Piaget. Updates/Announcements. Overview. Cognitive Development. Jean Piaget. Try this

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1 Updates/Announcements Piaget Exams end of class Papers end of class Assignment #4 dispersed today February 20, 2007 Bryan T. Karazsia, M.A. Overview Cognitive Development What is cognition? Jean Piaget Sensorimotor Stage Preoperational Stage What is Cognition? Basically, mental processes associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, communicating Courses & Careers in Cognitive Psychology Jean Piaget Try this Look at a picture for 3 seconds, then try to draw it Picture

2 Picture 2 Picture 3 Why is #3 so hard? Piaget proposed the following ideas: Schemas (book says scheme ) Assimilation Accommodation 2

3 Schema Assimilation When you IDed that car using your schema, you performed a process called assimilation Interpretations of new experiences based on existing schemas But, this ain t no car Accommodation Process by which we adapt current schemas based on new information Truck example! Piaget Stage Theory Sensorimotor (birth to 2) Preoperational (2 to 6-7) Concrete Operational (7-11) Formal Operational (12 adulthood) Birth to about 2 Sensorimotor Stage Sensory & Motor Interactions with the world Begins with reflexes (no thought involved) Building schemes through sensory and motor exploration (accidental at first) Circular Reaction With respect to Piaget s schemas any problems or limitations??? 3

4 Sensorimotor Stage (birth 2) 8-12 months intentional behavior & prediction Out of sight---out of mind Object Permanence Sensorimotor Stage (birth 2) Culmination of Sensorimotor Stage: Mental Representations (12-24 mos.) Internal depictions of information that the mind can manipulate (i.e., images and concepts) Permits Mental experimentation (instead of trial & error) Deferred imitation Make-believe play Subsequent Research (not Piaget) Violation-of-expectation methods Object permanence in first few months Mental representation earlier??? Recall location of hidden objects (many factors play a role) Deferred imitation at 6 weeks??? Evaluation of Sensorimotor Piaget RIGHT!!! Anticipating events A-B object search Make-believe play Piaget Wrong??? Not a neat, stepwise development Empowered infants! Object Permanence Built-in cognitive equipment to make sense of experiences Sensorimotor Major Advances in Mental Representation Language & Thought 4

5 What children CAN do: Language Make-Believe Play Development of drawing abilities Symbol-Real World Relations Language (according to Piaget) most flexible mental representation Dependant on sensorimotor abilities Underestimated relationship between language & cognition Make-Believe Play practice/strengthen representational schemas Increasingly imaginative, less self-centered, more complex (sociodramatic play) Has many benefits Drawings: Major cognitive advancement: symbols, planning/spatial understanding 1- Scribbles (2 3 years) 2- First Representational Forms (3 4 years) 3- More Realistic Drawings (4 6 years) Symbol-Real World Relations Beginning around age 3 (object versus symbol) What helps??? Placing model behind glass Previous exposure to diverse symbols (picture books, photos, drawings, maps) Gradually, understand symbols that bear no physical resemblance of what they represent (prerequisite for advanced knowledge) What children CANNOT do: Operations Marked by...egocentrism Reversibility Hierarchical classification 5

6 Too young to perform mental operations What are mental operations? Operations Mental representations of actions that obey logical rules Therefore, thinking is rigid, limited to one aspect of a situation, and strongly influenced by physical appearances Egocentrism Failure to distinguish symbolic viewpoints of others from one s own Child has difficulty taking another person s point-of-view Ex- Empathy Never really non-egocentric, especially in Western Culture but we do develop! Piaget saw this as most serious deficiency (underlies all others) Responsible for animistic thinking Prevents Accommodation Egocentrism Inability to Conserve Inability to Conserve Difficulty with Hierarchical Classification more yellow flowers or flowers? 6

7 Follow-up Research on Preoperational Stage Preoperational Egocentric Thought Can adjust language to others and take others perspectives in simple situations Animistic thinking comes from incomplete knowledge of objects Illogical Thought Categorization Appearance versus reality Can do simplified conservation Can reason by analogy Use causal expressions Everyday knowledge is categorized Can solve appearance-reality tasks in nonverbal ways 7