PSYC 3310 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Cognitive Development, Literal And Figurative Language, Paralanguage
20 Jun 2018
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CHAPTER 3 COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
• Piaget concluded that the way children think shifts in a regular pattern from
one system of logic to another.
o Each of these logical systems gives rise to a different cognitive stage
– a distinctive way of thinking, typical of a particular age and based on
a particular system of logic.
• Piaget saw cognitive development as the product of an active interaction
between the child’s cognitive level and the environment.
o The child continually tries to construct a better, more adaptive
understanding of the world.
o Because all children live in the same world and approach this task
with the same basic mental tools, it is not surprising that they follow
similar paths of development – universal and invariant.
• For adolescents, their cognitive development lags behind their physical
development.
o Because their bodies grow rapidly, other people expect that their
appearance matches with their cognitive abilities, which is not.
• Assimilation: the process by which one tries to understand a new experience
by making it fit with existing knowledge or understandings
• Accommodation: the process of changing one’s cognitive structure in
response to new information or experiences
o Sometimes, what you encounter does not match with what you knew.
• When adolescents go through these periods of assimilation, these eventually
lead to equilibrium.
o Disequilibrium leads to change (accommodation).
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Stages of Development
• Sensorimotor stage: characteristic of infancy, in which experience of the
world is based on perceptions and motor activity
o Birth to 2 years
o Behaviour goes from being reflexive to purposive (goal-directed)
o Gradually, they realize that objects in their environment exist
separately from them.
• Preoperational stage: marked by the emergence of an ability to represent
objects and events symbolically
o Ages 2 to 7
o Learn language and numbers
o Pretend play
o This symbolic function makes it possible to deal mentally with things
that are not physically present, but preoperational children tend to
confuse the way things look with their underlying qualities.
▪ Do not yet understand conservation
• Concrete operational stage: those in middle childhood become able to think
about more than one aspect of a problem at a time and to solve it through
mental operations
o Ages 7 to 11
o Conservation – you can change the form of something but you can’t
necessarily change the amount
o Decentration – can look at different aspects of a problem
o Perspective taking – has implications for their social relationships and
moral thinking
o Use reversibility
o Better able to think logically, but cannot extend from the real and
concrete
o Problem: don’t problem solve systematically
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• Formal operational stage: enables adolescents and adults to use an
abstract system of logic to understand the world
o Age 11 or 12
o Thinking is based on an abstract system of formal logic
o Perform mental operations on ideas and propositions, and not just on
tangible objects
o Can think just as easily about what might be as about what is
Achievements of the Formal Operations Stage
Abstract Thought
• Language
o Play with language in socially appropriate ways
o They can think one thing and say another – e.g., sarcasm
o Understand satire, irony, paralanguage (use intonation)
o Understand figurative language, metaphors
• Introspection
o Thinking about how they think
o Analyze their own thoughts and feelings and think about how they
manifest those
• Contradictions and uncertainties
o Makes them better at dialectical reasoning – pros and cons
Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning
• A way of reasoning in which a person makes a logical prediction based on
some supposition, and then checks the prediction against reality
• Involves reasoning that moves from a hypothesis or premise to a deduction of
conclusion
