,
or harmonious relation.
oProcess of achieving is called equilibrium
-Constructivist: one who gains knowledge by acting or otherwise operating on objects and
events to discover their properties.
oPiaget describes a child as a constructivist
-Scheme: an organized pattern of thought or action that a child constructs to make sense of
some aspect of his or her experience; Piaget sometimes uses the term cognitive structures
as a synonym for schemes.
-Organization: an inborn tendency to combine and integrate available schemes into
coherent systems or bodies of knowledge.
-Adaptation: an inborn tendency to adjust to the demands of the environment.
-Assimilation: the process of interpreting new experiences by incorporating them into
existing schemes.
-Accommodation: the process of modifying existing schemes to incorporate or adapt to
new experiences.
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Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
-Invariant developmental sequence: a series of developments that occur in one order
because each development in the sequence is a prerequisite for those appearing later.
-Sensorimotor period: Piaget’s first intellectual stage, from birth to 2 yrs. When infants
are relying on behavioural schemes as a means of exploring and understanding the
environment. (following table is on p.249)
Development of Imitation
- Piaget’s observations led him to believe that infants are incapable of imitating novel
responses displayed by a model until 8-12 months old.
-Deferred imitation: the ability to reproduce a modelled activity that has been witnessed at
some point in the past.
oPiaget believed that older infants are capable of deferred imitation because they
can now construct mental symbols, or images, of a model’s behaviour that are
stored in memory and retrieved later to guide the child’s recreation of the
modelled sequence.
oOther researchers argue that deferred imitation begins much earlier.
Development of Object Permanence
- The realization that objects continue to exist when they are no longer visible or detectable
through the other senses.
- Notable achievement in the sensorimotor period
- 1-4 months old will not search for attractive objects that are hidden from view
- 4-8 months old will retrieve toys that are partially concealed or placed beneath a
semitransparent cover, but their continuing failure to search for objects that are
completely concealed suggested to Piaget that, from the infant’s perspective,
disappearing objects no longer exist.
- 8-12 months old develop clearer signs of an emerging concept of objects
-A-not-B error: tendency of 8-12 month olds to search for hidden object where they
previously found it even after they have seen it moved to a new location.
-Neo-nativism: idea that much cognitive knowledge, such as the object concept, is innate,
requiring little in the way of specific experiences to be expressed, and that there are
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biological constraints, in that the mind/brain is designed to process certain types of
information in certain ways.
-Theory theorists: theories of cognitive development that combine neo-nativism and
constructivism, proposing that cognitive development progresses by children generating,
testing, and changing theories about the physical and social world.
Preoperational Stage (2-7 yrs.) and the Emergence of Symbolic Thought
-Preoperational period: Piaget’s second stage of cognitive development lasting from
about age 2-7 when children are thinking at a symbolic level but are not yet using
cognitive operations.
-Symbolic function: the ability to use symbols (i.e. images and words) to represent objects
and experiences.
-Representational insight: the knowledge that an entity can stand for (represent)
something other than itself.
-Dual representation: aka dual coding, the ability to represent an object simultaneously as
an object itself and as a representation of something else.
-Animism: attributing life and life-like qualities to inanimate objects.
-Egocentrism: the tendency to view the world from your own perspective well feeling to
recognize that others may have different points of view.
-Appearance/reality distinction: ability to keep the true properties for characteristics of an
object in mind despite the deceptive appearance that the object has assumed notably
lacking amongst young children during the pre-conceptual period.
-Centration (centered thinking): in Piaget’s theory, the tendency of preoperational
children to attend to one aspect of a situation to the exclusion of others; contrasts with the
decentration.
-Conservation: the recognition that the properties of an object or substance do not change
when its appearance is altered in some superficial way.
- Decentration: in Piaget’s theory, the ability of concrete operational children to consider
multiple aspects of the stimulus for situation; contrasts with centration.
- Reversibility: the ability to reverse or negate an action by mentally performing the
opposite action (negation).
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Document Summary
Cognition: the activity of knowing and the process through which knowledge is acquired. Cognitive development: changes that occur in mental activities such as attending, perceiving, learning, thinking, and remembering. Genetic epistemology: the experimental study of the development of knowledge, developed by piaget. Cognitive equilibrium: piaget"s term for the state of affairs in which there is a balanced, or harmonious relation: process of achieving is called equilibrium. Constructivist: one who gains knowledge by acting or otherwise operating on objects and events to discover their properties: piaget describes a child as a constructivist. Scheme: an organized pattern of thought or action that a child constructs to make sense of some aspect of his or her experience; piaget sometimes uses the term cognitive structures as a synonym for schemes. Organization: an inborn tendency to combine and integrate available schemes into coherent systems or bodies of knowledge. Adaptation: an inborn tendency to adjust to the demands of the environment.
