PSYC 2230 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Habituation, Cognitive Development, Dishabituation
8 Jun 2016
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Document Summary
Piaget"s question: how does a child"s knowledge of the world change with age. Piaget was a swiss biologist who observed his own three children. Piaget"s most central assumption was that the child is an active participant in the development of knowledge, constructing his own understanding; this was possibly the most influential idea in the progression of the study of child development. Scheme/schema: concept, mental category, complex ideas about the world; the basic action of knowing, including physical and mental actions; schemes build on a small repository of simple sensory or motor schemes ex. tasting or sucking. Organization: as individuals act on their environments, an inborn mental process causes them to derive generalizable schemes from specific experiences; increases in complexity over time. Equilibration leads to 4 stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years): the child uses sensory and motor skills to act on the environment. Primary circular reactions: simple repetitive behaviours involving the infant"s body.
