Chapter 6

Cognition

Modified: 2025-07-03 (10:41 AM CDST)

• I. Piaget’s Constructivist Approach (p. 176)
  • A. Schemes: The Basic Unit of Knowledge (p. 176)
    • 1. Schemas are a set of rules for cognition.
    • 2. Infant’s grasping is an example of an early behavioral schema.
    • 3. Second year, children develop symbolic schemes including internal mental symbols
    • 4. Older children are able to manipulate symbols in their head.
    • 5. Schema becomes more sophisticated with development.
    • 6. More sophisticated schemas allow for better adaptation
  • B. How Does Cognition Develop? (p. 177)
    • 1. Piaget took an interactionist position on nature–nurture issue.
    • 2. Children actively create knowledge by building schemes from experiences (nurture) and using two inborn (nature) intellectual functions called
    • organization and adaptation.
    • 3. Organization—systematic combining of schemas into new and complex cognitive structures
    • 4. Cognitive structures in older children grow out of reorganization of simpler structures
    • 5. Adaptation—process of adjusting to the demands of the environment (using complimentary processes of assimilation and accommodation)
    • 6. Assimilation—interpreting new experiences using existing schemas
    • 7. Deal with environment in own terms
    • 8. Squeeze world into our existing schemas
    • 9. Accommodation—modifying existing schemas to fit new experience
    • 10. Inventing new name or revising a concept
    • 11. Need to accommodate to advance understanding
    • 12. If we only assimilated information, understanding would never advance
    • 13. When understanding is challenged by new events and our understanding is inadequate, we are in cognitive conflict or disequilibrium
    • 14. Motivated to achieve equilibration—mental state of stability
    • 15. Four distinct stages resulting from interaction of biological maturation and experience:
      • a. Sensorimotor stage (0–2 years)
      • b. Preoperational stage (2–7 years)
      • c. Concrete operations (7–11 years)
      • d. Formal operations (11 years and beyond)
    • 16. Qualitatively different ways of thinking occurring in an invariant sequence
    • 17. Children may advance through stages at different rates
  • C. Piaget’s Contributions (p. 177)
    • 1. Giant in the field of human development
    • 2. Stimulated research on cognitive development
    • 3. Showed infants active in own development using processes of assimilation and accommodation
    • 4. Some logical processes of preschoolers explained
    • 5. Accurate basic description of cognitive-developmental sequences
  • D. Challenges to Piaget (p. 179)
    • 1. Some criticisms are mild while others are very severe, suggesting that Piaget is fundamentally flawed and should be thrown out (e.g., Broughton)
    • 2. Five common criticisms:
      • a. Underestimated young minds
        • i. With more familiar problems, the hidden capacities of children, adolescents, and adults are sometimes revealed
        • ii. Failed to distinguish between competence and performance
        • iii. Failure does not necessarily mean lack of competence—could be result of lack of motivation, limited memory capacity, or familiarity with task
      • b. Overemphasized the idea that knowledge is all or nothing
        • i. Wrongly claimed that broad stages of development exist
        • ii. Emphasized consistency of thinking within a stage and differences between stages
      • c. Ignored idea of domain-specific knowledge
        • i. Transition between stages not as swift as he proposed
      • d. Failed to adequately explain development
        • i. Vague description of how development comes about
        • ii. Researchers need to know more about impact of specific maturational changes in brain and specific kinds of experience
      • e. Gave limited attention to social influences on cognitive development
      • i. Child often viewed as isolated scientist exploring the world alone
      • ii. Parents, teachers, peers, siblings, and others likely impact development, but Piaget’s model saw little cognitive growth from interaction with adults
  • E. A Modern Take on Constructivism
    • 1. Neuroconstructivism theory
      • a. New knowledge is constructed in the context of existing knowledge and is constrained by genetic as well as environmental factors
      • b. Believes that the neural structures in the brain underlying cognitive phenomenon develop and change in response to experience

II. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective (p. 180)

• A. Brief Biography of Vygotsky
  • 1. Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky was born in 1896, same year as Piaget.
  • 2. Active scholar during 1920s and ‘30s, when Piaget formulating his theory
  • 3. Work banned for political reasons by the former Soviet Union
  • 4. North American scholars did not have access to English translations of his work.
  • 5. Limited consideration of Vygotsky’s work until recent decades
  • 6. Died at age 38
  • 7. Basic argument: Cognitive growth occurs in a sociocultural context and evolves out of the child’s social interactions
• B. Culture and Thought (p. 180)
  • 1. Intelligence is held by group, not individual.
  • 2. Vygotsky’s colleague Alexander Luria found environment provides conditions that allow for the emergence of thinking and differed between rural children and those raised in large cities.
  • 3. Knowledge depends on social experience
  • 4. Vygotsky would not be surprise that formal-operational thought is rarely used in some countries as he expected cognitive development to vary by culture, depending on the mental tools (like language and cultural values) that are available
• C. Social Interaction and Thought (p. 181)
  • 1. Example of 4-year-old receiving a jigsaw puzzle and receiving assistance from her father (e.g., suggestions to put the corner pieces together first) exemplifies the type of social interactions that Vygotsky believed fostered cognitive growth
  • 2. Zone of proximal development—gap between what one can accomplish alone vs. with assistance of more skilled partner

Good coaches are well aware of the ZPDs of their athletes. Consequently they know just how much improvement to demand of them.

• 3. Knowledge not fixed (cannot be tested by single test)
• 4. Upper limit of knowledge moves in response to cultural change
• 5. Children’s performance on assisted learning tasks is a good predictor of their future achievement
• 6. Guided participation—learning by actively participating in culturally relevant events with aid and support of parents and knowledgeable guides
• 7. Scaffolding—structuring the learning situation so learning is easier

Think of a crossword puzzle where all of he first letters of the clues are provided. That's cognitive scaffolding

• 8. Vygotsky rejected Piaget’s view of children as independent explorers
• D. Tools of Thought (p. 181)
  • 1. Mental activity is mediated by “tools.”
  • 2. Key to learning is to equip with tools.
  • 3. If child practices and masters tools, then child will adopt tools as their own.
  • 4. Language (spoken and written) is an important tool.
  • 5. Vygotsky: Language shapes thought, and thought fundamentally changes once we begin to use words
  • 6. Disagreed with Piaget’s emphasis on nature of egocentric speech
  • 7. Piaget saw this speech as evidence that preoperational thinkers cannot take the perspective of others
  • 8. Vygotsky called children’s recitations “private speech”—guides their own thought and behavior
  • 9. Not sign of cognitive immaturity but cognitive maturity
  • 10. Forerunner of silent thinking-in-words engaged in by adults
  • 11. This regulatory speech gradually becomes internalized
  • 12. Private speech is more common when children are struggling to solve a difficult problem
  • 13. Incidence of private speech varies with age (4-year-olds more than 3-year-olds) and task demands (more on unfamiliar and open-ended activities)
  • 14. Intellectually capable children more likely to engage in private speech
  • 15. Private speech contributes to effective problem-solving (allows one to think through problems and to incorporate own thinking with problem-solving strategies learned during collaborations with adults)
  • 16. Social speech (conversation) gives rise to private speech.
• E. Evaluation of Vygotsky (p. 182)
  • 1. Placed needed emphasis on role of social environment in cognitive development
  • 2. Too much emphasis on social interactions at expense of individually constructed knowledge

III. Modern Approaches (p. 184)

• A. A Modern Take on Constructivism (p. 184)
  • 1. According to their neuroconstructivism theory, new knowledge is constructed through changes in the neural structures of the brain in response to experiences
  • 2. Piaget developed his theory in an era devoid of modern tests for measuring electrical activity and blood flow in the brain, before precise reaction time and eye tracking measures, and before genetic analyses could be performed.
  • 3. Theories such as neuroconstructivism are not necessarily an indication that Piaget was incorrect
• B. Dynamic Skills Framework (p. 185)
  • 1. Kurt Fischer’s dynamic skill framework
  • 2. Behavior is intertwined with the context in which it occurs
  • 3. Unlike machines, human performance is dynamic, that is, it changes in response to changes in context.
  • 4. A skill is a person’s ability to perform on a particular task in a specific context
  • 5. Fischer uses the concept of zone of proximal development to explain how cognition advances from one level to another
  • 6. Fischer and others have adopted the term developmental range to better capture their findings that people’s abilities vary with context.
• C. Evolutionary Developmental Theory (p. 186)
  • 1. Evolutionary theorists consider how characteristics and behaviors may have helped our ancestors successfully adapt and survive in their environments.
  • 2. Starting around age 1, human infants begin to engage in pretend play—play in which one actor, object, or action symbolizes or stands for another.
  • 3. Pretend play blossoms from age 2–5 and we begin to see toddlers incorporate others into this play.
  • 4. The evolutionary perspective on cognitive development is that we have evolved in ways that prepare us to learn.

IV. The Infant (p. 180)

• A. Sensorimotor stage
  • 1. Sensorimotor stage—spanning 2 years of infancy; coming to know world through senses and actions
  • 2. Dominant cognitive structures are behavioral schemes—action patterns that evolve in which infants coordinating sensory input and motor responses
  • 3. Substages of the Sensorimotor Stage
    • a. Substage 1: reflexive activity (birth to 1 month); based on innate reflexes
    • b. Substage 2: primary circular reactions (1 to 4 months); repeat interesting acts centered on own body
      • i. Thus named because Piaget noticed that infants repeat (circular) actions related to own bodies (primary to themselves)
      • ii. Son Laurent accidently gets thumb in mouth and then begins to repeat this action, which brings him pleasure
      • iii. Piaget bandaged thumb to end this habit
    • c. Substage 3: secondary circular reactions (4 to 8 months)
      • i. Repeat interesting acts centered on object in the environment (e.g., sucking on a toy) from which they derive pleasure
    • d. Substage 4: coordination of secondary schema (8 to 12 months); combine actions to solve simple problems (e.g., push obstacle out of the way to grasp desired object)
    • e. Substage 5: tertiary circular reactions (12 to 18 months)
      • i. Experiment with new ways to solve problems (curiosity)
      • ii. “Interest in novelty for its own sake”
      • iii. Repeat an action with variation
    • f. Substage 6: beginning of thought (18 months to 2 years); let one object represent another (e.g., cooking pot becomes a hat)
      • i. Can imitate models no longer present
• B. The Development of Object Permanence (p. 187)
  • 1. Object permanence (object concept)—understanding objects exist when they leave presence is lacking in newborns
  • 2. Very young infants rely on senses, and objects only exist when perceived or being acted upon
  • 3. Develops gradually over sensorimotor period
  • 4. Roughly through ages 4 to 8 months it’s “out of sight, out of mind”
  • 5. By Substage 4, they master basic understanding of hidden (out of sight) toy
  • 6. Still think that their behavior determines where a hidden object will appear
  • 7. Commit A-not-B error—looking for object where last seen, not new place
  • 8. Error may be influenced by task demand and physical limitations
  • 9. Infants do have a conceptual problem when it comes to object location
  • 10. In Substage 5, continue to struggle with invisible displacements (e.g., put object in hand, place hand under pillow, remove hand while leaving object behind)
  • 11. Object performance fully developed by 18 months or so
  • 12. Capable of representing invisible moves
  • 13. Object permanence mastered from this point on
  • 14. Piaget may have underestimated timing of acquisition of object permanence
  • 15. Baillargeon and colleagues found early evidence of object permanence using looking task in which toy had disappeared behind one screen and reappeared behind a second screen without appearing on open space between screens
  • 16. At 2½ months, infants on tracking task do not show object permanence
  • 17. At 3 months, have acquired the skill
  • 18. Research on children with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) provides insight into process of object permanence
  • 19. Infants with SMA have normal IQ but severe muscle problems
  • 20. SMA children are slower to reach for objects
  • 21. Slower reaching allows for longer thinking, and SMA kids do better on object permanence tasks
  • 22. Results indicate that task conditions like interval between seeing and searching for hidden object may impact behavior
  • 23. Data supports some of Piaget’s ideas about object permanence
  • 24. Important to distinguish between looking and reaching
  • 25. Looking and reaching skills improve between 8 and 12 months
  • 26. By end of sensorimotor period, master very complex hide-and-seek games
• C. The Emergence of Symbols (p. 189)
  • 1. Crowning acquisition during sensorimotor stage is acquisition of symbolic capacity—ability to use images/words to represent objects and experiences
  • 2. Piaget discussed example of his daughter Lucienne working to get a chain out of a matchbox.
  • 3. She used the symbol of opening and closing her mouth to “think” through the problem.
  • 4. By end of sensorimotor stage, children have become deliberate and symbolic thinkers

V. The Child (p. 190)

• A. Preschoolers: Symbolic Thinking (p. 190)
  • 1. More sophisticated symbolic capacity
  • 2. Imaginary companions—pretend friends created by young children (normal)
  • 3. Imaginative uses of symbolic capacity like imaginary companions associated with advanced cognitive and social development as well as higher levels of creativity
  • 4. Perceptual salience—focus on the obvious features of object or situation leads to children being fooled by appearance
• B. Lack of Conservation (p. 191)
  • 1. Conservation—certain properties of object do not always vary when appearance is altered in superficial way
  • 2. Problems of conservation-of-liquid-quantity task—lack understanding that volume of liquid is conserved despite changes in shape

One of the reasons to have children is to have them demonstrate the lack of conservation. Here, my five year old daughter (in 2002) struggles with the tough conservation of mass problem.

• 3. (Exploration Box on can there be a real Santa Claus?)
• 4. Decentration—ability to focus on two or more dimensions simultaneously (e.g., height and width of glass on conservation of liquid task)
• 5. Centration—tendency to focus on single aspect of problem (e.g., either the height or width of the glasses on conservation of liquid task)
• 6. Leads preoperational child to fail conservation of liquid task
• 7. Reversibility—process of mental undoing or reversing an action
• 8. Lack of reversibility leads to difficulty on conservation task
• 9. Irreversibility—cannot engage in reversibility
• 10. Transformation thought—ability to conceptualize transformation (process of change from one state to another)
• 11. Preoperational thinker engages in static thought—fixated on end state not transformation into another state
• C. Egocentrism (p. 193)
  • 1. Egocentrism—tendency to view world solely from one’s own perspective and difficulty recognizing the point of view of others
  • 2. When shown display of three mountains, children will assume that everyone sees the mountains from a vantage point similar to their own
  • 3. Often assume that if they know something, other people do too
  • 4. Assume others desire what they desire
• D. Difficulty with Classification (p. 193)
  • 1. Older preoperational children can group objects by color, shape, function
  • 2. Have trouble thinking about relationship between classes (e.g., pets) and subclasses (e.g., dogs, cats)
  • 3. Lack class inclusion—logical understanding that parts are included in the whole
  • 4. Did Piaget underestimate the preschool child?
  • 5. Gelman (1972) used simplified conservation-of-number task with bead
  • 6. Reduced tasks to bare essentials, demonstrated that preschoolers not as egocentric as Piaget thought
  • 7. Evidence that children can perform earlier than Piaget believed
  • 8. Classification skills are found in children younger than Piaget believed
  • 9. Three- and four-year-olds have a more advanced grasp of classification hierarchies than Piaget thought (e.g., dandelion is a flower)
  • 10. Simplified tasks allow children to focus attention on relevant aspects of a task and have shown that they have understanding of aspects of the physical world at a younger age than Piaget proposed
• E. Elementary-Aged Children: Logical Thinking (p. 194)
  • 1. Concrete operations stage—mastering many logical operations lacking in preoperational thinkers (roughly ages 7–11)
  • 2. Can perform mental actions on objects (e.g., adding and subtracting birthday candles, arranging objects from smallest to largest)
  • 3. Conservation
    • a. Ability to solve conservation tasks improves
    • b. Can decenter—mentally juggle two dimensions at once
    • c. Acquire reversibility of thought
    • d. Can engage in transformational thought (allowing a better understanding of the change involved in pouring the water in the conservation of liquid task)
    • e. Some forms of conservation solved in earlier years than others (e.g., conservation of mass and number earlier; conservation of area or volume later)
    • f. Piaget used concept of horizontal décalage—different skills within stage occur at different times—to explain this difference
  • 4. Seriation and transitivity
    • a. Seriation—mentally order objects along quantifiable dimension
    • b. Set of sticks arranged from biggest to smallest
    • c. Transitivity—understand logical relationship of objects in a series
    • d. Which of three children are taller than each other
    • e. Preoperational children need to have individuals stand next to each other in order to solve this problem
  • 5. Other advances
    • a. Class inclusion—understand that two subclasses can be in a whole (e.g., brown and white beads are a subclass of the whole class of wooden beads)
    • b. Can engage in mathematical operations in their head (e.g., keeping score of a game)
    • c. Biggest limitation of concrete thinking is that it is applied only to objects, situations, or events that are real or readily imaginable (i.e., concrete) and not to hypothetical or abstract ideas

VI. The Adolescent (p. 198)

• A. Emergence of Abstract Thought (p. 198)
  • 1. Formal operations—can perform mental actions on objects and ideas (age 11 or older)
  • 2. Hypothetical and abstract thinking
  • 3. Can invent ideas that are contrary to fact (e.g., the idea of having an eye in your palm) and can think logically about implications of such ideas
• B. Hypothetical and Abstract thought (p. 198)
  • 1. School-age children define justice in terms of police and judges, while adolescents think about abstract issues like balancing rights of different interests in a society
• C. Scientific Reasoning (p. 196)
  • 1. Systematic and scientific (less trial-and-error) thinking
  • 2. Concrete operational children will jump right into a problem, while formal operational thinkers will sit and think and plan a strategy for solving a problem
  • 3. Good at drawing conclusions from observations
  • 4. General problem-solving strategy is to generate and test all possible hypotheses
  • 5. Hypothetical-deductive reasoning from general ideas to specific implications
  • 6. If-then thinking
  • 7. On string task, vary factors (e.g., length of string) while holding other constant (e.g., weight)
• D. Progress toward Mastery of Formal Operations (p. 196)
  • 1. Martorano (1977) study of girls on battery of Piagetian tasks found gradual transition into formal operations
  • 2. Findings from Munich Longitudinal Study on Ontogenesis of Individual Competencies
  • 3. Ten-year-olds showed an understanding of basic principles of scientific thinking.
  • 4. Twelve-year-olds could recognize good and bad experiments.
  • 5. Adolescents show an awareness of scientific reasoning but may not be able to produce logical scientific reasoning until they are older.
  • 6. Piaget’s claim that intuitive reasoning is replaced by scientific reasoning not supported.
  • 7. Two forms of reasoning—intuitive and scientific—coexist in older thinkers
  • 8. Flexibility in problem-solving effective as long as appropriate strategy is selected
  • 9. Ability to decontextualize—separate prior knowledge from task at hand
  • 10. Can begin to separate personal beliefs (e.g., males are better at math) from demands of task at hand (e.g., reviewing a study in which females performed better than males)
  • 11. Increases likelihood of using reasoning vs. intuition when analyzing a problem
  • 12. Recent cohorts of teens show ability to solve formal-operations tasks at younger ages than in past generations
  • 13. May be result of increasing incorporation of hands-on discovery learning in school curricula
  • 14. Age and level of education influence performance on formal-operations tasks
  • 15. Progress slow toward formal thinking; can be challenging to secondary-school teachers trying to teach abstract concepts
• E. Implications of Formal Thought (p. 199)
  • 1. Good news—formal thought may prepare person to gain greater sense of identity, to think in more complex ways about moral issues, and to understand others better
  • 2. Bad news—while younger children tend to heed words of authority figures, formal thinkers tend to question authority and to raise questions about parents’ decisions and the world in which they live
  • 3. Can lead to confusion and sometimes rebellion
  • 4. Some teens may become idealists (inventing perfect worlds)
  • 5. May flaunt their new-found schemes and irritate parents
  • 6. Adolescent egocentrism (Elkind’s proposal)—ignorance of perspective of others
  • 7. Imaginary audience—hypothesized audience (self-consciousness)
  • 8. Everyone is thinking about, or looking at, me
  • 9. Personal fable—tendency to think in terms of absolute uniqueness (no one understands me)
  • 10. If in love, may see themselves as first to be in such a state
  • 11. No one can understand what they are going through or feeling
  • 12. May feel that rules do not apply to them
  • 13. High scores on measures of adolescent egocentrism associated with risky behavior
  • 14. Self-consciousness associated with imaginary audience most evident in early adolescence and declines by late high school
  • 15. Adolescent egocentrism may persist when adolescents have insecure relationships with parents
  • 16. Contrary to Piaget and Elkind, research unable to link onset of formal thought and adolescent egocentrism
  • 17. Imaginary audience fear may be due to real audience and consequences
  • 18. Adults also aware that actions and appearance judged by others

VII. The Adult (p. 200)

• A. Limitations in Adult Cognitive Performance (p. 200)
  • 1. Half of college students and adults lack mastery of formal operations
  • 2. Many American adults do not solve scientific problems at the formal level
  • 3. Many reasons why more adults do not do well on Piagetian tasks
  • 4. Formal thought appears to require advanced schooling, which is lacking in many cultures and among many individuals
  • 5. Lack of expertise in a domain of knowledge hurts adult response
  • 6. Strongest performance in area of own expertise
  • 7. Performance inconsistent across content areas
  • 8. Taking a contextual approach on cognitive development can lead to appreciation of role of individual experience and nature of task
• B. Growth Beyond Formal Operations? (p. 201)
  • 1. Piaget’s own writing indicates that his thinking shifted from largely formal to something beyond formal operations
  • 2. Some argue that formal operations involve applying logic to a closed set of ideas and not an open set of ideas that characterize most adult issues
  • 3. Postformal thought—term for logic beyond formal thinking
  • 4. Relativistic thinking—realizing understanding in context and subjective to knower
  • 5. Absolutist thinkers assume truth lies in nature and there is only one truth
  • 6. Relativist thinkers start with assumption that one’s starting assumptions influence the “truth” and a problem can be viewed in multiple ways
  • 7. On real-life problems (e.g., John and wife Mary), adolescents tend not to realize that different assumptions may be in play
  • 8. Assumptions influence the “truth”
  • 9. Perry found changes in college students
  • 10. Students originally look for the answer to a question
  • 11. Take position that any position is as good as another
  • 12. Able to make commitments to positions
  • 13. Between adolescence and adulthood, many start as absolutists, become relativists (think unconventionally or “outside the box”), and then make commitments with more sophisticated awareness of nature
  • 14. Dialectical thinking—detecting paradoxes and inconstancies among ideas and trying to reconcile them
  • 15. Mentally “wrestling” with multifaceted and difficult solution
  • 16. Repeatedly challenge and change their understanding of what constitutes the “truth”
  • 17. Common features of postformal ideas (proposed by Marchand)
  • 18. Understanding that knowledge is relative and not absolute (more shades of grey than clear dichotomies)
  • 19. Accepting that world is filled with inconsistencies
  • 20. Attempting to integrate contradictions into some larger understanding
  • 21. College students with greater diversity among their friendships exhibit more postformal characteristics
  • 22. Some suggests that there is no need for a fifth stage beyond formal thought as the evidence does not reflect a qualitatively different change in thinking that is universal and irreversible (that would be required for a fifth Piagetian stage)
• C. Aging and Cognitive Skills (p. 203)
  • 1. Poorer performance on Piagetian tasks of older cohorts does not mean that there is a regression of cognitive abilities
  • 2. Brief training can improve performance (skills are not gone, just need to be reactivated)
  • 3. Piagetian tasks not relevant to everyday adult events—adults may lack motivation to solve the tasks

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