Psychology Chapter 7 More Sophisticated Symbolic Capacity Imaginary Companions

Chapter 7

7

COGNITION

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading and studying the material in this chapter, the student should be able to

understand the following ideas/concepts.

7.1 PIAGET’S CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH

• Describe the processes of developmental change in Piaget’s theory and give an example

7.2 VYGOTSKY SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

7.3 FISCHER’S DYNAMIC SKILL FRAMEWORK

• Describe Fischer’s perspective on context and performance.

7.4 THE INFANT

• Explain the importance of object permanence and describe the path from lack of object

7.5 THE CHILD

• Describe the typical preschool-age child’s pattern of thinking.

7.6 THE ADOLESCENT

• Explain how adolescent thinking differs from the child’s typical pattern of thinking.

7.7 THE ADULT

• Outline the characteristic features of adult cognition.

• Discuss ways that adult thought is the most advanced level of thinking and ways that

• Describe changes to cognitive skills in later adulthood

CHAPTER OUTLINE

I Piaget’s Constructivist Approach

A. Cognition and Piaget’s Start

1. Example of three-year-old, nine-year-old, adolescent interacting with magnet

a. Three-year-old amused, nine-year-old trial-and-error activities, adolescent

abstract understanding of magnetism

questions)

B. What Is Intelligence?

1. Piaget defined intelligence as basic life function that facilitates adaptation to

environment

2. Can be seen in children’s interactions with the world

a. Watching child figure out a jack-in-the-box

b. Newborns are active agents in knowledge, observing, investigating, and

C. How Does Intelligence Develop?

1. Piaget took an interactionist position on nature-nurture issue

a. Children actively create knowledge by building schemes from experiences

(nurture) and using two inborn (nature) intellectual functions called

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5. Accommodation – modifying existing schemas to fit new experience

a. Inventing new name or revising a concept

b. Need to accommodate to advance understanding

c. If we only assimilated information, understanding would never advance

6. When understanding is challenged by new events and our understanding is

D. Piaget’s Contributions

a. Giant in the field of human development

b. Stimulated research on cognitive development

E. Challenges to Piaget

1. Some criticisms mild while others 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,

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F. A Modern Take on Constructivism

1. Neuroconstructivism theory

a. New knowledge is constructed in the context of existing knowledge and is

phenomenon develop and change in response to experience

► Checking Mastery

1. What is a scheme in Piaget’s theory?

2. How do assimilation and accommodation operate to bring about cognitive change?

➢ Answer: Assimilation is using an existing scheme to make sense of a new

3. What are two of Piaget’s major contributions to our understanding of cognitive

development?

➢ Answer: Piaget was instrumental in pointing out that we are active in our own

4. What are three problems with, or challenges to, Piaget’s theory of cognitive

development?

➢ Answer: Piaget probably underestimated what infants and young children know

II Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective

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

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3. Work banned for political reasons by the former Soviet Union

a. North American scholars did not have access to English translations of his

4. Basic argument: cognitive growth occurs in a sociocultural context and evolves

out of the child’s social interactions

B. Culture and Thought

1. Intelligence is held by group, not individual

a. Vygotsky’s colleague Alexander Luria found environment provides

2. 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

1. Example of four-year-old receiving a jigsaw puzzle and receiving assistance from

3. Guided participation – learning by actively participating in culturally relevant

events with aid and support of parents and knowledgeable guides

4. Scaffolding – structuring the learning situation so learning is easier

5. Vygotsky rejected Piaget’s view of children as independent explorers

D. Tools of Thought

1. Mental activity is mediated by “tools”

2. Language (spoken and written) is an important tool

a. Faulkner and colleagues (2000): children with computer as tool think and act

differently than those with physical materials alone

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i. Not sign of cognitive immaturity, but cognitive maturity

ii. Forerunner of silent thinking-in-words engaged in by adults

iii. This regulatory speech gradually becomes internalized

E. Evaluation of Vygotsky

1. Placed needed emphasis on role of social environment in cognitive development

Checking Mastery

1. What theme is stressed in Vygotsky’s theory that is largely missing in Piaget’s

theory?

➢ Answer: Vygotsky gave much more attention to social and cultural factors than

2. What is the zone of proximal development? Provide an example of this concept.

➢ Answer: The zone of proximal development is the difference between what a

III Fischer’s Dynamic Skill Framework

A. Comparison to Piaget and Vygotsky

1. Natural context

2. View of what develops

d. Abstractions

Checking Mastery

1. What is the meaning of the terms dynamic and skill in the dynamic skill framework?

➢ Answer: Fischer uses the term dynamic to convey the fluidity or change in

2. How is the dynamic skill framework similar to Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory?

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➢ Answer: Fischer’s dynamic skill framework uses a concept similar to Vygotsky’s

3. In what ways is dynamic skill framework different from Piaget’s theory of cognitive

development?

➢ Answer: Dynamic skill framework emphasizes the environment or context in

IV The Infant

A. Sensorimotor Stage – spanning two years of infancy; coming to know world

through senses and actions

1. Dominant cognitive structures are behavioral schemes—action patterns that

evolve in which infants coordinating sensory input and motor responses

B. Substages of the Sensorimotor Stage

1. Substage 1: reflexive activity (birth to one month); based on innate reflexes

3. Substage 3: secondary circular reactions (four to eight months)

a. Repeat interesting acts centered on object in the environment (e.g., sucking on

a toy) from which they derive pleasure

4. 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)

C. The Development of Object Permanence

1. Object permanence (object concept) – understanding objects exist when they

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b. By Substage 4, they master basic understanding of hidden (out of sight) toy

c. Still think that their behavior determines where a hidden object will appear

3. Commit A-not-B error—looking for object where last seen, not new place

4. 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)

5. Object performance fully developed by 18 months or so

6. Piaget may have underestimated timing of acquisition of object permanence

a. Baillargeon and colleagues found early evidence of object permanence using

7. Research on children with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) provides insight into

process of object permanence

8. Data supports some of Piaget’s ideas about object permanence

a. Important to distinguish between looking and reaching

D. The Emergence of Symbols

1. Crowning acquisition during sensorimotor stage is acquisition of symbolic

capacity—ability to use images/words to represent objects and experiences

2. By end of sensorimotor stage, children have become deliberate and symbolic

thinkers

Checking Mastery

1. Why does the name “sensorimotor” stage seem to capture the essence of Piaget’s first

stage of development?

➢ Answer: In the first stage of Piaget’s theory, infants learn much about the world

2. What must infants master or acquire in order to understand object permanence?

➢ Answer: In order to understand object permanence, infants must come to realize

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V The Child

A. Preschoolers: Symbolic Thinking

1. More sophisticated symbolic capacity

a. Imaginary companions – pretend friends created by young children (normal)

2. Lack of conservation

a. a. Conservation – certain properties of object do not always vary when

appearance is altered in superficial way

i. Problems of conservation-of-liquid-quantity task—lack understanding that

volume of liquid is conserved despite changes in shape

ii. (Exploration Box on can there be a real Santa Claus?)

3. Egocentrism – tendency to view world solely from one’s own perspective and

difficulty recognizing the point of view of others

a. When shown display of three mountains, children will assume that everyone

sees the mountains from a vantage point similar to their own

b. Often assume that if they know something, other people do too

c. Assume others desire what they desire

4. Difficulty with classification

a. Older preoperational children can group objects by color, shape, function

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at a younger age than Piaget proposed

B. Elementary-Aged Children: Logical Thinking

1. Concrete operations stage – mastering many logical operations lacking in

2. Conservation

a. Ability to solve conservation tasks improves

i. Can decenter—mentally juggle two dimensions at once

ii. Acquire reversibility of thought

3. Seriation and transitivity

a. Seriation – mentally order objects along quantifiable dimension

i. Set of sticks arranged from biggest to smallest

b. Transitivity – understand logical relationship of objects in a series

i. Which of three children are taller than each other

ii. Preoperational children need to have individuals stand next to each other

in order to solve this problem

4. Other advances

a. Class inclusion – understand that two subclasses can be in a whole (e.g.,

Checking Mastery

1. Name three ways that preoperational thought is limited relative to concrete-

operational thought.

➢ Answer: Preoperational thought is limited relative to concrete operational thought

by its reliance on perceptual salience—what is most obvious about a problem—

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2. What is the defining feature of concrete-operational thought?

➢ Answer: The defining feature of concrete-operational thought is the ability to

VI The Adolescent

A. Emergence of Abstract Thought

1. Formal operations – can perform mental actions on objects and ideas (age 11 or

older)

2. Hypothetical and abstract thinking

a. Can invent ideas that are contrary to fact (e.g., the idea of having an eye in

3. Scientific reasoning

a. Systematic and scientific (less trial-and-error) thinking

b. Concrete operational children will jump right into a problem, while formal

operational thinkers will sit and think and plan a strategy for solving a

B. Progress toward Mastery of Formal Operations

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. Piaget’s claim that intuitive reasoning is replaced by scientific reasoning not

supported

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4. Ability to decontextualize – separate prior knowledge from task at hand

a. Can begin to separate personal beliefs (e.g., males are better at math) from

5. Recent cohorts of teens show ability to solve formal-operations tasks at younger

ages than in past generations

a. May be result of increasing incorporation of hands-on discovery learning in

C. Implications of Formal Thought

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

3. Adolescent egocentrism (Elkind’s proposal) – ignorance of perspective of others

a. Imaginary audience – hypothesized audience (self-consciousness)

i. Everyone is thinking about, or looking at, me

b. Personal fable – tendency to think in terms of absolute uniqueness (no one

4. Contrary to Piaget and Elkind, research unable to link onset of formal thought and

adolescent egocentrism

a. Imaginary audience fear may be due to real audience and consequences

b. Adults also aware that actions and appearance judged by others

Checking Mastery

1. What change in thinking marks the shift from concrete to formal-operational

thinking?

➢ Answer: The shift from concrete to formal-operational thinking comes when

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2. What is the hypothetical-deductive approach to problem solving?

➢ Answer: Hypothetical-deductive thinking is reasoning from general ideas or rules

VII The Adult

A. Limitations in Adult Cognitive Performance

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

B. Growth beyond Formal Operations?

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

5. Dialective thinking – detecting paradoxes and inconstancies among ideas and

trying to reconcile them

a. Mentally “wrestling” with multifaceted and difficult solution

b. Repeatedly challenge and change their understanding of what constitutes the

“truth”

c. Common features of postformal ideas (proposed by Marchand)

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6. College students with greater diversity among their friendships exhibit more

postformal characteristics

C. Aging and Cognitive Skills

1. Poorer performance on Piagetian tasks of older cohorts does not mean that there is

a regression of cognitive abilities

Checking Mastery

1. When, or under what conditions, is an adult most likely to use formal-operational

thinking?

2. What is relativistic thinking?

➢ Answer: Relativistic thinking is understanding that knowledge is subjective and

SUGGESTIONS FOR CLASS DISCUSSIONS OR PROJECTS: To develop critical thinking skills

and enhance learning with exercises that support the courses learning objectives.

1. Piagetian Tasks: Have students work in pairs or small groups on Piagetian tasks. Have them

demonstrate a standard conservation of liquid task, as well as a “conservation-like” problem for

2. Conservation and Object Permanence: An alternative or add-on to suggestion 1 is to provide

an opportunity to observe children of various ages working on Piagetian tasks, such as

conservation or object permanence. Depending on access, students may be able to actually test

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3. Piagetian Tasks in Other Species: At a time in history when the theory of evolution is under

4. Postformal Thinking: One method of enhancing students’ understanding of postformal

5. Culture and Cognitive Development: Vygotsky suggested that culture plays a major role in

cognitive development. Have students identify 5-10 characteristics that they believe are highly

impacted by culture and 5-10 characteristics that they believe are not influenced by culture.