cognitive psychology

1. Cognitive Development
Santrock, Papalia, Berk

2. Piaget theory of Cognitive
Development
• Piaget viewed children as discovering, or constructing, virtually
all knowledge about their world through their own activity, his
theory is described as a constructivist approach to cognitive
development.
• Characteristics of theory- general, invariant, universal
• Cognitive change-specific psychological structures called schemes —organized
ways of making sense of experience —change with age.
• Adaptation involves building schemes through direct interaction with the
environment. It consists of two complementary activities: assimilation and
accommodation. During assimilation, we use our current schemes to interpret
the external world. The infant who repeatedly drops objects is assimilating
them into his sensorimotor “dropping scheme.” And the preschooler who,
seeing a camel at the zoo, calls out, “Horse!” has sifted through her conceptual
schemes until she finds one that resembles the strange-looking creature. In
accommodation, we create new schemes or adjust old ones after noticing that
our current way of thinking does not capture the environment completely.
• back-and-forth movement between equilibrium and disequilibrium is
equilibration
• Schemes also change through organization , a process that occurs
internally, apart from direct contact with the environment. Once
children form new schemes, they rearrange them, linking them
with other schemes to create a strongly interconnected cognitive
system

3. Stages of development –
sensori motor stage
• Birth to 2 years of age
understands the world by
coordinating sensory
experiences with motoric
actions
• The reaction is “circular”
because, as the infant tries to
repeat the event again and
again, a sensorimotor response
that originally occurred by
chance strengthens into a new
scheme
• Object permanence(knowing
something exists even though
it can’t be seen)

4. Major developments of this stage
• Intentional Behavior In Substage 4, 8- to 12-month-olds combine schemes into new, more complex action
sequences. Now, behaviors leading to new schemes no longer have a random, hit-or-miss quality—
accidentally bringing the thumb to the mouth or happening to hit the doll. Instead, 8- to 12-month-olds can
engage in intentional , or goal-directed, behavior, coordinating schemes deliberately to solve simple
problems. The clearest example comes from Piaget’s famous object-hiding task, in which he shows the baby
an attractive toy and then hides it behind his hand or under a cover. Infants in this substage can find the
object by coordinating two schemes— “pushing” aside the obstacle and “grasping” the toy. Piaget regarded
these means–end action sequences as the foundation for all problem solving. Retrieving hidden objects is
evidence that infants have begun to master object permanence , the understanding that objects continue to
exist when they are out of sight. But this awareness is not yet complete.
• Babies still make the A-not-B search error : If they reach several times for an object at one hiding place (A),
then see it moved to another (B), they still search for it in the first hiding place (A). Piaget concluded that the
babies do not yet have a clear image of the object as persisting when hidden from view.
• Mental representations- in substage 6 -Representation also enables older toddlers to solve advanced object
permanence problems involving invisible displacement —finding a toy moved while out of sight, such as into a
small box while under a cover. Second, it permits deferred imitation —the ability to remember and copy the
behavior of models who are not present. And it makes possible make-believe play, in which children act out
everyday and imaginary activities. As the sensorimotor stage draws to a close, mental symbols have become
major instruments of thinking.
• Analogical Problem solving , displaced reference

5. The preoperational stage (2 to 7
years)
The most obvious change is an extraordinary increase in representational, or
symbolic, activity.
Make believe play; learn to use words and pictures to represent objects
The language development
Limitations: pre operational suggests-compared them to older, more
competent children who have reached the concrete operational stage.
According to Piaget, young children are not capable of operations —mental
representations of actions that obey logical rules.
Egocentricism failure to distinguish others’ symbolic viewpoints from one’s
own. He believed that when children first mentally represent the world, they
tend to focus on their own viewpoint and assume that others perceive, think,
and feel the same way they do.
animistic thinking —the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities,
such as thoughts, wishes, feelings, and intentions

6. Inability to conserve
• Conservation refers to the idea that
certain physical characteristics of
objects remain the same, even when
their outward appearance changes. For
example, in the conservation-of-liquid
problem, the child is shown two
identical tall glasses of water and
asked if they contain equal amounts.
Once the child agrees, the water in
one glass is poured into a short, wide
container, changing the water’s
appearance but not its amount. Then
the child is asked whether the amount
of water is the same or has changed.
Preoperational children think the
quantity has changed. They explain,
“There is less now because the water
is way down here”
• Centration and irreversibility

7. Another limitation
• Lack of Hierarchical
Classification-
Preoperational children
have difficulty with
hierarchical
classification —the
organization of objects
into classes and
subclasses on the basis
of similarities and
differences.

8. The concrete operational
stage (7 to 11 years)
• Decentration
• Reverserability The ability to pass conservation
tasks provides clear evidence of operations —
mental actions that obey logical rules.
• Classification
• Seriation (The ability to order items along a
quantitative dimension, such as length or weight)
• The concrete operational child can also seriate
mentally, an ability called transitive inference .
• Spatial reasoning
• Children think in an organized, logical fashion
only when dealing with concrete information they
can perceive directly. Their mental operations
work poorly with abstract ideas—ones not
apparent in the real world
• Children think in an organized, logical fashion
only when dealing with concrete information
they can perceive directly. Their mental
operations work poorly with abstract ideas—ones
not apparent in the real world

9. Formal operational stage- 11
years and older
• Hypothetico-deductive reasoning .
• pendulum problem-strings of different
lengths, objects of different weights to
attach to the strings, and a bar from which
to hang the strings Then we ask each of
them to figure out what influences the speed
with which a pendulum swings through its
arc.
• Formal operational adolescents hypothesize
that four variables might be influential:
(1) the length of the string, (2) the weight of
the object hung on it, (3) how high the
object is raised before it is released, and (4)
how forcefully the object is pushed. By
varying one factor at a time while holding
the other three constant, they test each
variable separately and, if necessary, also in
combination. Eventually they discover that
only string length makes a difference.

10. Propositional thought
• adolescents’ ability to evaluate the logic of propositions (verbal
statements) without referring to real-world circumstances
“ Either the chip in my hand is green or it is not green.”
• “The chip in my hand is green and it is not green.”
• Self-Consciousness and Self-Focusing (cognitive distortions)
• The imaginary audience , adolescents’ belief that they are the focus of
everyone else’s attention and concern
• A second cognitive distortion is the personal fable . Certain that others
are observing and thinking about them, teenagers develop an inflated
opinion of their own importance— a feeling that they are special and
unique.
• Idealism and Criticism
• Decision making

11. Educational implications of Piaget theory
• Discovery learning –interaction with the environment
• Sensitivity to children’s readiness to learn.
• Acceptance of Individual difference in learning.

12. Information processing
approach
• Information-processing
research sheds light on
how children develop
the attention,
memory, and self-
management skills and
knowledge to succeed
at these diverse tasks.

13. Working memory
• Working memory is a limited capacity
part of the human memory system that
combines the temporary storage and
manipulation of information in the
service of cognition.
• working memory is used most frequently
to refer to a limited capacity system that
is capable of briefly storing and
manipulating information involved in the
performance of complex cognitive tasks
such as reasoning, comprehension and
certain types of learning
• Central executive like a system which
controls attentional processes. The
central executive enables the working
memory system to selectively attend to
some stimuli and ignore others.

14. Cases Neo Piagetian theory
• Child dev takes place in stages, they develop more sophist acted
mental structures in each stage – incorporates information
processing approach
• age-related increases in processing speed, processing capacity,
and working memory capacity rather than an acquisition of a
common underlying “logical structure”.
• It is a theory of executive control and central conceptual structures.
• Case proposed that executive control structures are the building blocks of developmental
stages. If we think back to our staircase example, executive control structures explain what is
happening to the learner during each stage of development.
• Executive control structures do the following:
• They allow a person to represent a problem.
• They articulate the objectives of problem solving

15. Stages
• Case proposed the following four types of executive control stages:
• 1.) Sensorimotor Structures (1 - 18 months of age). Perceptions and actions that can be performed
on objects occur in this stage. For example, the perception of an object causes a desire ('I want to
hold that toy'), which activates an action to satisfy the desire ('I must reach out my hand to grab the
toy').
• 2.) Inter-relational Structures (18 months - 5 years old). Simple relations between actions or
representations occur in this structure.
• 3.) Dimensional Structures (5 - 11 years). Relationships between previously learned information and
new information are formed in this structure.
• 4.) Vectorial Structures (11 - 19 years). Complex understanding of the relationship between prior
knowledge and new knowledge occurs in this stage.

16. • Robbie Case's Theory
• . The first stage is the sensorimotor stage (0-2 years old), which is characterized by
children processing sensory input and thinking in terms of the physical world and the
physical impact one can have on his or her environment. Once a child can recognize the
relationship between two action-reaction units, such as the fact that pushing on a door
will open it, while pulling on a door will close it,
• he or she then progresses to the interrelation stage (2-5 years old). It is the
differentiation, coordination, and consolidation of these two action-reaction units that
makes the child capable of what Case denotes as ‘inter-relational’ thinking.
• At the inter-relational stage, children are able to coordinate two qualitatively different
relational structures, such that they now understand to open or close the door by both
physical and verbal instruction. They can also understand the effects of adding a door
stop to the door, in that the door opens and closes differently due to the presence or
absence of the door stop
• They create a strategy needed to solve the problem.

17. • As children progress through this stage, they become able to
recognize and understand the relationship between two inter-
relational units, instead of one. Another example of capabilities
at this stage is that children can recognize the effects or
outcome of having a heavy weight on one side of a balance beam
and a light weight on the other side. Finally, the differentiation,
coordination, and consolidation of these units enable the child to
progress to the dimensional stage (6 to 11 years old).
• In this stage, children are able to coordinate their conceptual
structures for dealing with causation. For example, with
reference to the balance beam scenario (above), the child gains
the ability to recognize and anticipate the outcome of having
different weights on two sides of the fulcrum of the balance
beam. Thus, in the process of learning to recognize and
cognitively manipulate two relationship structures, the child is
able to consolidate the inter-relationship functions and in so
doing, another more complex logical structure emerges, in this
case, the understanding of the physics of balance and the impact
of gravity on objects that have different weights

18. • Moreover, children begin to understand weight in terms of quantity instead
of its physical appearance (Case, 1991). This ability can be observed by the
child’s ability to focus on the actual value or number of weights on each
• side of the balance beam, instead of simply arriving at conclusions based
on which side “looks” heavier. By the end of the dimensional stage, children
can further understand the relationship between two such dimensions,
such as the relationship between number and weight, in this case the
number of weights on each side of a balance beam, and the distance of
weights placed on each side of the balance beam.
• Once again, when the differentiation, coordination, and consolidation of
two or more dimensions are achieved, the child is in the final, i.e., the
‘vectorial,’ stage.
• Within this general stage, the adolescent progresses to a second sub-stage
of vectorial operations, in which s/he learns to coordinate two dimensional
structures, e.g., the type of dimensional structure used for the weight-
distance effect on the balance beam, and another dimensional structure
such as the concepts of fractions and ratios (Case, 1991).

19. • Finally, in the third sub-stage of vectorial operations, the
child is able to understand abstract systems in which there
are no concrete referents to a problem. For example, in the
balance beam task, this ability is reflected by the ability to
convert two ratios of weight or distance to two new ratios
that share a common 7 denominator. In this example, the
child has compared two new abstract terms to draw a
conclusion as to which side of the balance beam will go
down. Throughout all of these specified stages,
development proceeds through a recursive process in
which transitions between one stage and the next that
occur in the first stage occur in all of the proceeding
stages, they are just composed of more complex units and
therefore increase working memory demands (

20. • Robert Siegler’s (1996, 2006) model of strategy
choice uses an evolutionary metaphor— “natural
selection”—to help us understand cognitive change.
When given challenging problems, children generate
a variety of strategies, testing the usefulness of
each. With experience, some strategies are
selected; they become more frequent and
“survive.” Others become less frequent and “die
off.” Like the evolution of physical traits, children’s
mental strategies display variation and selection,
yielding adaptive problem-solving techniques—ones
best suited to solving the problems at hand.

21. Language development
• Phonology-speech sounds, bakes vs
waves
• Semantics-a child might make use of
semantics to understand a mom's
directive to “do your chores” as, “do
your chores whenever you feel like
it.”
• Grammar- syntax eg- While watching a
movie, people who text on their phone are very
annoying.
• People who text on their phone while
watching a movie are very annoying.
• Morphology-grammatical markers
indicating number, tense, case, person,
gender, active or passive voice, and
other meanings (the endings -s and -ed
are examples in English)
• “How are you?”

22. Theories of language
development
• Linguist Noam Chomsky (1957)
proposed a nativist theory
• Chomsky proposed that all children
have a language acquisition device
(LAD) —an innate system that permits
them, once they have acquired
sufficient vocabulary, to combine
words into grammatically consistent,
novel utterances and to understand
the meaning of sentences they hear.
• LAD is a universal grammar, a built-in
storehouse of rules common to all
human languages. Young children use
this knowledge to decipher
grammatical categories and
relationships in any language to which
they are exposed.

23. The Interactionist
Perspective

24. Language dev in infancy and toddlerhood
• Recognizing language sounds: before they begin to learn words infants make fine
distinctions among the sounds of the language
• Babbling and other vocalizations: early vocalizations are to practice making
sounds, to communicate, and to attract attention. Babies sounds go though this
sequence during the first year: crying, cooing first coo about 2 to 4 months. It starts
with vowel like ooooo then consonants are added nnanana
• Babbling- in the middle of the first year, babies babble-they produce strings of
consonant-vowel combinations, such as ba, ba, ba,
• Gestures: infant start using gestures such as showing and pointing at about 8 to 12
months of age.
• First words: children understand their words earlier than they speak. As early as 5
months of age, infants recognize their name, they can understand about 50 words
around 13 months. Thus, the receptive vocabulary exceeds spoken vocabulary.

25. First words (holophrastic speech)
1.Children begin using their first words at about 12 or 13 months of age
and may use partial words to convey thoughts at even younger ages.
These one word expressions are referred to as holophrastic speech.
For example, the child may say “ju” for the word “juice” and use this
sound when referring to a bottle. The listener must interpret the
meaning of the holophrase and when this is someone who has spent
time with the child, interpretation is not too difficult. They know that “ju”
means “juice” which means the baby wants some milk! But, someone
who has not been around the child will have trouble knowing what is
meant. Imagine the parent who to a friend exclaims, “Ezra’s talking all
the time now!” The friend hears only “ju da ga” which, the parent
explains, means “I want some milk when I go with Daddy.”

26. Overextension and under extension
• Children sometimes overextend or underextend the meanings of
the words they use. Overextension is the tendency to apply a word
to objects that are inappropriate for the words meanings. Eg
children may use dadda not only for father but other strangers
too.
• Under extension is the tendency to apply a word too narrowly- boy
word to a 5 year old but not to an infant or older
5.Vocabulary growth spurt: One year olds typically have a vocabulary
of about 50 words. But by the time they become toddlers, they have
a vocabulary of about 200 words (18 months to 2 years)

27. Telegraphic speech
• Words are soon combined and 18 month old toddlers can express
themselves further by using expressions such as “baby bye-bye” or
“doggie pretty”. Words needed to convey messages are used, but
the articles and other parts of speech necessary for grammatical
correctness are not yet used.
• These expressions or two word utterances sound like a telegraph
(or perhaps a better analogy today would be that they read like a
text message) where unnecessary words are not used. “Give baby
ball” is used rather than “Give the baby the ball.” mommy give ice-
cream. “Where ball?”, “my candy”

28. Early childhood
• Beginning to say longer sentences of three or four
words
Using some plurals and past tenses
Talking about what they’re doing as they do it
Conversation skills improve – they respond to you
more often (2-3 years)
• speaking more clearly – strangers can
mostly understand them
Asking ‘who’, ‘what’, and ‘why’ questions (3-
4 yrs)
• Using more complex sentences with words like
‘because’, ‘if’, ‘and’, or ‘when’
Telling stories and simple jokes
Being able to answer questions about stories
Being able to follow requests (4-5)
• In short advanced phonology (can
pronounce all vowel sounds and
consonants), knowledge of morphology
rules, syntax and semantics,
• pragmatics (better conversationalist). Can
understand other person perspective, can
talk about things in future, eg what will I
bring for lunch tmrw

29. Middle and late childhood
• Vocabulary: One of the reasons that children can classify objects in so many
ways is that they have acquired a vocabulary to do so. By fifth grade, a child’s
vocabulary has grown to 40,000 words (from 14000 words at age 6 )by age
11). It grows at a rate that exceeds that of those in early childhood. This
language explosion, however, differs from that of younger children because it
is facilitated by being able to associate new words with those already known,
and because it is accompanied by a more sophisticated understanding of the
meanings of a word.
• New understanding- Process of categorization becomes easy. dog,- cat,
drink-eat, Those in middle and late childhood are also able to think of objects
in less literal ways. For example, if asked for the first word that comes to mind
when one hears the word “pizza”, the younger child is likely to say “eat” or
some word that describes what is done with a pizza. However, the older child
is more likely to place pizza in the appropriate category and say “food”. This
sophistication of vocabulary is also evidenced by the fact that older children
tell jokes and delight in doing do. They may use jokes that involve plays on
words such as “knock- knock” jokes or jokes with punch lines. Young children
do not understand play on words and tell “jokes” that are literal or slapstick,
such as “A man fell down in the mud! Isn’t that funny?”

30. Grammar and flexibility
• Older children are also able to learn new rules of grammar with
more flexibility. While younger children are likely to be reluctant to
give up saying “I goed there”, older children will learn this rather
quickly along with other rules of grammar.
• Their improvement in logical reasoning and analytical skills help
them understand constructions, use of appropriate
comparatives(shorter, deeper) and subjectives (if you were
president..)
• They use narratives, descriptions, definitions that make sense. They
have metalinguistic awareness (to think about ones language,
understand what words are(
• They also show improvement in pragmatics ie language in culturally
appropriate ways.

31. Adolescence
• pragmatics and semantics are the linguistic features which are developed during
adolescence. This development includes learning to use more complex language
and to communicate differently depending on the situation. adolescents is
the ability to understand and use figurative language. This
includes understanding metaphors such as, "the mountains
were angry that day," and similes, "he's as crazy as a
jester." Students also have the ability to better understand
idioms such as, "he's a bull in a china shop."Social
language skills are of huge importance to adolescents. For
instance, the ability to detect and respond to sarcasm from
peers is a critical skill that teenagers understand.