Cognition and development- Vygotsky, Baillargeon & Selman's theories

• Vygotsky believed that social interaction plays a fundamental role in cognitive development. He thought that learning appears first at a social level and later at an individual level

• He stated that children are born with innate elementary mental processes such as perception and memory, but higher level mental processes come from the influence of culture

• This transition is made possible by language. He proposed 3 speech stages: social speech (0-2yr) Egocentric speech (3-7yr) and inner speech (7+yr)

• Vygotsky also developed the Zones of Proximal Development (ZPD) which is the gap between what a child can do on their own and what they need support with.

• Vygotsky believed that children need to be scaffolded across the ZPD by an adult who can give guidance in order to take the next cognitive step.

• Vygotsky also proposed 4 stages of concept formation.

• The first stage is the vague syncretic stage which is when a child learns through trial and error.

• The second is complex stage which is the basic cognitive strategies applied.

• The third is potential concept stage which is when a child can only concentrate on one thing at a time.

• The last stage is mature concept stage which is when a child can identify several features at a time.

• These stages occur when a child’s cognitive ability increases. In order to go though the stages, a child must have informal learning experiences (through family and peers) and formal learning (education/elaborate code language).

Research support for the ZPD:

Roazzi & Bryant (1998) - Gave chilren aged 4-5 the task of estimating the number of sweets in a box. (2 conditions). 1:They worked alone 2:They worked with the help of an older child.         Findings: 1: failed to give a good estimate 2: with the help of prompts they sucessfully mastered the task.Conclusion: This shows that children can develop additional reasoning abilities when working with an expert, supporting the ZPD.

Challenging findings:

Vygotsky assumed that the process of learning are largely the same in all children, this however does not take into account individual differences.                                                                 Some children learn best during social interaction, however this may not be true for everyone.

Application to education:

Vygotskys ideas have been highly influencial in education in the last decade. Social interaction in learning, through group work, peer mentoring & individual adult assistance from teachers has been used to scaffold children through their ZPD. Every child has a different ZPD and so teachers need to develop their lessons to suit children of all abilities.

Contrast to Piaget:

Vygotsky's theory can be contrasted to Piagets. He explained that children tended to interact more with the enviroment (Self-discovery) and develop through accomodation and assimilation and so the role of social factors were not deemed as important.Whereas, in contrast, Vygotsky believed culture and language played a huge role in cognitive development. Piaget belived that learning should be based on the need of the individual, whereas Vygotsky didn't do this and so it could be seen as a weakness. If they were to combine their theories then it would be a more effective theory of cognitive development 

• Baillargeon challenged Piagets claims regarding infants understanding of the physical world and proposes that we are born with a physical reasoning system which provides an infant with a basic understanding of the world and the ability to learn more details easily.

• She suggests that we have a certain level of awareness of object permanence from birth, and that the reasons why children may appear to lack object permanence is because they may lose interest in an object or get distracted.

Violation of expectation (VoE)

• New method, developed to investigate infant understanding of the physical world. The idea was that if children understand how the physical world operates then they will expect certain things to happen in particular situations.

• If these do not occur then the children react occordingly, this suggests that they have an intact knowledge of that aspect of the world. E.g. if a child has object permance they will look at an impossible event for longer

Research Support -VoE studies:

Baillargeon & Grabber - showed 24 infants ages 5-6 months a tall and short rabbit pass behind a screen with a window. 2 conditions- impossible, and possible. Impossible= neither rabbit could be seen passing the window. Possible= tall rabbit can be seen passing, but the short one cant.   xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxFindings: looked at possible condition= 25.11 seconds impossible=33.07 seconds.                   Conclusion: Interpreted this as the children being surprised at the impossible event, to be surprised they must have known that the tall rabbit should've been seen, demonstrating the understanding of object permanence. 

Better validity than Piagets earlier studies into infant abilites:

Piaget assumed that when a baby shifted their attention away from an out-of-site object this meant that they no longer knew it existed. However= lost interest. VoE method is probably a better method for investigating whether a child has some understanding of the object permance because it eliminates this cofounding variable. Simply losing interest in an object would not explain the findings that children look longer at impossible events, = better validity

Baillargeons theory of the PRS may explain why physical understanding is universal.

Hepos & Marle (2012) point out that without learning and regardless of experience we all have a very good understanding of the basic properties of physical objects. E.g. with dangling keys we all know that if we let go the key will fall to the floor. Hepos & Marle stated that this understanding requires PRS. The fact that this understanding is universal it suggests that this system is innate, otherwise we would expect a cultural difference which we dont see.

Baillargeons findings have been challenged by other psychologists:

Schoner and Thelen (2004) - point out that all the VoE studies definetly show that the infants notice a difference between the two events, however, everything else is an extrapolation. They argue that there are many reasons why infants may prefer looking at the 'impossible' events for longer. They conclude that Baillargeon has mistakenly assumed that the only difference between her conditions were that one was 'possible' and one was 'impossible', however, there are many differences between the two stimuli any of which might be the reason why infants look for longer. - what Bailargeon claims, Schoner and Thelen say is no more than the effect of cofounding variables.

Egocentric stage (stage 0 age 3-6yr): Children are not able to reliably distinguish between their emotions and the emotions of others. They can identify emotional states in others but not the social causes of them.

Social information perspective taking stage (Stage 1 age 6-8yr): The child can now tell the difference between their point of view and others, but can only focus on one at a time.

Self-reflective perspective taking stage (Stage 2, age 8-10yr): The child can now fully consider another persons perspective but they can only look at one point of view at a time.

Mutual perspective taking stage (Stage 3, age 10-12yr): The children are now able to look at a situation from their own point of view and another at the same time.

Social & conventional system perspective taking (Stage 4, age 12+yr): They understand that understanding others view points is not always enough to allow people to reach agreement and that social conventions are required.

Research Evidence to Support that perspective taking improves with age: E.g. Selmen looked at changes that occured with age in childrens responses to scenarios where they ahd to take the role of different people. 30 boys and 30 girls ages 4-6 were individually given a task designed to measure role taking delivery. They asked them a scenarion and asked how everyone would feel. E.g. child promised her father she would never climb trees again, however her friends kitten was stuck up the tree. The task was to explain how everyone would feel if she was to or not to climb the tree. Selmen found that the level of role taking correlated with age, suggesting a clear developmental sequence.

Supporting research that indicates the importance of perspective talking in pro-social behaviour: Valkenburg (2008) conducted an observation study of child parent interaction in toyshops and supermarkets. He found a negative correlation between age, perspective taking and coercive behaviour. (e.g. trying to force parents to buy them things). This therfore suggests that perspective taking is important in developing pro-social behaviour.

Practical applications in the relation to the study of disorders such as ADHD and ASD:      Marton et al (2009) compared 50 8-12 year old children with a diagnosis of ADHD with a control group on performance on perspective taking tasks, like those used by selmen. Findings: ADHD=did worse on underst\nding the scenarios, identifying the feelings of each person and evaluating the consequences of different actions.Strength= shows that it is helpful in understanding A-typical development.

By focusing on cognitive factors in relation to social development other key elements are overlooked:

E.g. Selmens approach does not take into account any social factors such as family climate and oppertunities to learn from peer interaction. These may be just as important as cognitive factors as the idea of perspective taking may be learnt quicker in some families than others. There are also chilren with good abilities in this respect, but they may not be very adept at social interaction, because they lack motivation to use these abilities. This is therefore a limitation of his theory as he doesnt consider all important factors.