COGNITION AND DEVELOPMENT
SPECIFICATION
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development: schemas, assimilation, accommodation, equilibration, stages of intellectual development. Characteristics of these stages, including object permanence, conservation, egocentrism and class inclusion.
Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development, including the zone of proximal development and scaffolding.
Baillargeon’s explanation of early infant abilities, including knowledge of the physical world; violation of expectation research.
The development of social cognition: Selman’s levels of perspective-taking; theory of mind, including theory of mind as an explanation for autism; the Sally-Anne study. The role of the mirror neuron system in social cognition.
DISCUSS PIAGET’s THEORY OF INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT
Piaget believed that children are not able to undertake certain tasks until they are psychologically mature enough to do so. These developments don’t happen entirely smoothly and there are stages where children move into new capabilities, him seeing those transitions taking place at about 18 months, 7 years and 11 or 12 years. Piaget believed that schemas (an evolving unit of knowledge which we use to understand situations) are key to cognitive development. Adults have complex schemas developed while babies have simple ones like the sucking reflex. Assimilation is where new elements are added to existing schemas by applying a schema to a new situation, such as applying the pull along schema to a wooden dog on wheels with pull rope or by adding new information to an existing schema. Accommodation is where a schema has been changed in order to deal with a new situation, for example the pull along schema can’t be used for a wind up tractor, so the wind up schema needs to be developed to understand how the wind up tractor.
The first stage of Piaget’s theory is the sensorimotor stage, which is between 0-2 years. Piaget believes that each stage is invariant, where each child passes through the stages in the same order, also believing that the stages are universal, Piaget proposing that these sequential stages apply to all children regardless of their culture. At this stage, knowledge consists of simple motor reflexes such as grasping and sucking. The child’s cognition is limited to sensations and motor movements. At the ages of 8 months, the child begins to understand object permanence, which is the understanding that objects exist independently even if they are not being observed. In order to have object permanence, a child needs the ability to hold simple mental representations of objects.
One of Piaget’s key studies that investigates object permanence tested infants individually where Piaget waited until the child was playing with an object and then removed the toy from its grasp and hid it beneath a blanket when the child looked on. If the child searched for it, this would suggest that the child could understand that the object continued to exist even when out of sight, indicating object permanence. Infants less than 8 months didn’t search for the toy, apparently forgetting that the toy existed out of sight. Children at approximately 8 months searched for the hidden toy however when Piaget moved it from the blanket to another place, the child looked for it where they last found it not where they last saw it. This is the type A not B error, which indicates simple object permanence. At around 12 months the infant then begins to look for the toy where they last saw it being hidden, showing a more complex object permanence.
The weaknesses of this study is that infants under 8 months didn’t search for the toy for other reasons, for example they lacked the necessary motor skills to look for it, they simply weren’t interested or that the deliberate covering of the toy led them to believe that it was forbidden. The tests that Piaget conducted were accused as lacking ‘human sense’, where critics have suggested that he underestimates the age at which children develop object permanence. Other studies such as the Bower and Wishart demonstrate that even children as young as 3 months may have object permanence. They turned out the lights and then observed the child with infrared camera. They found that infants continued reaching for objects in the dark, suggesting that they realise they’re there.
Within the next stage, the pre- operational stage (2-7 years), children can use symbols, images and can recognise that one thing can stand for another however there are certain cognitive tasks that they are unable to do, these include animism, centration and egocentrism. Animism is the belief that inanimate objects have emotions nevertheless this is still questionable because it could be argued that they are making the best use of their limited powers of expression. Centration is where children in the pre-operational stage can only deal with one factor at a time, Piaget suggesting that children can only begin to de-centre at the age of 7.
Egocentrism is the inability for a child to take another point of view into consideration. The study that Piaget conducted for this idea is the 3 mountain experiment. Children were shown a 3D display of 3 mountains and then a doll was placed in various positions around the mountain. Ten images of the model were shown to the child and they were asked to select the perspective that the doll could see. Children at the middle of the stage tended to pick their own view, demonstrating egocentrism however by 7-8 years, when they were coming out of this stage; children were beginning to lose this egocentric trait and began selecting the dolls perspective.
Some weaknesses in this study is that the children may have found it difficult to analyse the pictures and may indeed recognise that the doll is viewing the mountain from a different angle but struggled to identify which view it was from the pictures given. The children that didn’t correctly complete the task may have felt a lack of interest in it because it was so irrelevant and unfamiliar to them compared to their daily lives. Other evidence provided from other studies, such as Hughes and Donaldson have suggested that children are able to de-centre from a much younger age, given a familiar situation. 90% of children aged between 3 and a half- 5 years were able to hide the boy from the two policemen in a hide and seek (cross model) situation successfully. This could be because the task was clearly understood and the child could understand the motives behind each of the characters because to them it was a game of hide and seek.
Conservation is the understanding that even though the physical appearance of an object has changed, the volume, density and mass of the object remains the same. Piaget studied the age at which children could conserve volume by showing them 2 identical beakers with equal amounts of water within them before asking which one contained more water. The water from one beaker was poured into a third, taller beaker, with the children being asked the same question. Most children under 7 stated that the 3rd beaker contained the most water, showing that the ability to conserve develops at the age of 7 as children older than this knew that the amounts were equal. One limitation of this study is that the children may have assumed that the experimenter was expecting a different answer as they saw them pour the water into a different beaker, so they may have just gone with the beaker that changed and not necessarily believed it. Also the language that is used in the experiment may have made it more difficult for the younger children to conserve. When the experimenter used the word more, they wouldn’t have been taking it in the adult sense of volume but instead would have interpreted it as ‘higher’ or ‘fuller,’ thus affecting the results. A study that was conducted by McGarrigle and Donaldson shows that children can conserve numbers earlier than Piaget suggested because alterations in terms of counters were made both by the experimenter and the other condition was made to look accidental with the intervention from a ‘naughty teddy.’ 16% showed conservation when the experimenter made the alterations however 62% of the 4-6 years olds conserved with the ‘accidental’ mistake.
From the age of 7, Piaget suggested that there is a cognitive shift where the child is now able to perform mental operations- an internal schema that enables logic such as ordering, multiplication, division, subtraction and addition. This is within the concrete- operational stage. Another cognitive ability that children acquire at this stage is class inclusion, where they become aware of categories and the classification of objects. They are able to recognise the difference between general categories and sub categories. Piaget’s study that supports this idea is the experiment with the wooden beads- 20 of which 18 are brown and 2 are white. The children are then asked 3 questions- 1) Are the beads all wooden? 2) Are there more brown or white beads? 3) Are there more brown beads or wooden beads? Children under the age of 7 usually answered the first 2 questions correctly because even though they are being asked about two separate categories, the two classes are separate, they do not overlap, unlike the third question where the subclass of the brown beads overlaps with the superordinate class of all the wooden beads. One limitation of this study is that the wording of the questions may have affected the answers that were given by the children, which is demonstrated in the study from McGarrigle and Donaldson.
Children about 6 years old were shown 3 black cows and a white cow that were laid on their side in a sleeping position, with the children being asked- 1) Are there more black or white cows? And 2) Are there more black cows or sleeping cows? The first questions was answered correctly 25% of the time and the second 48% of the time. This shows how the wording of the question affects the responses because by giving more emphasis to the whole group through the adjective ‘sleeping’, this helped them give the right answer.
When a child reaches the age of 12 they enter the formal- operational stage, where they are now able to understand abstract concepts. This is where they can refer to things that are not tangible, examples are boredom and calm. Children at this stage know what these concepts mean despite not being able to see or touch them as they don’t physically exist.
One study that Piaget used in order to show systematic reasoning is with the pendulum problem. Children were asked to change variables such as the weight, length of string etc. in order to observe which affected the rate of the swing of the pendulum, thus creating a cause and effect relationship. Children who were not in the final stage changed more than one variable at a time and couldn’t come to any conclusion however those that were in the stage changed one variable at a time and could correctly identify the factors that were affecting the rate of the swing.
Another cognitive ability that is present in formal operational thinkers is hypothetical thinking- this is where thinking can be speculative and they are able to imagine situations. One example that can be sed is the third eye problem. Children were asked where they’d put a 3rd eye if they had one. Schaffer conducted this test and found that 9 year olds made conventional suggestions such as the forehead however 11 year olds were capable of hypothetical thinking and made more initive suggestions such as on the hand.
There are many criticisms that can be used of the methods that Piaget used in order to carry out his work. The sample that he used was small and unrepresentative of the whole population because he used his own children and the children of his friends who all came from Switzerland. This is biased in the sense that it is a small sample and they all came from one cultural background instead of investigating the cognitive development of several cultures around the world. The reporting methods that Piaget used could also be greatly criticised because he often failed to record the number and ages of many of his participants, meaning that many participants from his studies may have not been included and if they were, then their results may have turned the conclusion out very differently.
Piaget also used the clinical interview technique, where he did not stick to normal scientific procedures of standards and control. His interactions with the children were usually conversational in an informal sense, with each participant being treated slightly differently. He based all of his theory on the qualitative work that he collected, he never took data or correlations that could make his work in any way scientific. It has also been argued that because the reported answers were of a conversational tone rather than statistical evidence, Piaget may have selected particular examples to support his theory.
Strengths of his work is that it allowed for further research and he was a key cognitive psychology pioneer. He made cognitive development an important sector of cognitive psychology. There have also been a large amount of others that have conducted studies based around Piaget’s work to see whether they are able to support his findings. However it was found that many studies actually refuted his work.
Another strength is that Piaget did conduct many experiments that did support his idea of there being a sequential set of stages that all children universally pass through at set ages and despite of what cultural background. His cross cultural studies used samples of children from the USA, Britain, Africa and China, which supported Piaget’s idea behind universality. However other research on other cultures doesn’t completely support Piaget’s age related stages. Dasen found that children from societies that aren’t as industrialised, where they have less state education, reached the stages that Piaget proposed at a much later date, suggesting that environmental factors play a part in child cognitive development. This idea has been supported through cross cultural research and Piaget can also be praised on the fact that his experiments were innovative and creative that may be deemed as entertaining for the children nevertheless his experiments could be said to be out of context and unfamiliar to the children, which may have affected their responses greatly if they became confused.
One limitation of Piaget’s theory is the criticism that the formal- operational stage has received. Few adults demonstrate the thinking required for scientific reasoning even in industrialised societies. Martorano tested 12- 18 females on ten Piaget tests to do with formal operational science problems, including the pendulum problem. Only 2 of the 20 women succeeded on all the problems and the success rate for 18 year olds varied from 15% to 95%.
Further limitations is that Piaget’s beliefs were that children went through a sequential set of cognitive development stages one at a time and were unable to recognise that sometimes these stages can overlap in which is called horizontal decalage. A child could show signs of more than one stage at a time, for example a child may be able to conserve correctly depending on the task, they might be able to conserve numbers but not volume as it is a harder conservation task. Nevertheless Piaget’s argument about an actual difference in qualitative thinking amongst these stages has appeared to have been supported.
Moreover, another strength of Piaget’s work is that the finding that Piaget has had, as well as the entire theory itself, has had an enormous impact on modern day educational systems and the school curriculum. His theory of children not being able to perform certain cognitive tasks until they hit a certain age has been applied to classroom situations where teachers are now basing the complexity of their teaching around Piaget’s theory.
DISCUSS PIAGET’S EXPLANATION OF THE PROCESSES INVOLVED IN SCHEMA DEVELOPMENT
REFER TO EXAMPLES OF SCHEMA DEVELOPMENT IN YOUR ANSWER.
Piaget looked at children’s schemas as part of their cognitive development. Schemas are packages of information, and mental representations of the world around us. These start off as very basic in newborns (our first few schemas are innate) however become more rich and complex as children grow, develop and confront new and different situations. Ultimately developing a schema for everything including objects i.e. Chair/table and higher concepts such as morality or love. An example of a child’s schema is the ‘me schema’ about themselves. Piaget also looked at how schemas change as children learn. Assimilation is when they are confronted with a new situation that they need to integrate into an existing schema i.e. when first seeing a Labrador or Poodle a child would assimilate these into their dog schema. Accommodation is when children need to create a new schema for a situation which they have never encountered before i.e. creating a new schema for cats after first seeing them and thinking they were dogs. Piaget also highlighted the motivation for learning and creating new schemas. When a child’s schema cannot quite make sense of a new encounter or situation they are in a state of disequilibrium. This is an uncomfortable feeling and provides motivation to learn in order to stop this and reach equilibrium through assimilation and accommodation.
To evaluate, Piaget’s work on schema has had valuable application, having practical uses in education and so proving to be highly useful. Previously, teaching of even young children usually just involved them sitting in their chair all day and taking notes or repeating facts from the blackboard. Now thanks to Piaget, teachers know that it is important for children to form their individual schemas of the world and so interactive and activity based teaching and time for discovery is used. For example, young children may assimilate their schema for shapes by learning about new ones such as triangles, squares, and accommodate by creating new schemas for new experiences such as playing musical instruments or with sand.
Piaget’s theory can also be supported, making his ideas more convincing here. For example, Fantz found that infants even as young as 4 days old preferred a face with the correct features (schematic) rather than one in which they were incorrect and confused i.e. the eyes, nose etc. were in the wrong place and upside down, or there were no features at all. This supports what Piaget said about schemas, that we are born with a selection of innate schemas for some simple objects or situations, these are biologically determined.
Piaget can also be supported with other research, showing his theory to be grounded and evidence backed. Howe et al. put children aged 9-12 in groups of 4 and let them investigate how different shapes slid down a slope, assessing what they knew about this before and after the activity. It was found that all of the children gained more knowledge and understanding form the activity, and that the information the children gave afterwards varied between them. This provides powerful support not only for Piaget’s idea that children learn through interacting with the world and adding to their schema, but also that this is an individual process.
Piaget can be criticised however. He emphasized that motivation was key in how children learn and develop their schemas, with the unpleasant disequilibrium meaning that children had a strong motivation to do this. He may have overestimated this though, as in reality not all children are so keen to learn and develop their understanding. Indeed, in much of Piaget’s original research, he was testing intelligent middle-class children from the nursery attached to his university, it is unlikely that this sample represents children as a whole and how motivated they are to create new schemas. Some children for example may encounter a novel situation i.e. seeing a horse for the first time, but not be motivated enough to accommodate and create a new schema for this. Piaget’s ideas about equilibrium and children’s motivation to develop their schemas and learn may not be as universal as thought.
In addition, it has been suggested that Piaget described rather than explained the processes in schema development. We are still not actually sure about the cognitive processes or underlying mechanisms that are involved and so some have claimed that this makes his explanation somewhat incomplete. For example, when a child assimilates something i.e. adds a willow to their tree schema, we do not know exactly how this happens. Piaget’s explanation of schema development would be more comprehensive if we knew this.
Linked to his lack of proper explanation and their hypothetical nature, many of the concepts Piaget brought forward in schema development are rather vague and so are difficult to operationalize and test. They remain quite speculative i.e. we do not know precisely what assimilation or equilibrium are so it is difficult to measure and falsify them. This means we cannot really disprove nor properly support many of Piaget’s concepts, casting doubt on his work here.
It has been suggested that Piaget under emphasised the role that other people have in the schema development of children, and so his theory may be somewhat incomplete here. He did recognise how others i.e. adults can provide information and facilitate discovery for children however saw learning primarily as taking part in the mind of the individual. Vygotsky however proposed that other people are central to learning, with it being a social process. He highlighted how if an adult or peer supports a child then they can accomplish much more learning (developing their scema) than by themselves i.e. with scaffolding.
Despite the criticisms, Piaget can still be praised though as his work on schema development highlighted how children make sense of the world around them and learn. Before him, established belief was that children thought just like mini-adults but just knew less than them, Piaget challenged this and brought the focus on to their cognitive development, and schemas were an important part of this.
Lev Vygotsky and social mediation
Jean Piaget’s theory depicted the cognitive growth of a child as occurring largely as a result of the child’s maturation. The Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, challenged this notion. Instead, Vygotsky asserted, as did George Mead, that mental processes have social origins (Feinman, 1991; Wertsch & Tulviste, 1992). According to Vygotsky’s theory of cultural development:
Neither caregivers nor children behave in fixed ways without regard to the other’s behaviour. Their interactions are mutually regulated in a dynamic and adaptable system.
Loving, mutually responsive early care is essential for the child to develop into an emotionally secure and confident individual. If the infant is treated with love and kindness, he or she feels worthy of love, and becomes capable of feeling and expressing love and kindness towards others.
“Any function in the child’s cultural development appears twice, or on two planes.
First it appears on the social plane, and then on the psychological plane.
First it appears between people as an interpsychological category, and then within the child as an intrapsychological category. This is equally true with regard to voluntary attention, logical memory, the formation of concepts, and the development of volition...It goes without saying that the internalisation transforms the process itself and changes its structure and functions. Social relations or relationships among people genetically underlie all higher functions and their relationships” .
In this view, an individual’s functioning derives from the internalisation and mastery of social processes, that is, from the internalisation of what occurs between people. With respect to young children, Vygotsky argued that there exists a “zone of proximal development”, a potential level of cognitive functioning, which the child can achieve with the guidance and collaboration of a more experienced, perceptive and responsive adult.
This idea has a lot in common with Werner & Kaplan’s theory of symbol formation (1963), whereby the child is able to acquire complex concepts on the basis of the “primordial sharing situation”. This sharing situation is a meeting point between the child’s developing capacities and the symbolic medium provided by a caregiver. The caregiver mediates the child’s experience of the world by structuring it and giving it cultural meaning. The adult points out and explains objects and events. In this way, the adult simplifies and person- alizes the child’s experi- ence so that it occurs in a form that the child, at her current level of development, is able to use.
1 Genetically means developmentally in this context.
Interactions between caregivers and children that are sensitive to the child’s cognitive functioning – complementing and extending the child’s capacity – are essential for the child’s cognitive development and acquisition of cultural meaning (Rogoff & Wertsch, 1984). When caregivers successfully instruct young children, they do so by providing a scaffold consisting of linguistic and situational props, contingent on the child’s efforts and errors. The caregiver might move an object closer, point to something, or name an action to assist the child to overcome an obstacle in the way of achieving a particular goal.
Developmental psycholinguistics
Enormous advances were made in developmental psycholinguistics when knowledge about the pragmatics of communication, how people try to influence others with words and communicative gestures, was applied to pre-speech communi-cation between infants and their caregivers (Austin, 1962). By this view of communication,
the infant’s growing use of language requires first that the infant become competent at influencing their caregivers through the communication of his or her emotional and motivational states (Bruner, 1975).
Caregiver-child interaction during the first few months of the child’s life – the reciprocal and turn- taking interchange of looks, expressions and vocalizations – is a proto-dialogue or preverbal conversation (Bretherton & Bates, 1979; Stern, 1977). Caregiver and child alternate “utterances”, vocalizations, gestures and facial expressions in what are called proto-conversations (Stevenson et al., 1986). Caregivers attribute meaning to the utterances, gestures and actions of infants and respond according to inferred meanings and the baby’s intentions. The caregiver might ask if the baby is tired when she observes the child’ becoming fretful, and she might try to settle the child to sleep. This early interaction predisposes the child to language acquisition by sensitizing the infant to a sound system, to the referential requirements of speech or what is being talked about, and to communication objectives such as getting the other person to understand what one wants (Bruner & Sherwood, 1983). Prelinguistic communication first fulfils these functions in the interactions between caregivers and infants. According to Halliday (1975), in these interactions the child learns how to convey meanings to others long before she speaks. Although the precursors to language are extremely complex, in these ways early social interactions play a central role in language development (Bruner, 1983; Nelson, 1973).
The preceding three strains of theory and research, (object relations, social mediation, and psycholinguistics) indicate the importance of early interactions to emotional, social, cognitive and language development. In each theoretical area, the mechanisms are assumed to be universal, although specific manifestations may vary with different cultural and situational circumstances. What follows is an outline of findings since the 1970s regarding the development of infants and young children in interaction with their intimate caregivers.
Long before the child is able to speak, the caregiver attributes meaning to the utterances, gestures and actions of the infant, and responds accordingly.
The caregiver simplifies and personalizes the child’s experience so that it occurs in a form that the child, at her current level of development, is able to use. The caregiver complements and extends the child’s capacity.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CAREGIVER–CHILD INTERACTIONS FOR THE SURVIVAL AND HEALTHY DEVELOPMENT OF YOUNG CHILDREN
SENSE OF SELF
DESCRIPTION/OUTLINE OF EXPLANATION OR RESEARCH
AO1 MARK SCHEME
The development of the child’s sense of self concerns the gradual emergence of their sense of having a separate identity to other people.
This section of the Specification also refers to Theory of Mind (ToM), and the two most likely approaches are (a) a chronology of the child’s developing sense of ‘separateness’, and (b) the development of ToM.
There is no generally agreed detailed chronology, but the sequence of developmental stages could be accurately described for marks in the top band eg using the ‘red spot test’ (Lewis and Brooks-Gunn) self-awareness is not seen before the age of about 15 months, and develops fully between 18 and 24 months; alternatively candidates may describe a sequence such as eye-to-eye contact, then shared attention (eye gaze cueing), protoimperative pointing, pretend play, full self-awareness.
There is a wide range of material available for candidates. It is possible to see development of the sense of self extending to adolescence, while others may focus on the development of self-esteem.
Although unlikely, aspects of Selman’s theory of perspective taking could be made relevant to this question.
