Psychology 2410A/B Lecture 7: Cognitive Development in Childhood

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2410A/B
• Professor: Lynne Zarbatany

Document Summary

Could form mental representations of objects and events. There are 3 more stages of increasingly sophisticate (logical and abstract) qualitatively different ways of thinking. Stage mostly described in terms of what child can"t do because they lack necessary logical operations. Start with two identical quantities; two rows lined up exactly the same. Then the experimenter makes one row longer than the other (with the same amount of coins), and ask child again - the child would say there are more in the longer row. Would do this with volume, mass, and length as well. Piaget: suffers from centration: focuses on only one relevant dimension of problem (e. g. , dimensions in liquid volume task; child says is different b/c it"s higher but ignores width) Also, need mental operations (logical rules) for comparing mental representations before and after transformations: Compensation: change in one dimension compensates for change in another. Reversibility: change can be reversed to original condition.