Developmental psychology

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Jean Piaget (1896-1980)

- Born in Switzerland

- Not a psychologist - doctorate in biology

- "Genetic epistemology" - the study of how we know things

- Behahaviourism and psychoanalysis - child as passive, they are shapers of their own development.

- First person to suggest the theory of cognitive development.

- Studied clinical psychology.

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Development of the theory

- Worked with Binet of IQ

- Noticed:

     - Children's thinking different from adult thinking

     - Children's of similar ages make similar mistakes - wondered why. Became interested in the systematic errors of children.

- Proposed cognitive development occurs through stages (discontinue)

- Constructivist theory - gave children an active role in their development.

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Key aspects of Piagetian theory

- Schemas - a cognitive framework that helps us to organise and interpret information from our environment.

- Adaption - the changes we make in terms of our environment.

     - Assimilation - where we take in new information to our exisiting schemas.

     - Accommodation - adapt or create new schemas to fit their schemas.

     - These happen together if the child is an infant.

- Equilibrium/disequilibrium

     - Something is familiar (equilibrium)

     - Something is unfamiliar (disequilibrium)

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Piaget's stage theory

- 4 main stages of cognitive development

1) Sensori-motor - when the child is in their infancy (0-2)

2) Pre-operational - early childhood

3) Concrete operational - middle childhood

4) Formal operational - early adolescent to adulthood

- Stages are invariable - rigid and occured in this order, they were not open to change. Children cross-culturally went through this development.

- Ages were an approximation

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Sensori-motor stage

Birth - 18months/2years (approx)

Behaviours:

- Learn through senses

- Learn through reflexes

- Manipulate materials

Means-end problem solving - around 9 months

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Object permanence

- Understanding about objects existence

- Objects tied to infants awareness of them - only think the object exists if they can see it

- Hidden toy experiment

     - 4 months: no attempt to search for hidden object

     - 4 - 9 months: visual search for object

     - 9 months: search for and retrieve hidden object.

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Pre-operational stage

18/24 months - 7 years

Behaviours

- Ideas based on perception

Focus on one variable at a time:centration - focusing your attention on one aspect of situation to the exclusion of others.

- So, fail conservation tasks

- Over-generalise based on limited experience

- Yet to acquire logical thinking - thought this was due to the fact that they struggle to understand invariance.

Start to get better at using tools

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Pre-operational stage

- Develop communication skills - draw things and represent things through drawing, as well as spoken language and gestures. They engage in symbolic play.

- Egocentrism - as centering on ones self. Seeing things from their own perspective and find it hard to understand that other people may see things differently from them. Often persists throughout the entire stage.

- Rigidity of thought - often children can only do things one way

- Struggle with class inclusion

- Limited social cognition - having a lack of awareness of other people's intentions and understand other people's viewpoint.

- Become imaginative in play - more role play and fantasy play.

- Display animism - attribute life like qualities to inanimate objects.

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Piaget's three mountain task

- To test children's abilities to take on someone else's perspective.

- Piaget and Inhelder (1956) asked children between the ages of four and 12 years to say how a doll, placded in variations positions, would view an array of three mountains from different perspectives.

- The child would be asked to choose, from a set of different views of the model, the view that the doll could see. 

- When four and five-year old children were asked to do this task they often chose the view that they themselves could see, and it was not until the age of 8 or 9 that children could confidently work out the doll's view.

- Piaget interpreted this result as an example of young children's egocentricity - that they could not decentre from their own view to work out the doll's view.

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Concrete operational stage

7/8 years - 11/12 years

Behaviours

 - Form ideas based on reasoning - more logical, think about and take into account more pieces of information

- Limit thinking to objects and familar events

- Can conserve - understanding that the fundamental properties of something remain the same even if the appearance of the object has changed.

Decentration; more flexible thinking - develop the ability to pull away from just focusing on one aspect of a situation, they can now focus on more than one thing.

No longer egocentric

Reversibility - do things in both direction

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Formal operational stage

11/12 onwards

Behaviours:

- Think conceptually

- Think hypothetically

Reasoning about abstractions; Applying logic; Advanced problem solving; Make logical deductions based on verbal statements. 

Abstract, hypothetical thinking.

1) Edith has darker hair than Lily

2) Edith's hair is lighter than Susan's

3) Who has the darkest hair? Susan.

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Piaget's theory involves changes in cognitive deve

- Appearance - reality distraction - about understanding that there is a dual-reality. Some way linked to centration

- Spatial cognition - understanding the three dimensional world and use of symbols.

- Conservation - linked to children's inability to understand invariance

- Class inclusion - ability to coordinate and reason with subgrous/groups

- Transitive inferences - about understanding the relationsip between tow or more premises and using this knowledge to make an inference.

- Perspective taking - lessoning of egocentricity, to understand things from other people's perspective.

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Implication for education

- Piaget very influential in educational psychology and schooling.

- Child-centred learning

     - Strong advocate of active learning

- Children can only learn when ready - at right stage of cogntive development.

     - Child learns aline and in their own time.

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Piaget's legacy

- Comprehensive theory - intellectual development from adult to birth

- Interaction between individual level of maturation and environment that offers right experiences

- Piaget's explanations not wholly useful.

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