Piaget's theory of cognitive development ^_^

Cognitive Development

Cognitive development = How our mental abilities develop, invcluding thinking, problem solving, maths skills and our moral development.

Piaget (1926) - Overview of his theory of cognitive development:

• Piaget believed that children's thinking changed as they got older due to biological maturation of innate structures in their brain.
• With age comes a variety of interactions with ones environment; therefore, a child's understanding becomes more complex due to thier experiances.
• Nature vs. nurture debate.

Mechanisms involved in Piaget's thoery of cognitive development:

• Schema:
  • Self constructed mental structures; can be cogniitve or behavioural.
• Assmiliation:
  • Occurs when an existing schema is applied to a new object; it invloves integrating new information into an exisiting schema.
• Accommodation:
  • When a new experinace cannot be assimiliated into an existing or new schema, it is altered or a new schema is developed to accommodate the new information.
• Eqilibrium:
  • Has a biological origin.
  • According to Piaget, equilibrium (balance) is needed in cognitive structures.
  • An imbalance (disequilibrium) is encountered when there is a gap in what's understood and what is being presented.
  • By developing new schemas and adapting old ones, the imbalance is corrected resulting in an equilibrium.

Stage 1 - Sensorimotor (0-2 years):

• Children learn to coordinate sensory input with motor actions; they explore by using their senses and reflexes.
• Object permanence develops before 18 months; before this, young children lose their interest in an object when it is hidden from them as they have no concept that it still exists.

Stage 2 - Pre-operational (2-7 years):

• Symbolic thinking (use of symbols and language)
• Children don't understand conservation; the physical properties of an object stays the smae ddespite changes in its appearance.
• Children are egocentric.

Stage 3 - Concrete operational (7-11 years):

• Children develop decentration - the ability to focus on more than one aspect of something.
• They also develop conservation
• Children at this stage develop logical thinking; Piaget said this was the most important acheivement as it provides evidence of a child's command of logical control.

Stage 4 - Formal operational (11+):

• Children can solve problems and can use hypothetico-deductive reasoning.
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• Idealistic thinking -  they use imagination to picture how things might be like if changes were made.
• Can reason solely on verbal statements.

The three mountain task (Piaget and Inhelder, 1956):

• Aims to test egocentrism.
• It was found that 4 year olds showed no awareness of the doll's view showing that htey were egocentric.
• 6 year olds frequently chose a picture different to thier view, but rarely chose the correct picture.
• Only at 7 or 8 years did the children consistently choose the picture that matched the doll's view, showing that they weren't egocentric.

The Policeman doll study (Hughes, 1975):

• Hughes wanted to see if children could perspective-take when faced wit a familiar stimulus.
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• It was found that 90% of children aged 3.5 to 5 years old could complete the task correctly, showing that they weren't egocentric.
• This contradicts Piaget's finding that only 7-8 years olds weren't egocentric.

Naughty teddy (McGarrigle and Donaldson, 1974):

• They aimed to test conservation.
• They believed that children made errors on Piaget's conservation task as he asked the same question twice, which could have acted as a demand characterisitc for the children.
• They wanted to see if levels of conservation changed if the question was asked once.
• It was found tht 62% of 6 year olds showed that they had number conservation.
• By asking them the question once, children didn't have a misleading demand characteristic as a barrier to them demonstrating conservation.

The turntable task (Borke, 1975):

• Aimed to test egocentrism in children.
• Similar to Piaget's three mountain task, but children were given a turntable instead of walking around the three mountains.
• It was found that 3 year olds selected a correct view 42% of the time.
• 4 year olds seleted teh right view 67% of the time.
• These findings contradict those found by Piaget; Borke found that young children weren't egocentric.
• Borke's study had a practise session which helped, Piaget would have seen practise as irrelevent.
• It was claimed that Piaget's task confused the younger children as they were distracted by the fact that they had to walk around the three mountains.

Bower and Wishart

• They tested object permanence by placing a toy infront of a child.
• However, unlike Piaget's experiment of using a screen (which may have distracted the child), they switched off the lights.
• By using infra-red cameras, they monitored the children's eye movement.
• The found that even 1-4 month old babies continued to look in the direction of the toy.
• This showed that object permanence occured at an earlier stage than Piaget suggested (18 months).

Stregths:

• Based on empirical evidence and therefore falsifiable.
• Practical applications - contribution to education.
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Weaknesses:

• Bias in his research: Piaget used his own children and other middle-class children from the same western culture; therefore, it lacks population validity and cannot be applied to individualist and non-western cultures.
• Researcher bias may have been shown as his own children were used.