Hoofdstuk 4: theories of cognitive development
Three advantages of knowing about theories:
- Developmental theories provide a framework for understanding important phenomena
- Developmental theories raise crucial questions about human nature
- Developmental theories lead to a better understanding of children.
Cognitive development includes the growth of
such diverse capabilities as perception,
attention, language, problem solving, reasoning,
memory, conceptual understanding, and
intelligence.
Piaget’s theory
Piaget’s theory: the theory of Swiss psychologist
Jean Piaget, which posits that cognitive
development involves a sequence of four stages
—the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete
operational, and formal operational stages—that
are constructed through the processes of assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration.
Piaget’s fundamental assumption about children was that:
- they are mentally active from the moment of birth and that their mental
- physical activity both contribute greatly to their development.
- children are intrinsically motivated to learn and do not need rewards from other people to
do so.
His approach to understanding cognitive development is often labeled constructivist, because it
depicts children as constructing knowledge for themselves in response to their experiences.
According to Piaget, three of the most important of children’s constructive processes are generating
hypotheses, performing experiments, and drawing conclusions from their observations.
Piaget believed that nature and nurture interact to produce cognitive development. Piaget depicted
development as involving both continuities and discontinuities. The main sources of continuity are
three processes— assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration—that work together from birth to
propel development forward.
- Assimilation is the process by which people incorporate incoming information into concepts
they already understand.
- Accommodation is the process by which people improve their current understanding in
response to new experiences.
- Equilibration is the process by which people balance assimilation and accommodation to
create stable understanding. Equilibration includes three phases.
Equilibrium: people are satisfied with their understanding of a particular phenomenon.
People do not see any discrepancies between their observations and their understanding
of the phenomenon
Disequilibrium: new in. formation leads them to perceive that their understanding is
inadequate. They recognize shortcomings in their understanding of the phenomenon,
but they cannot generate a superior alternative, they are confused.
Finally, they develop a more sophisticated understanding that eliminates at least some of
the shortcomings of the old one, creating a more advanced equilibrium within which a
broader range of observations can be understood. Through innumerable equilibrations,
children learn about the world around them
,The most famous part of Piaget’s theory concerns discontinuous aspects, which he depicted as
distinct stages of cognitive development. Piaget viewed these stages as products of the basic human
tendency to organize knowledge into coherent structures. Each stage represents a unified way of
understanding one’s experience, and each transition between stages represents a discontinuous
intellectual leap from one coherent way of understanding the world to the next, higher one.
The central properties of Piaget’s stage theory:
- Qualitative change. Piaget believed that children of different ages think in qualitatively
different ways.
- Broad applicability. The type of thinking characteristic of each stage influences children’s
thinking across diverse topics and contexts
- Brief transitions. Before entering a new stage, children pass through a brief transitional
period in which they fluctuate between the type of thinking characteristic of the new, more
advanced stage and the type of thinking characteristic of the old, less advanced one.
- Invariant sequence. Everyone progresses through the stages in the same order without
skipping any of them
Piaget hypothesized four stages of cognitive development. In each stage, children exhibit new
abilities that enable them to understand the world in qualitatively different ways than they had
previously.
- The sensorimotor stage (birth to age 2 years), infants’ intelligence is expressed through their
sensory and motor abilities, which they use to perceive and explore the world around them.
Throughout the sensorimotor period, infants live largely in the here and now: their
intelligence is bound to their immediate perceptions and actions.
- The preoperational stage (ages 2 to 7 years), toddlers and preschoolers become able to
represent their experiences in language and mental imagery. This ability allows them to
remember the experiences for longer periods and to form more sophisticated concepts.
Piaget’s theory emphasizes young children’s inability to perform certain mental operations,
such as considering multiple dimensions simultaneously. This leads to children’s being unable
to form certain ideas.
- The concrete operational stage (ages 7 to 12 years), children can reason logically about
concrete objects and events. However, they cannot think in purely abstract terms or
generate systematic scientific experiments to test their beliefs.
- The formal operational stage (age 12 years and beyond), adolescents and adults can think
deeply not only about concrete events but also about abstractions and purely hypothetical
situations.
The sensorimotor stage (birth to age 2 years)
Infants are born with many reflexes. Even during their first month, infants begin to modify their
reflexes to make them more adaptive. Over the first few months, infants begin to organize separate
reflexes into larger behaviors, their reflexes serve as components of more complex behaviors. In the
middle of their first year, infants become increasingly interested in the world around them. A
hallmark of this shift is repetition of actions that produce pleasurable or interesting results. , infants
late in their first year begin to search for objects of interest that have disappeared from sight, a
capability known as object permanence. However, Piaget also hypothesized that these initial
representations of objects are fragile, e, as reflected in the A-not-B error: the tendency to reach for a
hidden object where it was last found rather than in the new location where it was last hidden. At
around 1 year of age, infants begin to actively and avidly explore the potential ways in which objects
can be used. In the last half-year of the sensorimotor stage (ages 18 to 24 months), according to
Piaget, infants become able to form enduring mental representations. The first sign of this new
capability is deferred imitation, 422 that is, the repetition of other people’s behavior minutes, hours,
or even days after it occurred.
- At first, infants’ activities center on their own bodies; later, their activities include the world
around them.
, - Early goals are concrete (shaking a rattle and listening to the sound it makes); later goals
often are more abstract (varying the heights from which objects are dropped and observing
how the effects vary).
- Infants become increasingly able to form mental representations, moving from “out of sight,
out of mind” to remembering a playmate’s actions from days earlier. Such enduring mental
representations make possible the next stage, which Piaget called preoperational thinking.
The preoperational stage (ages 2 to 7)
Piaget viewed the preoperational period as including striking cognitive acquisitions and equally
striking limitations. Perhaps the foremost acquisition is symbolic representations; among the most
notable weaknesses are egocentrism and centration. symbolic representation is the use of one
object, word, or thought to stand for another. As children develop, they rely less on self-generated
symbols and more on conventional ones. Heightened symbolic capabilities during the preoperational
period are also evident in the growth of drawing. Piaget proposed that an important limitation of
preoperational thinking is egocentrism, perceiving the world solely from one’s own point of view. For
example the three-mountain task and egocentric conversations. Young children often focus on a
single, perceptually striking feature of an object or event to the exclusion of other relevant features,
a process that Piaget labeled centration. For example the balance scale problem. Another good
example of centration comes from Piaget’s research on children’s understanding of conservation.
The idea of the conservation concept is that changing the appearance or arrangement of objects
does not necessarily change other key properties.
The concrete operational stage (ages 7 to 12)
At around age 7, according to Piaget, children begin to reason logically about concrete features of
the world. However, this relatively advanced reasoning is, according to Piaget, limited to concrete
situations. Thinking systematically remains very difficult, as does reasoning about hypothetical
situations. For example the pendulum problem.
The formal operational stage (age 12 and beyond)
Formal operational thinking, which includes the
ability to think abstractly and to reason
hypothetically, is the pinnacle of Piaget’s stage
progression. Piaget believed that unlike the previous
three stages, the formal operational stage is not
universal: not all adolescents (or adults) reach it. For
those adolescents who do reach it, however, formal
operational thinking greatly expands and enriches
their intellectual universe.
Weaknesses of Piaget’s theory:
- Piaget’s theory is vague about the
mechanisms that give rise to children’s
thinking and that produce cognitive growth.
- Infants and young children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized.
- Piaget’s 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
information-processing theories: a class of theories that focus on the structure of the cognitive
system and the mental activities used to deploy attention and memory to solve problems. To help
specify these processes, Klahr used task analysis: the research technique of specifying the goals,
, obstacles to their realization, and potential solution strategies involved in problem solving. Task
analysis helps information-processing researchers understand and predict children’s behavior and
rigorously test precise hypotheses regarding how development occurs. In some cases, it also allows
them to formulate a computer simulation, a type of mathematical model that expresses ideas about
mental processes in precise ways. A second distinctive feature of information-processing theories is
an emphasis on thinking as a process that occurs over time.
Information-processing theorists see cognitive development as occurring continuously, in small
increments that happen at different ages on different tasks.
- The Child as a Limited-Capacity Processing System: In the information-processing view,
cognitive development arises from children gradually surmounting their processing
limitations, in particular their limited working memory capacity, processing speed, and
knowledge of useful strategies and content. Through learning and maturation of brain
structures, children expand the amounts of information they can process at one time,
process information faster, and acquire new strategies and knowledge. Together, these
changes yield improvement in problem solving, memory, and other cognitive functions.
- The Child as Problem Solver: problem solving involves strategies for overcoming obstacles
and attaining goals. Children’s cognitive flexibility helps them attain their goals.
One distinctive characteristic of information-processing theories is their emphasis on precise
descriptions of change mechanisms. The way in which information-processing theories address how
change occurs can be seen particularly clearly in their accounts of the development of memory and
problem solving.
Memory is crucial to everything we do. Information-processing theories distinguish among three
types of memory processes: working memory, long-term memory, and executive functioning.
- Working memory involves actively attending to, maintaining, and processing information.
Working memory is limited in both its capacity (the amount of information that can be
actively attended to at one time) and in the length of time for which it can maintain
information in an active state without updating. The exact capacity and duration vary with
age, the task, and the type of information being processed. The capacity and speed of
working memory increase greatly during infancy, childhood, and adolescence. These changes
occur because of increasing knowledge of the content on which working memory operates
and because of brain maturation.
- Long-term memory consists of the knowledge that people accumulate over their lifetime.
Long-term memory is the totality of one’s knowledge, whereas working memory is the
subset of that knowledge attended to at a given time. Long-term memory can retain an
unlimited amount of information for unlimited periods of time.
- Executive functions control behavior and thought processes. The prefrontal plays a
particularly important role in this cognitive control. Three key executive functions are
inhibition, enhancement of working memory and cognitive flexibility. The ability of executive
functions to control thinking and action—enabling the individual to respond appropriately
rather than acting impulsively or out of habit—increases greatly during the preschool and
early elementary school years. The quality of executive functioning during early childhood
predicts many important later outcomes.
Explanations of memory development:
- Basic processes: The simplest and most frequently used mental activities are known as basic
processes. They include associating events with one another, recognizing objects as familiar,
recalling facts and procedures, and generalizing from one instance to another. Another basic
process, which is key to all the others, is encoding—the representation in memory of specific
features of objects and events. With development, children execute basic processes more
efficiently, enhancing their memory and learning for all kinds of materials.
