1. CHAPTER 7 COGNITION

2. Learning Objectives
What is cognition?
How did Piaget define intelligence?
According to Piaget’s theory, how do organization, adaptation, and disequilibrium function in the development of intelligence?
According to Piaget’s theory, what are the stages through which cognition develops?

3. Cognition
Cognition is the activity of knowing and the processes through which knowledge is acquired and problems are solved
Humans are cognitive beings throughout the lifespan, but cognition changes in important ways

4. Piaget’s Constructivist Approach
Piaget noticed that children of the same age often made similar kinds of mental mistakes
Studied how children think, not just what they know
Piaget’s initial studies were his naturalistic observations of his own infant children
Piaget also used a clinical method, a flexible question-and-answer technique, to discover how children think about problems

5. Piaget’s Constructivist Approach – What Is Intelligence?
Piaget’s definition of intelligence: a basic life function that helps an organism adapt to its environment
Piaget viewed infants as active agents, learning about people and things by observing, investigating, and experimenting
Through exploration, the brain responds by creating schemes/schema/schemata
Cognitive structures – organized patterns of action or thought that people construct to interpret their experiences
Rules or procedures that structure our cognition

6. Piaget’s Constructivist Approach – How Does Intelligence Develop?
Knowledge is created by building schemes from experiences using two inborn functions, organization and adaptation
Organization – existing schemes are systematically combined into new and complex schemes
Adaptation – process of adjusting to the demands of the environment that occurs through assimilation and accommodation

7. Piaget’s Constructivist Approach – How Does Intelligence Develop?
Adaptation
Assimilation – an adaptive process through which we interpret new experiences in terms of existing schemes or cognitive structures
Example: we have a scheme for dogs and fit our experience with a new animal into our existing scheme for dogs

8. Piaget’s Constructivist Approach – How Does Intelligence Develop?
Accommodation – an adaptive process of modifying existing schemes in order to better fit new experiences
Example: We have a scheme for dogs, but the animal we see is larger or barks in a different way, so we must change our scheme in order to account for the animal

9. Piaget’s Constructivist Approach – How Does Intelligence Develop?
According to Piaget, cognitive conflict occurs when new events seriously challenge old schemes or prove our existing schemes to be inadequate
Stimulates cognitive growth
Motivated to reduce cognitive conflict through equilibration
Process of achieving mental stability so that our internal thoughts are consistent with the evidence in the external world

10. Piaget’s Constructivist Approach – How Does Intelligence Develop?
Humans progress through four invariant stages of cognitive development
Sensorimotor stage: birth to approximately 2 years of age
Preoperational stage: approximately 2-7 years of age
Concrete operations stage: approximately 7-11 years of age
Formal operations stage: approximately 11 years of age and beyond

11. Caption: Process of change in Jean Piaget’s theory

12. Learning Objectives
What are the major achievements of the sensorimotor stage ?
How do infants progress toward these achievements?

13. The Infant
Sensorimotor Stage
The world is understood through the senses and actions
The dominant cognitive structures are the behavioral schemes that develop through coordination of sensory information and motor responses

15. The Infant – Substages of the Sensorimotor Stage
Reflexes – first month
Reflexive reaction to internal and external stimulation
Primary circular reactions – 1-4 months
Infants repeat actions relating to their own bodies
Secondary circular reactions – 4-8 months
Repetitive actions involving something in the infant’s external environment

16. The Infant – Substages of the Sensorimotor Stage
Coordination of secondary schemes – 8-12 months
Secondary actions are coordinated in order to achieve simple goals (i.e., pushing or grasping)
Tertiary circular reactions – months
Experimentation; actions are repeated with variations
Beginning of thought – 18 months
Symbolic thought permits mental representation, imitation, and recall

17. The Infant – The Development of Object Permanence
Object permanence develops during the sensorimotor period
The understanding that objects continue to exist when they are not visible
From 4-8 months, “out of sight, out of mind”
By 8-12 months, make the A-not-B error
Infants will search for an object in the place they last found it (A), rather than in a new place (B)
By 1 year, A-not-B error is overcome, but continued trouble with invisible displacement
By 18 months, object permanence is mastered
The infant can mentally represent an invisible action (a toy is being hidden) and conceive of the object in its final location

18. The Infant – The Development of Object Permanence
Research suggests that infants may develop at least some understanding of object permanence far earlier than Piaget believed
By 3 months, infants appear to understand that objects have qualities that should permit them to be visible when nothing obstructs them
Success on object permanence tasks also may be influenced by task conditions, such as the time interval between seeing something hidden and being able to search for it
Infants improve their looking and reaching skills between 8 and 12 months
By 24 months, infants can play complex hide-and-seek games

19. The Infant – The Emergence of Symbols
Symbolic capacity is the crowning achievement of the sensorimotor stage
Ability to use images, words, gestures to represent or stand for objects and experiences
Can use internal behavioral schemes to construct mental symbols that can guide future behavior
By 24 months, children are deliberate thinkers with a symbolic capacity that lets them solve problems in their heads

20. Learning Objective
What are the characteristics and limitations of preoperational thought?

21. The Child – The Preoperational Stage
Symbolic capacity is the greatest cognitive strength of the preschooler
Can refer to past and future
Pretend or fantasy play flourishes
Can include imaginary companions
Focus on perceptual salience – the most obvious features of an object or a situation – means that preschoolers can be fooled by appearance
Have difficulty with tasks that require logic

22. The Child – The Preoperational Stage
Reliance on perceptions and lack of logical thought means that children have difficulty with conservation
The idea that certain properties of an object or substance do not change when its appearance is altered in a superficial way
Piaget’s conservation-of-liquid-quantity task
Children younger than 6 or 7 typically do not understand that the volume of liquid is conserved despite the change in the shape it takes in different containers

23. The Child – The Preoperational Stage
Why do preschoolers have difficulty with the conservation task?
Unable to engage in decentration, the ability to focus on two or more dimensions of a problem at once
Preoperational thinkers engage in centration, the tendency to center attention on a single aspect of a problem
Preschoolers lack reversibility, the process of mentally undoing or reversing an action
Preoperational thinkers engage in static thought, thought that is fixed on end states rather than the changes that transform one state into another
They lack transformational thought, the ability to conceptualize transformations or processes of change from one state to another

24. The Child – The Preoperational Stage
Comparison of a preoperational thinkers and concrete-operational thinkers on the conservation task
Younger children do not understand conservation because they engage in centration, irreversible thought, and static thought
Older children understand conservation because they have mastered decentration, reversibility, and transformational thought

25. The Child – The Preoperational Stage
Additional limitations of preoperational thinkers
Egocentrism
A tendency to view the world solely from one’s own perspective and to have difficulty recognizing other points of view
Difficulty with classification
Using criteria to sort objects on the basis of characteristics such as shape, color, function
Lack class inclusion, the ability to relate the whole class (furry animals) to its subclasses (dogs, cats)
The preoperational child does not understand that the subclasses are included within the whole class

26. Caption: A typical class inclusion problem in which children are asked whether there are more dogs or more animals in the picture

28. The Child – The Preoperational Stage
Did Piaget underestimate the preschool child?
Researchers have used simple tasks to identify cognitive abilities
Gelman (1972) discovered that children as young as 3 have some grasp of the concept that a number remains the same even when items are rearranged spatially
Preschoolers may not be as egocentric as Piaget claimed
Preschool children seem to have more understanding of classification systems than Piaget believed

29. Learning Objective
What are the major characteristics and limitations of concrete-operational thought?

30. The Child – The Concrete-Operations Stage
Concrete operations involve mastering the logical operations missing in the preoperational stage
Conservation
The concrete-operational child can decenter and can use reversibility and transformational thought
Operational abilities evolve in predictable order
Horizontal décalage – different cognitive skills related to the same stage of cognitive development emerge at different times

31. The Child – The Concrete-Operations Stage
Seriation enables the concrete-operational child to arrange items mentally along a quantifiable dimension such as weight or height
Transitivity is the understanding of relationships among elements in a series
If John is taller than Mark, and Mark is taller than Sam, who is taller—John or Sam?
School-age children are less egocentric and are better at recognizing the perspectives of others
Classification abilities improve and subclasses are understood to be included in a whole class

32. Caption: Some common tests of the child’s ability to conserve

33. Learning Objectives
What are the main features of formal operational thought?
In what ways might adult thought be more advanced than adolescent thought?

34. The Adolescent – The Formal-Operations Stage
Formal operations are mental actions on ideas
More abstract than concrete operations
Formal operations permit systematic and scientific thinking about problems, hypothetical ideas, and abstract concepts
Piaget’s pendulum task illustrates the use of hypothetical-deductive reasoning
Involves reasoning from general ideas or rules to their specific implications
Forming hypotheses and systematically testing them through an experimental method

35. The Adolescent – The Formal-Operations Stage
According to Piaget, the transition from concrete operations to formal operations takes place gradually over years
Adolescents may show an awareness of scientific reasoning but may not be able to produce logical scientific reasoning skills until later
Intuitive and scientific reasoning coexist in older thinkers
Being able to shift between the two forms of reasoning provides flexibility in problem-solving situations
With age, adolescents are increasingly able to decontextualize, or separate prior knowledge and beliefs from the requirements of the task at hand
The achievement of formal-operational thinking depends on opportunities to learn scientific reasoning, as through exposure to math and science education

36. The Adolescent – The Formal-Operations Stage
Formal operations contribute to positive aspects of adolescent development.
Sense of identity, complex thinking, appreciation of humor
Formal operations contributes to not-so-positive aspects of adolescent development
Questioning can lead to confusion and to adolescent idealism and rebellion against ideas that are not logical
Can lead to adolescent egocentrism, difficult differentiating one’s own thoughts and feelings from those of other people

37. The Adolescent – The Formal-Operations Stage
Adolescent egocentrism can take two forms
Imaginary audience
The phenomenon of confusing one’s own thoughts with those of an hypothesized audience for your behavior
Characterized by self-consciousness
“They’re all thinking that I am a slob”
Personal fable
A tendency to think that you and your thoughts are unique
“You could never understand how I feel!”
Characterized by a sense of specialness
High scores on measures of adolescent egocentrism are associated with risky behavior
The self-consciousness and the sense of specialness are most evident in early adolescence and decline by late high school
However, adolescent egocentrism may persist when adolescents have insecure relationships with their parents

38. Learning Objectives
How do theories of postformal thought explain cognitive development in adulthood?
What happens to cognitive capacities in later adulthood?

39. The Adult – Limitations in Cognitive Performance
Research has revealed limitations in adult cognitive performance
Only about half of all college students show firm and consistent mastery of formal operations on Piaget’s scientific reasoning tasks
Many American adults do not solve scientific problems at the formal level
There are some societies in which no adults solve formal-operational problems
Adults are likely to use formal operations in a field of expertise and to use concrete operations on unfamiliar problems

40. The Adult – Growth Beyond Formal Operations
Theorists have proposed two forms of postformal thought or ways of thinking that are more complex than formal operations
Relativistic thinking – understanding that knowledge depends upon its context and the subjective perspective of the knower
Dialectical thinking – detecting paradoxes and inconsistencies among ideas and trying to reconcile them
Advanced dialectical thinkers challenge and change their understanding of what constitutes “truth”

41. The Adult – Aging and Cognitive Skills
Cross-sectional comparison studies have shown poorer cognitive performances by elderly individuals relative to young and middle-aged adults
The results should be interpreted with caution
Poorer performance could result from a cohort effect: older adults may have less formal education than the younger adults
Training can reactivate cognitive abilities
The tasks may not be relevant to older adults
Older adults may use modes of cognition that are useful in daily life but that are not helpful in laboratory tests
Cultural differences can affect older adults’ performances
Summary: an age-related decline in operational abilities has not been firmly established

42. Piaget in Perspective – Piaget’s Contributions
Piaget’s theory has stimulated much research and continues to guide the study of human development
Piaget showed us that infants are active in their own development
Piaget showed us that infants and children think differently at each stage of development
Piaget’s account of the direction of cognitive development (sequence) was basically correct, even though cultural factors may influence the rate of cognitive growth

43. Piaget in Perspective – Challenges to Piaget
Piaget seems to have underestimated the cognitive abilities of young minds
Piaget failed to distinguish between competence and performance
Overemphasized the idea that knowledge is an all-or-nothing concept
Piaget wrongly claimed that broad stages of development exist
That thinking within a stage is coherent or consistent and that transition between stages is swift and abrupt
Piaget failed to adequately explain development
Perhaps a better job of describing development than explaining development?
Piaget gave inadequate attention to the social influences upon cognitive development

44. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective
Culture and society are pivotal in Vygotsky’s theory
Knowledge depends on social experiences
Cognitive development varies from society to society depending upon the mental tools such as language that the culture values and makes available
Children acquire mental tools through interaction with parents and other more experienced members of society and by adopting their language and knowledge

45. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective
Vygotsky’s ideas about how social interaction fosters cognitive children’s growth
Zone of proximal development
The gap between what a learner can accomplish independently and what she can accomplish with the guidance and encouragement of a more skilled partner
Guided participation
Children’s active participation in culturally relevant activities with the aid and support of parents and other knowledgeable guides
Parents provide scaffolding when they give structured help and gradually reduce the help as the child becomes more competent
Vygotsky’s ideas about how social interaction fosters cognitive children’s growth
Zone of proximal development
-The gap between what a learner can accomplish independently and what she can accomplish with the guidance and encouragement of a more skilled partner
--Knowledge is not a fixed state
--The mind has potential for unlimited growth.
--Development consists of moving toward the upper range of the zone using the tools of society such as the language and the inventions it has created. The upper limit continues to move upward in response to cultural changes.
--Support for Vygotsky’s idea of the zone of proximal development comes from various sources, including research showing that children’s performance on assisted learning tasks is a good predictor of their future achievement, and research shows that pairing less-skilled readers with more-skilled ones shows increases reading fluency substantially when the less-skilled readers are provided with a model of good reading and encouragement.
Guided participation
-Children’s active participation in culturally relevant activities with the aid and support of parents and other knowledgeable guides
--Parents provide scaffolding when they give structured help and gradually reduce the help as the child becomes more competent

46. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective
Vygotsky believed that mental activity is mediated by tools
Spoken language, writing, using numbers, applying problem-solving and memory strategies
Vygotsky argued that thought changes fundamentally once we begin to think in words
Private speech – speech to oneself that guides one’s thoughts and behavior
Helps children think their way through challenging problems
Allows them to incorporate into their own thinking the problem-solving strategies learned during collaborations with adults

47. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective – Evaluation
Vygotsky has been criticized for placing too much emphasis on social interaction and insufficient attention upon individual construction of knowledge