Piagets Theory of Cognitive Development Key Constructs Schemes

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development Key Constructs: • Schemes: Knowledge structures – Simplest schemes are organized patterns of behavior, including reflexes • Ex: sucking scheme; looking scheme; grasping scheme – Become more complex with age and become mental/internal – Children play an active role in the development of schemes through their interactions with the environment (constructivist)

• Organization: Inherited predisposition to combine physical or psychological schemes into more complex systems – Ex: infants combine looking and grasping into a reaching scheme

• Adaptation: Inherited predisposition involving two processes, assimilation and accommodation – Assimilation: Interpret new experiences in terms of existing schemes • Ex: Newborns and young infants try to suck many things, regardless of their “suckability” • Ex: Child sees a camel at the zoo and yells “horse!”

– Accommodation: Modify schemes to fit new experiences • Ex: Infants learn to modify their sucking depending on the object • Ex: Child sees a camel at the zoo and yells “Lumpy horse!”

• Object Permanence: Understanding that objects continue to exist when they cannot be perceived directly – Infants have some understanding of object permanence at around 8 months (according to Piaget) • Will search for a fully occluded (covered) object if they observe it being hidden

– But still have difficulty solving visible displacement problems – A-not-B error: Tendency to reach where objects have been found before, rather than where they were last hidden • Infants make this error until about 12 months of age – According to Piaget, the A-not-B error occurs because infants do not have a full understanding of the permanent existence of the object independent of its spatial location and their actions on the object

– Between 18 -24 months, final stage of object permanence emerges (according to Piaget) – Can solve invisible displacement problems • One object serves as a symbol for a second object that is hidden from view

General Criticisms of Piaget’s Theory: • Underestimates the role of specific experiences in affecting cognitive development – Ex: Certain experiences (like formal schooling) may promote conservation and other abilities

• Doesn’t explain HOW cognitive development occurs – Concepts (i. e. , schemes, organization, adaptation) are vague – Better description than explanation of children’s cognitive development

• Portrays children’s thinking as being more consistent than it really is – Cognitive development occurs more gradually and shows more variation within children than Piaget’s theory allows • Ex: Children can typically solve some conservation problems sooner than others

• Underestimates the cognitive competence of infants and young children – Ex: Object permanence? ?

Core Knowledge Theories – Hold that there are specialized learning mechanisms that allow infants and young children to acquire certain types of knowledge quickly • Ex: Knowledge about object properties such as solidity and continuity – two objects cannot occupy the same space; objects follow continuous paths through space

– Infants/young children develop “naïve” theories in certain domains (areas) based on these specialized learning mechanisms • – Ex: theory of physics (knowledge of physical properties of objects) Domains of “core knowledge” have evolutionary significance • Exs: knowledge of people , knowledge of living things, knowledge of objects

• Violation of Expectation Method – Based on assumption of infants’ preference for novel stimuli – Habituate infants to a “possible” physical event • Habituation: Decrease in response due to repeated presentation of a stimulus – Present a “possible” and “impossible” event • Measure infants’ looking time to each event • Pits novelty of a stimulus against impossibility of an event

Baillargeon, Spelke, & Wasserman (1985) • Infants were habituated to a screen rotating up and then down 180 degrees • Test trials: Object was placed behind the screen to block its path – Screen rotated 112 degrees (possible event) or 180 degrees (impossible event) – Infants looked longer at impossible event, even though possible event was (arguably) more novel

• Based on findings using the violation-ofexpectation method with very young infants, core knowledge theorists claim that some types of object knowledge are innate or emerge very early without direct experience with objects

Issues • If infants are not fully habituated initially, may show a preference for the familiar stimulus during test trials—the more familiar stimulus is also the “impossible event” • Some evidence indicates the presence of familiarity effects

• Other factors may also be confounded with the possible and impossible events – Ex: Degree of movement

• Should infants’ looking behavior be attributed to higher-order cognitive processes or does it reflect more “basic” perceptual processes (e. g. , preference for novelty or familiarity)? – “Perception and knowing are not the same thing. . . A person can regard an event as odd without knowing why” (Haith, 1998)

• Why does young infants’ behavior differ from older children’s behavior? – Ex: If young infants have object permanence, then why don’t older infants search for hidden objects, make the A-not-B error, etc. ?

Conclusions (Cohen & Cashon, 2006) • Evidence is mixed and has been used both to justify core knowledge theories and more traditional Piagetian explanations of object knowledge • Researchers should focus on understanding the process of acquiring object permanence, rather than treating it as an all-or-none phenomenon

Microgenetic Designs • Designed to answer questions about how learning occurs

• Three “essential” characteristics: – Observations are made across a period of rapidly changing competence in a particular area – Within this period, the density of observations is high relative to the rate of change – Observations are analyzed intensively to infer underlying processes

• Microgenetic studies typically involve: – Relatively small numbers of participants (or single subject designs) – Trial-by-trial assessments of children’s strategies for solving particular types of problems – Behavioral observations of strategy use (often supplemented with self-reports in children 5 years and older)

Overlapping Waves Theory (R. S. Siegler) • Microgenetic studies across different areas consistently indicate that children’s thinking is highly variable • For example: – Different children use different strategies – Individual children use different strategies on different problems within a single test session – Individual children use different strategies to solve the same problem on two occasions close in time

• According to Overlapping Waves Theory: – Development is a process of variability, choice, and change – Children typically know and use varied strategies for solving a given problem at any one time – With age and experience: • Relative frequency of existing strategies changes • New strategies are discovered • Some older strategies are abandoned

– Children usually choose adaptively among strategies • Choose strategies that fit the demands of the problem given the strategies and available knowledge that children possess – Choices of strategies become even more adaptive with experience in a particular content area

• According to OWT, cognitive change can be analyzed along five dimensions – Source of change (causes that set the change in motion) – Path of change (sequence of knowledge states or predominant behaviors that children use while gaining competence) – Rate of change (how much time or experience separates initial use of a new strategy from consistent use of it) – Breadth of change (how widely the new strategy is generalized to other problems and contexts) – Variability of change (differences among children in the other dimensions of change; changing set of strategies used by individual children)

• Siegler (1995) – Examined effects of training on strategy use for number conservation problems (N=45; 54 -73 mos. , mean = 5. 17 years) – Could add more buttons and make one line a different length; could take away buttons and make one line a different length; or could change the length of the line and not add or take away any buttons – Random assignment to one of three training conditions • Feedback only (answer correct/incorrect) • Feedback plus explain-own-reasoning (“How did you know that? ” followed by feedback) • Feedback plus explain-experimenter’s reasoning (Feedback followed by “How do you think I knew that? ”)

Findings • Different Types of Strategies (Explanations) Used: – Relative Length: Compare lengths of two rows – Type of Transformation: Objects added/subtracted or just moved around – Counting – “Don’t know”

• Over the course of the experiment: – Frequency of length strategies decreased – Frequency of transformation strategies increased – Frequency of counting remained consistently low – “I don’t know” first increased and then decreased

• Source of change – Combination of feedback and explainexperimenter’s-reasoning led to greater learning than feedback alone • Path of change – Children relied initially on relative length, then abandoned this strategy but did not adopt a consistent alternative, then usually adopted the type of transformation strategy

• Rate of Change – Most children required multiple sessions to progress from initial use to consistent use of the transformation strategy • Breadth of Change – Relatively narrow (low generalizability) • Even some of the best learners continued in the final session to offer relative length explanations (rather than transformational explanations) when the longer row also had more objects

• Variability of change – Substantial variability within and between children • Within children: Only 2% of children relied on a single strategy throughout the study; 70% used three or more strategies • Between children: Individual differences in learning could be predicted by two pretest measures (total number of strategies used, whether two strategies were ever used on the same problem)