Samenvatting Development Learning and Behavior deeltentamen 2
Lecture cognitive development
Major themes regarding development
- Nature vs nurture
- The role of the child
- Continuity vs discontinuity
- Mechanisms of change
- The sociocultural context
- Individual differences
Major theories of cognitive development
- Piaget
- Information processing
- Core-knowledge
- Sociocultural
- Dynamic systems
Jean Piaget
Observations on his own children
View of children’s nature
- Children are mentally active from birth
- Their mental and physical activity both contribute
- Constructivist approach to cognitive development
- Children construct knowledge for themselves in response to their experiences
- Children’s constructive processes are:
o Generating hypotheses
o Performing experiments
o Drawing conclusions form their observations
Central Developmental Issues
- Nature and nurture interact together to produce cognitive development
- Main sources of continuity are:
o Assimilation: the process by which a child incorporates incoming information into
concepts they already know (iemand met een donkere huidskleur is zwarte piet)
o Accommodation: the process by which people improve their current understanding
based on new experiences
o Equilibration: the process by which children balance assimilation and accommodation
to create stable understanding.
- 4 distinct stages of discontinuous cognitive development
o Sensorimotor Stage – birth to age 2 years
o Preoperational stage – ages 2 to 7 years
o Concrete operational stage – ages 7 to 12 years
o Formal operational stage – age 12 years and beyond
Sensorimotor stage
- Sensory and motor abilities are used to explore the world
- Learn about objects and people
- Learn about rudimentary forms of concepts like time, space and causality
, - Experience is largely in here and now
- Birth to 1 month: reflexes sucking, grasping
- Beyond first few months: integrating reflexes grasping object then bringing it to mouth,
sucking on it.
- 8 months: object permanence mental representation beyond here and now
- Beyond first year: actions based on interest of the child squeezing a toy over and over to
hear the noise)
- 1 year old: explores, ‘little scientist’
- 18 to 24 months: Deferred imitation repeating behavior of others at a later time
Preoperational stage
- Ability to represent experiences in language and mental imagery develops
- Better memory for experiences and concepts
- Unable to perform certain mental operations
- Symbolic representation: the use of one object to stand for another
- Concentration: only able to focus on a single, perceptually striking feature of an object
- Egocentrism: perceiving the world solely form one’s own point of view
- Conservation concept: the idea that changing the appearance of objects does not necessarily
change the properties
Concrete operational stage
- Logical reasoning about concrete features of the world emerges
- Thinking systematically about hypothetical things remains difficult
Pendulum task
What determines the time it takes the pendulum to swing a full arc? Dropping height? Weigt? Length
of the rope? Combination?
Formal operational stage
- Children begin to think abstractly and to reason hypothetically
- The world and events as you know or see them are only one possibility
- Piaget believed the stage was not universal (i.e., not all adolescents reach it)
Piaget’s legacy
Pieaget’s theory remains very influential
Weaknesses of the theory:
- The theory is vague about the mechanisms that give rise to children’s thinking and produce
cognitive growth
- Infants and young children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized
- The theory understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development
- The stage model depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it is
Information processing theories
View of children’s nature
- Cognitive development occurs continuously
- Small increments happen at different ages on different tasks.
The child is a limited-capacity processing system
, - Cognitive development arises from gradually surmounting processing limitations through:
1) Expanding amount of information they can process at a time
2) Increasing processing speeds
3) Acquiring new strategies and knowledge
The child is a problem solver
- Problem-solving: the process of attaining a goal by using a strategy to overcome an obstacle
Central developmental issues
- Examine how nature and nurture work together to produce development
- Emphasize precise descriptions of how change occurs
- Focus on:
o Development of memory
o Development of problem solving
De development of memory
Working memory
- Actively attending to, gathering, maintaining, storing, and processing information is limited in
both capacity (amount of information that can be stored) and length of time information can
be retained
Long-term memory
- Knowledge that people accumulate over their lifetime (think Triviant)
Executive functioning
- The controls of cogntion
- Processing speed synaptogenesis & myelination
- Encoding more efficient
- Basic processes: associating, recognizing, recalling, generalizing
- Strategies: rehearsal, selective attention
- Content knowledge
The development of problem solving
- Example: overlapping waves theory
- Discover new strategies
- More effective execution of strategies
- More flexible/adaptive choice of strategies
- Improved planning abilities (freq & qual)
o Improved inhibition
o Less overoptimism about own abilities
Core knowledge theories
View of children’s nature
- Children enter the world equipped with specialized learning mechanisms
- Allow them to quickly and effortlessly acquire information of evolutionary importance
- Domain specific:
o Understanding and manipulating other people’s thinking
o Differentiating between living and non-living things
o Identifying human faces, finding one’s way through space
o Understanding cause-effects; language
Lecture cognitive development
Major themes regarding development
- Nature vs nurture
- The role of the child
- Continuity vs discontinuity
- Mechanisms of change
- The sociocultural context
- Individual differences
Major theories of cognitive development
- Piaget
- Information processing
- Core-knowledge
- Sociocultural
- Dynamic systems
Jean Piaget
Observations on his own children
View of children’s nature
- Children are mentally active from birth
- Their mental and physical activity both contribute
- Constructivist approach to cognitive development
- Children construct knowledge for themselves in response to their experiences
- Children’s constructive processes are:
o Generating hypotheses
o Performing experiments
o Drawing conclusions form their observations
Central Developmental Issues
- Nature and nurture interact together to produce cognitive development
- Main sources of continuity are:
o Assimilation: the process by which a child incorporates incoming information into
concepts they already know (iemand met een donkere huidskleur is zwarte piet)
o Accommodation: the process by which people improve their current understanding
based on new experiences
o Equilibration: the process by which children balance assimilation and accommodation
to create stable understanding.
- 4 distinct stages of discontinuous cognitive development
o Sensorimotor Stage – birth to age 2 years
o Preoperational stage – ages 2 to 7 years
o Concrete operational stage – ages 7 to 12 years
o Formal operational stage – age 12 years and beyond
Sensorimotor stage
- Sensory and motor abilities are used to explore the world
- Learn about objects and people
- Learn about rudimentary forms of concepts like time, space and causality
, - Experience is largely in here and now
- Birth to 1 month: reflexes sucking, grasping
- Beyond first few months: integrating reflexes grasping object then bringing it to mouth,
sucking on it.
- 8 months: object permanence mental representation beyond here and now
- Beyond first year: actions based on interest of the child squeezing a toy over and over to
hear the noise)
- 1 year old: explores, ‘little scientist’
- 18 to 24 months: Deferred imitation repeating behavior of others at a later time
Preoperational stage
- Ability to represent experiences in language and mental imagery develops
- Better memory for experiences and concepts
- Unable to perform certain mental operations
- Symbolic representation: the use of one object to stand for another
- Concentration: only able to focus on a single, perceptually striking feature of an object
- Egocentrism: perceiving the world solely form one’s own point of view
- Conservation concept: the idea that changing the appearance of objects does not necessarily
change the properties
Concrete operational stage
- Logical reasoning about concrete features of the world emerges
- Thinking systematically about hypothetical things remains difficult
Pendulum task
What determines the time it takes the pendulum to swing a full arc? Dropping height? Weigt? Length
of the rope? Combination?
Formal operational stage
- Children begin to think abstractly and to reason hypothetically
- The world and events as you know or see them are only one possibility
- Piaget believed the stage was not universal (i.e., not all adolescents reach it)
Piaget’s legacy
Pieaget’s theory remains very influential
Weaknesses of the theory:
- The theory is vague about the mechanisms that give rise to children’s thinking and produce
cognitive growth
- Infants and young children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized
- The theory understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development
- The stage model depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it is
Information processing theories
View of children’s nature
- Cognitive development occurs continuously
- Small increments happen at different ages on different tasks.
The child is a limited-capacity processing system
, - Cognitive development arises from gradually surmounting processing limitations through:
1) Expanding amount of information they can process at a time
2) Increasing processing speeds
3) Acquiring new strategies and knowledge
The child is a problem solver
- Problem-solving: the process of attaining a goal by using a strategy to overcome an obstacle
Central developmental issues
- Examine how nature and nurture work together to produce development
- Emphasize precise descriptions of how change occurs
- Focus on:
o Development of memory
o Development of problem solving
De development of memory
Working memory
- Actively attending to, gathering, maintaining, storing, and processing information is limited in
both capacity (amount of information that can be stored) and length of time information can
be retained
Long-term memory
- Knowledge that people accumulate over their lifetime (think Triviant)
Executive functioning
- The controls of cogntion
- Processing speed synaptogenesis & myelination
- Encoding more efficient
- Basic processes: associating, recognizing, recalling, generalizing
- Strategies: rehearsal, selective attention
- Content knowledge
The development of problem solving
- Example: overlapping waves theory
- Discover new strategies
- More effective execution of strategies
- More flexible/adaptive choice of strategies
- Improved planning abilities (freq & qual)
o Improved inhibition
o Less overoptimism about own abilities
Core knowledge theories
View of children’s nature
- Children enter the world equipped with specialized learning mechanisms
- Allow them to quickly and effortlessly acquire information of evolutionary importance
- Domain specific:
o Understanding and manipulating other people’s thinking
o Differentiating between living and non-living things
o Identifying human faces, finding one’s way through space
o Understanding cause-effects; language
