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Overview of Piaget
What is cognitive development? ● Study of thinking, problem-solving, and information processing across the life course (we are studying from infancy to adolescence) ● Distinct from the studies of emotional, physical, or social development (overlaps may exist) ● Focuses on thinking and processing information over time, specifically in adolescence where most cognitive development takes place ● Ex child's ability to regulate emotions might be influenced by their social development, etc.
What is a theory? ● Theory – a well-supported explanation of an aspect of human behaviour ○ Based on hypothesis and supported by evidence ● A psychological theory can typically: ○ Consistently describe a behaviour or phenomenon accurately ○ Allow for accurate predictions of future behaviour ● Used to help scientists, practitioners, policy makers, etc. ○ Create testable hypotheses and chooses areas for future research ○ Understand human behaviour ○ Anticipate what may happen next ■ Prevents bad things from happening ■ Develops interventions/solutions for when bad things happen ● More than a guess or explanation ● Based on evidence ● Psychological theory allows for predictions of the future ● Used to help guide policy decisions, practical tools used to prevent problems and design evidence based solutions
Children as Little Scientists – Piaget's Core Ideas:
● Piaget is known for stage their of cognitive development
- Right from birth, children are active listeners a. Saw children as "little scientists" who i. Made predictions about the world ii. Tests predictions through their actions iii. Draw conclusions based on what they find b. Children revise their understandings based on consequences of the action
- Children often learn without being taught a. Learning occurs naturally without direct "instructions" b. Through play and exploration, children expand their knowledge of the world
- Kids are intrinsically motivated to learn
a. No incentive required to explore and do not need rewards to learn b. Kids are naturally inclined to ask questions Ex. Baby picks up the bottle and throws it on the ground and it makes a loud noise. Then baby will do it again and again. In Piaget's perspective, baby is testing gravity, cause and effect, and gathering evidence through small actions, also senses changes in how we react to children's behaviour ● This is the constructivist view – children build their own knowledge on the world through experimenting and interacting with the world allowing them to reorganize their thinking Constructivist View: Before Piaget: ● Baby is just making a racket, parents might tell them to stop After Piaget: ● Baby is exploring the physical properties of the world around them ● An incredibly important part of their cognitive development
Piaget's Stage Theory - Learning is categorized in structured different stages:
- Children at different stages do not just know less; they think in qualitatively different ways ○ 4 year old – only considers their own perspective ○ 8 year old – considers others' perspectives
- Characteristics of each stage influence thinking across diverse topics and contexts ○ 4 year old – only considers their own visual perspective, their own emotions, etc.
- When transitioning between stages, children fluctuate between old and new ways of thinking ○ Transitions between stages are not clean lines
- Every human child follows the same stage pattern ○ Stage sequence is universal, but the timing can vary a bit, some may develop skills later than others ● Younger children do not know less, their just reorganize the world in a different way at different stages ○ Ex. can consider other perspectives = sign that they reached another stage ● Piaget saw development as a qualitative shift – not just an accumulation of knowledge ○ He believed development to be discontinuous
● Vocab growth is continuous for example (cumulative and slower over time) ● Discontinuous is about sudden shifts and stages – moving from 1 way of thinking to the next
Continuous Cognitive Development Example:
placed in another spot, but still continue to seek the object in original location ○
- Preoperational stage – Children start to become able to represent their experiences in language, mental imagery, and symbolic thought (2-7) ○ Children develop more mental skills, not just through action but also representation ○ Kids can think about things that are not physically present
Symbolic Representation: using 1 thing stand for another (ex. using a banana for a phone) ● Engage in simple pretend play ● Using simple shapes to represent more complex objects when drawing ● Rapid expansion of vocabulary – human language is symbolic ● Words stand for different ideas and objects, rapid vocabulary increase proves that language is symbolic
Notable limitation in children's representational thinking occurs at this stage: ● Children are egocentric – they typically consider their own perspective and point of view; older children can understand that people sitting somewhere else can see different stuff than what they see
Egocentrism in Toddlers' Communication: ● Only focus on own thoughts, goals, and intentions ● May reference things the listener does not know about ● Toddlers only say what they want to say, don’t really listen ● Assumes that the listener knows what they talk about, even if they do not provide context
Conservation example: Difficulty with conservation – younger children are unable to tell if two objects are equal or the same ● Centration: tendency to focus on only 1 prominent feature of an object or event ● Conservation concept – the idea that changing the appearance of an object does not necessarily change its other key prosperities ● preoperational kids often fail these tasks as they focus on what is different rather than what stays the same ○ Their thinking is perception based and not logical
3. Concrete operational stage – Children become increasingly able to reason logically about concrete objects and events (7-12) ● But struggle with hypothetical, abstract and, systematic thinking ○ Children's thinking is more logical but only on concrete tangible things
○ Ex. May be able to divide an object equally based on a visual (give 2 candies to each person), but may not be able to grasp math (dividing a a concept) or "what if" scenarios
Piaget's pendulum problem: Task: Determine what factors are important in determining how long it takes the pendulum to swing through a complete arc --> What affects how long it takes to make a pendulum make 1 full swing around – depends on multiple variables: string, weight, height In the concrete operational stage, children: ● Try a few combinations at random ● Fail to consider all possibilities ● Do not systematically test variables or isolate any actors ● Tend to jump to conclusions based on limited information --> draw fault conclusions ● Not able to think in a "scientific" way ● Will not try all the strings or weights
4. Formal operational stage – Can now reason about hypothetical situations, entertain multiple perspectives, engage in careful systematic thinking (12 – adulthood) ● Will approach problems like scientists, uses logic and planning to reach more evidence based conclusions ● May test all the weights on 1 string length and then switch (pendulum) ○ Not just guessing at random, but learning what leads to patterns ● Thinks hypothetically and applies scientific reasoning to problem solving ● Involves broader shifts in how adolescents think in the world ● Can develop multiple perspectives and think abstractly ● Moral reasoning, identity exploration, etc. ● Not all individuals even fully reach this stage or use it consistently ○ Some people may only use this at work or school or may not apply it to all aspects of life ● Suggests that reaching this stage is not about age, depends on environment, they are in and if it fosters abstract thinking ○ Flaw with Piaget's thinking
Counter factual reasoning: ● Ability to entertain hypothetical situations that run counter to facts about reality or what typically happens ● Children in the concrete operational stage (7-12): ○ Get stuck on the literal meaning or counterfactual premise ○ "Feathers can't break glass" ● Children in the formal operational stage (12+): ○ Able to apply logic despite the counterfactual premise ○ Will entertain the idea and think about it
Close Counterfactuals:
● Meaning that children can overcome the ePlanning Problem solving is often more successful if people plan before acting. Children benefit from planning the fastest route to friends’ houses, how to get their way with parents, and how to break bad news to others in ways that are least likely to trigger angry reactions (Hudson, Sosa, & Shapiro, 1997). Despite the advantages of planning, however, children often fail to plan in situations in which it would help their problem solving (Berg et al., 1997). The question is why. Information-processing analyses suggest that one reason planning is difficult for children is that it requires inhibiting the desire to solve the problem immediately in favour of first trying to choose the best strategy. Starting to work on an assigned paper without planning what will be written in the paper is one familiar example. A second reason why planning is difficult for young children is that they tend to be overly optimistic about their capabilities, believing they can solve problems without planning. Such overoptimism sometimes leads them to act rashly. For instance, 6-year-olds who overestimate their physical abilities have more accidents than peers who evaluate their abilities more realistically, presumably because their overconfidence leads to them not planning how to avoid potential dangers (Plumert & Kearney, 2018). Young children’s overoptimism sometimes leads them to engage in dangerous activities. This particular plan worked out fine, but not all do. Over time, maturation of the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that is especially important for planning, along with experiences that reduce overoptimism or demonstrate the value of planning, lead to increases in the frequency and quality of planning, which improves problem solving (Chalmers & Lawrence, 1993). Improvements in the planning process take a long time to become routine, however; in dangerous situations, 12-year-olds remain more likely than adults not to plan and to take risks (O’Neal et al., 2018).rror if they learn in 1 position (sitting) and answer in another position (standing)
Another person looked at object permanence – while the child may not pick up the object, they may look at where the object is instead ● Eye tracking revealed that infants can track objects they cannot see (under some circumstances) ○ Not as consistently or universally as adults do ● Just because infants cannot physically engage with something does not mean they do not understand it
Therefore, Piaget was wrong about a lot of things! ● However, the ideas he introduced for others allowed them to test and refine these ideologies ● His theory gave a framework for exploring new questions and making new discoveries
Information-Processing Theories
Piaget's theory is the foundation of cognitive development, however the we learned theories today address the limitations of Piaget
Children as "little computers" - attention, memory, problem solving skills
Information Processing Theories: Even the simplest activity involves a chain of mini cognitive tasks that build on each other ● Unlike stage theory, info processing emphasizes a gradual step by step improvement of skills – shows continuous development ● Example of a challenging task for a child: ○ Tying shoe – first find both shoes ○ Coordinate putting shoes on the right feet ○ Tie the laces ■ Recall what mom/dad taught you ■ Plan out actions to reach end goal ■ Coordinate find motor control while keeping the big picture goal in mind
To understand children's cognitive development, we need to focus on the underlying cognitive skills that allow kids to manage and manipulate information. Attention, memory and planning – how do skills develop over time to allow them to tackle larger problems and high skilled tasks?
Children as "little computers": Try to break down children's thinking and behaviour into a series of structures and operations organized in a hierarchy ● What are these component processes? How do they all fit together? As kids age, they get "hardware/software updates" that make them more efficient: ● They can hold and juggle more info at once, their memory capacity is expanding, and their processing speed is improving ● They can complete operations quicker ● They refine and test strategies they use to organize info ● All of these improvements make children more efficient thinkers and problem solvers
Focus on Development of Component Processes: Memory – ability to acquire, store, maintain, and later retrieve information when needed. ● Develops gradually as children become better at remembering tasks and things
Attention – focusing your awareness onto a particular range of stimuli or events you experience
The Basics of Memory: Encoding: Taking in information from the world and putting it in a form that can be stored in memory ● Requires some level of attention ○ Can't focus on everything at once ○ Selectively attend to certain stimuli you sense – Where the mental spotlight is "pointing"
Inhibition (inhibitory control) Ability to override reactive or tempting behaviours in order to facilitate more deliberate actions ● Examined through a variety of tasks ○ Eriksen Flanker task – practices ignoring distracting information to focus on a target ● This underlies self-control, following rules, supports learning , and social interaction
Cognitive Flexibility Ability to adjust your thinking, consider multiple perspectives, reinterpret events of stimuli ● Shifts thinking when the situation changes ● Helps children when they have to adapt to changing rules and expectations – even more creative tasks ● Also examined through a variety of tasks like Dimensional Change Card Sort ○ DCCS – children shift from sorting cards using 1 rule and then using another rule (ex. Color and shape)
Selective attention Ability to intentionally focus on the information that is the most relevant to the current goal ● Ignoring irrelevant info – equally important ○ Younger children struggle a lot with this (4-5), while 7-8 year olds perform much better ● Improves with age as children develop strategies for tuning out background distractions ● Researchers will often manipulate stimuli to make the ones they want children to focus on more stimulating and background ones less stimulating
Development of Problem Solving ● Children are depicted as active problem solvers ○ Adaptive use of new strategies and faster execution often allows them to overcome limitations of knowledge and processing capacity ● Planning ○ Problem solving is more successful if people plan before acting ○ Children are not good at planning, but planning improves as prefrontal cortex matures Overlapping waves theory ● Information processing approach that emphasizes the variability of children's thinking ● At any age children may be using multiple strategies to solve problems ○ Problem solving involves using multiple strategies and involves exterminating and selecting what is the most efficient ● Children often start using more advanced strategies to problem solve as they get older ○ Trying to remember past attempts ○ Children will recover more effective strategies
Core-Knowledge Theories
These propose that children have:
- Innate knowledge in certain domains of special evolutionary importance a. Physical laws, social processes, biological categories
- Domain-specific learning mechanisms for rapidly and effortlessly acquiring information in those domains
Children as "Products of Evolution" ● Partially addresses the limitation that children are born less smart than they actually are ● These theories emphasize that children are not blank states and come with built in cognitive tools that come from evolution
What are "Domains" of Cognition? ● Domain-Specific: information and learning that is specific to a particular domain (area) of cognition ○ The mind (like the brain) is highly compartmentalized ○ Lots of domains with their own unique processes ● Allows for rapid and often effortless learning in important areas humans need to survive and thrive ○ Experience-expectant processes (brain expects certain types of information to input) ○ Ex. Language – babies are predisposed to detecting speech sounds, easier for them to detect grammar patterns ● Babies come equipped with social interaction – they are naturally drawn to human faces, which may make it easier to detect emotions and social cues later on
Nativism ● Infants have substantial innate knowledge in domains of special evolutionary significance ○ This does not need to be taught or learned from experience ● Elizabeth Spelke proposed (2004) that children are born with 4 core-knowledge systems: ● 1 – Properties of inanimate objects and their Interactions ○ Ex. hitting a pool ball hits another pool ball ● 2 – Minds and intentional behaviours ○ Others have different minds and beliefs ● 3 – Numbers and counting ○ Basic numerical reasoning ● 4 – Geometry and spatial knowledge ○ Basic understanding of shapes, distances, etc. Contrasts with the constructivist view (like Piaget, argue that children develop knowledge with experience with the world gradually)
Sociocultural Theories
Children as 'social learners' Children's cognitive development is guided by their communication and interaction with others: ● Parents, teachers, siblings, peers, neighbors, relatives ● Skills, activities, habits, values, ideas, histories, beliefs ○ In other words: their culture
Lev Vygotsky – believed cognitive development is deeply rooted in social interaction ● He highlighted the importance of Guided Participation ○ Knowledgeable individuals can organize activities in ways that allow less knowledgeable people to learn ○ With support, children can learn, think, solve problems and develop skills that are much too complex for them to do by themselves
Social Learning Processes Social learning relies on intersubjectivity ● Cognitive perspectives of the teacher and learner align to build a shared understanding ○ "Meeting of the minds" - keeps everyone on the same page, meeting in the middle Joint attention ● Social partners intentionally focus on a common referent in the external environment ● Established through pointing, vocalization, gaze following, exchanging looks ● 2 people (parent and child) focusing on the same object in the room ○ Ex. Parent and child may be looking at the same truck and playing with it, etc. ● Social referencing – using another person's reactions and expressions to guide one's learning and behaviour ○ Ex. Child looking to mother before crossing the street or child looking to parent after breaking something
Difference Between Social Referencing and Joint Attention: ● Joint Attention is the mutual focus of two people on an object or event ● Social referencing involves a person looking to a trusted adult to gauge how to respond to an ambiguous or novel situation ● While joint attention focuses on sharing attention and communication about an external topic, social referencing adds an emotional and informational component, allowing a child to use another's emotional cues to guide their own actions in uncertain circumstances.
Social Scaffolding ● Providing children with a temporary framework that allows them to think and achieve at a higher level than they normally could manage on their own
○ Support degreases as competency grows ○ Pushes child beyond their current level, but not so far that they cannot succeed ○ Vygotskian term for it: Zone of Proximal Development ● Children can complete these skills with more guidance from a knowledgeable person/tutor
Difference Between Social Scaffolding and Guided Participation: ● They are both closely related concepts within Vygotsky's theory of learning. ● Guided participation is a broader concept of an expert helping a novice in a shared activity ● Social scaffolding is a more specific term for the temporary, structured support provided by the expert that is gradually removed as the learner gains competence.
Autism and Social Communication (Bonus): They have differences in social motivation ● Social stimuli is often less inherently rewarding for them ○ Engage in fewer behaviours like eye contact, impacts joint attention, social referencing Difficulty attention and information processing ● Difficulty coordinating attention between stimuli and another person ● May often focus on objects rather than people ● Challenges in interpreting social cues – struggle with meaning of social cures, hard to recognize what is meaningful, hard to pick up on non-verbal cues (facial expressions) Neurodevelopmental actors ● Brain regions in social cognition may function differently in autism ● This impacts face processing, gaze, how they process emotions, etc
Dynamic Systems Theories
Children as ‘Self-Organizing Systems’ ● These theories focus on how change occurs over varying time periods in complex systems ○ Development = the process of constant change in response to ● Current situation ● Child's immediate past history ● Child's longer-term history in similar situations ● A child is a well-integrated system with many subsystems that work together to determine behaviour ● Emphasizes that cognition is constantly changing and emerges from interaction of multiple interactions over time ● Explains how children's behavior and thinking changes constantly, from moment to moment ○ Motor skills, thinking, etc. work together to change thinking constantly
- The aspect of Piaget’s theory that could be considered a source of discontinuity (development happening in set stages) is invariant stages (sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational)
- Information processing theories note several limits on children's thinking including:
- Memory capacity
- Speed of processing
- Using problem solving strategies
- Overlapping waves theory refers to how children discover new strategies lead to more efficient problem solving
- Core knowledge theories argue that evolution play a role in cognitive development
- According to psychologists, children possess naive theories in the domains of biology, physics, and psychology
- According to sociocultural theory, children will often speak out loud as a means of controlling their behaviour. This is known as private speech
- Dynamic-systems theories suggest that infants’ failure in the A not B task is due to the combination of habit, memory demands, and focus of attention
- A child regressing from walking to crawling is characteristic of the overlapping waves theory as it suggests that children use multiple strategies at the same time
Piaget’s Theory Jean Piaget’s studies of cognitive development are a testament to how much one person can contribute to a scientific field. Before his work began to appear in the early 1920s, there was no recognizable field of cognitive development. Nearly a century later, Piaget’s theory remains the best-known cognitive developmental theory. What accounts for its longevity? One reason is that Piaget’s observations and descriptions vividly convey the texture of children’s thinking at different ages. They remind parents, teachers, nurses, and social workers of their own experiences with children of different ages. Another reason is the exceptional breadth of the theory. It extends from infancy through adolescence and examines topics as diverse as conceptualization of time, space, distance, and number; language use; memory; understanding of other people’s perspectives; problem solving; and scientific reasoning. A third source of its longevity is that it offers an intuitively plausible depiction of the interaction of nature and nurture in cognitive development, as well as of the continuities and discontinuities that characterize intellectual growth. View of Children’s Nature Piaget’s fundamental assumption about children was that they are mentally active from the moment of birth and that their mental and physical activity both contribute greatly to their development. His approach to understanding cognitive development is often labelled constructivist because it depicts children as constructing knowledge for themselves in response to their experiences. According to Piaget, three of the most important of children’s constructive processes are
generating hypotheses, performing experiments, and drawing conclusions from their observations. If this description reminds you of scientific problem solving, you are not alone: the “child as scientist” is the dominant metaphor in Piaget’s theory. Consider this description of his infant son: Laurent is lying on his back…. He grasps in succession a celluloid swan, a box, etc., stretches out his arm and lets them fall. He distinctly varies the position of the fall. When the object falls in a new position (for example, on his pillow), he lets it fall two or three more times on the same place, as though to study the spatial relation. (Piaget, 1952b, pp. 268–269) Jean Piaget, whose work has had a profound influence on developmental psychology, is seen here (centre) interviewing a child to learn about his thinking. In simple activities such as Laurent’s game of “drop the toy from different places and see what happens,” Piaget perceived the beginning of scientific experimentation. This example also illustrates a second basic Piagetian assumption: children learn many important lessons on their own, rather than depending on instruction from others. To further illuminate this point, Piaget cited a friend’s recollection from childhood: [H]e put [the pebbles] in a row and he counted them one, two, three up to 10. Then he … started to count them in the other direction…. and once again he found that he had 10. He found this marvelous…. (Piaget, 1964, p. 12) This incident also highlights a third basic assumption of Piaget’s: children are intrinsically motivated to learn and do not need rewards from other people to do so. Central Developmental Issues In addition to his view that children actively shape their own development, Piaget offered important insights regarding the roles of nature and nurture and of continuity/discontinuity in development.
Nature and Nurture Piaget believed that nature and nurture interact to produce cognitive development. In his view, nurture includes not just the nurturing provided by parents and other caregivers but every experience children encounter. Nature includes children’s maturing brain and body; their ability to perceive, act, and learn from experience; and their tendency to integrate particular observations into coherent knowledge. As this description suggests, a vital part of children’s nature is how they respond to nurture. Sources of Continuity Piaget depicted development as involving both continuities and discontinuities. The main sources of continuity are three processes—assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration—that work together from birth to propel development forwards. Assimilation is the process by which people incorporate incoming information into concepts they already understand. To illustrate, when one of our children was 2 years old, he saw a man who was bald on top of his head and had long frizzy hair on the sides. To his father’s great embarrassment, the toddler gleefully shouted, “Clown! Clown!” (Actually, it sounded more like “Kown! Kown!”) The man apparently looked enough like a “kown” that the boy could assimilate him to his clown concept. Perhaps hearing toddlers yelling “Kown, kown!” set Larry, a member of the Three Stooges, on his career path. Accommodation is the process by which people improve their current understanding in response to new experiences. In the “kown” incident, the boy’s father explained to his son that the man was not a clown and that even though his hair looked like a clown’s, he was not wearing a funny costume and was not doing silly things to make people laugh. With this new information, the boy was able to accommodate his clown concept to the standard one, allowing other men with bald pates and long, frizzy side hair to proceed in peace. Equilibration is the process by which people balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding. Equilibration includes three phases. First, people are satisfied with their understanding of a particular phenomenon; Piaget labelled this a state of equilibrium, because people do not see any discrepancies between their observations and their understanding of the phenomenon. Then, new information leads them to perceive that their understanding is inadequate. Piaget said that this realization puts people in a state of disequilibrium; they recognize shortcomings in their understanding of the phenomenon, but they cannot generate a superior alternative. Put more simply, they are confused. Finally, they develop a more sophisticated understanding that eliminates at least some of the shortcomings of the old one, creating a more advanced equilibrium within which a broader range of observations can be understood. Through innumerable equilibrations, children learn about the world around them.
Sources of Discontinuity Although Piaget placed some emphasis on continuous aspects of cognitive development, the most famous part of his theory concerns discontinuous aspects, which he depicted as distinct stages of cognitive development. Piaget viewed these stages as products of the basic human tendency to organize knowledge into coherent structures. Each stage represents a unified way of understanding one’s experience, and each transition between stages represents a discontinuous intellectual leap from one coherent way of understanding the world to the next, higher one. The following are the central properties of Piaget’s stage theory: Qualitative change. Piaget believed that children of different ages think in qualitatively different ways. For example, he proposed that children in the early stages of cognitive development conceive of morality in terms of the consequences of behaviour, whereas children in later stages conceive of it in terms of intent. Thus, a 5-year-old would judge someone who accidentally broke a whole jar of cookies as having been naughtier than someone who deliberately stole a single cookie; an 8-year-old would reach the opposite conclusion. This difference represents a qualitative change because the two children are basing their moral judgements on entirely different criteria. We will explore moral development in more detail in Chapter 14. Broad applicability. The type of thinking characteristic of each stage influences children’s thinking across diverse topics and contexts. Brief transitions. Before entering a new stage, children pass through a brief transitional period in which they fluctuate between the type of thinking characteristic of the new, more advanced stage and the type of thinking characteristic of the old, less advanced one. Invariant sequence. Everyone progresses through the stages in the same order without skipping any of them. Piaget hypothesized four stages of cognitive development: the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the concrete operational stage, and the formal operational stage. In each stage, children exhibit new abilities that enable them to understand the world in qualitatively different ways than they had previously. Stage 1. In the sensorimotor stage (birth to age 2 years), infants’ intelligence is expressed through their sensory and motor abilities, which they use to perceive and explore the world around them. These abilities allow them to learn about objects and people and to construct rudimentary forms of fundamental concepts such as time, space, and causality. Throughout the sensorimotor period, infants live largely in the here and now: their intelligence is bound to their immediate perceptions and actions. Stage 2. In the preoperational stage (ages 2 to 7 years), toddlers and preschoolers become able to represent their experiences in language and mental imagery. This ability allows them to remember the experiences for longer periods and to form more sophisticated concepts. However, as suggested by the term preoperational, Piaget’s theory emphasizes young children’s inability to perform certain mental operations, such as considering multiple dimensions simultaneously. This leads to children’s being unable to form certain ideas, such as the idea that pouring all the water from a
that toddlers and preschoolers use as personal symbols physically resemble the objects they represent. The shapes of the sticks and playing card resemble those of a sword and a smartphone. As children develop, they rely less on self-generated symbols and more on conventional ones. For example, when 5-year-olds play games involving pirates, they might wear a patch over one eye and a bandanna over their head because that is how pirates are commonly depicted. Heightened symbolic capabilities during the preoperational period are also evident in the growth of drawing. Children’s drawings between ages 3 and 5 make increasing use of symbolic conventions, such as representing the leaves of flowers as V’s (Figure 4.2). FIGURE 4.2 A 4-year-old’s drawing of a summer day Note the use of simple artistic conventions, such as the V-shaped leaves on the flowers. Egocentrism Piaget proposed that an important limitation of preoperational thinking is egocentrism. perceiving the world solely from one’s own point of view. An example of this limitation involves preschoolers’ difficulty in taking other people’s spatial perspectives. Piaget and Inhelder (1956/1977) demonstrated this difficulty by having 4-year-olds sit at a table in front of a model of three mountains of different sizes (Figure 4.3). The children were asked to identify which of several photographs depicted what a doll would see if it were sitting on chairs at various locations around the table. Solving this problem required children to recognize that their own perspective was not the only one possible and to imagine the view from another location. Most 4-year-olds, according to Piaget, cannot do this. FIGURE 4.3 Piaget’s three-mountains task When asked to choose the picture that shows what the doll sitting in the seat across the table would see, most children younger than 6 years choose the picture showing how the scene looks to them, illustrating their difficulty in separating their own perspective from that of others. The same difficulty in taking other people’s perspectives is seen in quite different contexts—for example, in communication. As illustrated in Figure 4.4, preschoolers often talk right past each other, focused only on what they themselves are saying, seemingly oblivious to other people’s comments and reactions. FIGURE 4.4 Egocentrism An example of young children’s egocentric conversations. Over the course of the preoperational period, egocentric speech becomes less common. An early sign of progress is children’s verbal quarrels, which become increasingly frequent during this period. The fact that a child’s statements elicit a playmate’s objection indicates that the playmate is at least paying attention to the differing perspective that the other child’s comment implies. Children also become better able to envision spatial perspectives other than their own during the preoperational period. We all remain somewhat egocentric throughout our lives—our own perspectives almost always seem more compelling than those of other people—but most of us do become less egocentric with age and experience. Centration Young children often focus on a single, perceptually striking feature of an object or event to the exclusion of other relevant features, a process that Piaget labelled centration. Their approaches to balance-scale problems provide a good example of centration. If presented with a balance scale like that in Figure 4.5 and asked which side will go down if a support were released, 5- and 6-year-olds centre on the amount of weight on each side, ignore the distance of the weights from the fulcrum, and say that whichever side has more weight will go down (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958).
Another good example of centration comes from Piaget’s research on children’s understanding of conservation. The idea of the conservation concept is that changing the appearance or arrangement of objects does not necessarily change other key properties, such as the quantity of material. Three variants of the concept that are commonly studied in 5- to 8-year-olds are conservation of liquid quantity, conservation of solid quantity, and conservation of number (Piaget, 1952a). In all three cases, the tasks used to measure children’s understanding employ a three-phase procedure (Figure 4.6). First, children are shown two objects (e.g., two glasses of orange drink, two clay sausages) that are identical in quantity, or two sets of objects (e.g., two rows of coins) that are identical in number. Once children agree that the dimension of interest (e.g., the amount of orange drink or the number of coins) is equal in the two objects or sets, they observe a second phase in which the experimenter transforms one object or set in a way that makes it look different but does not change the dimension of interest. Orange drink might be poured into a taller, narrower glass; a short, thick clay sausage might be molded into a long, thin sausage; or a row of coins might be spread out. Finally, in the third phase, children are asked whether the dimension of interest, which they earlier had said was equal for the two objects or sets of objects, remains equal. Video: Cognitive Development in Childhood: Piaget's Conservation-of-Number Task: 4 1/2-Year-Old Fails
The large majority of 4- and 5-year-olds answer no. On conservation-of-liquid-quantity problems, they claim that the taller, narrower glass has more orange drink; on conservation-of-solid-quantity problems, they claim that the long, thin sausage has more clay than the short, thick one; and so on. Children of this age make similar errors in everyday contexts; for example, they often think that if a child has one fewer cookie than another child, a fair solution is to break one of the short-changed child’s cookies into two pieces, so that he or she will have as many cookies as the other child (Miller, 1984).
In the next period of cognitive development, the concrete operational stage, children considerably reduce their egocentrism and centration, which allows them to solve these and many other problems. The Concrete Operational Stage (Ages 7 to 12) At around age 7, according to Piaget, children begin to reason logically about concrete features of the world. For example, although few 5-year-olds solve any of the three conservation tasks described in the previous section, most 8-year-olds solve all of them. The same progress allows children in the concrete operational stage to solve many other problems that require attention to multiple dimensions. Thus, on the balance-scale problem, they consider distance from the fulcrum as well as weight on the two sides. However, this relatively advanced reasoning is, according to Piaget, limited to concrete situations. Thinking systematically remains very difficult, as does reasoning about hypothetical situations. These limitations are evident in the types of experiments that concrete operational children perform to solve the pendulum problem (Figure 4.7; Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). In this problem, children are presented a pendulum frame, a set of strings of varying lengths with a loop at each end, and a set of metal weights of varying weights, any of which can be attached to any string. When the loop at one end of the string is attached to a weight, and the loop at the other end is attached to the frame of the pendulum, the string can be swung. The task is to perform experiments that indicate which factor or factors influence the amount of time it takes the pendulum to swing through a complete arc. Is it the length of the string, the heaviness of the weight, the height from which the weight is dropped, or some combination of these factors?
Most concrete operational children, like most adolescents and adults, begin their experiments believing that the relative heaviness of the weights being dropped is the most important factor, perhaps the only important one. What distinguishes the children’s reasoning from that of older individuals is how they test their beliefs. Concrete operational children design biased experiments from which no valid conclusion can be drawn. For example, they might compare the travel time of a heavy weight on a short string dropped from a high position to the travel time of a light weight on a long string dropped from a lower position. When the first string goes faster, they conclude that, just as they thought, heavy weights go faster. This premature conclusion, however, reflects their limited ability to think systematically or to imagine all possible combinations of variables. They fail to imagine that the faster motion might be related to the length of the string or the height from which the string was dropped, rather than the weight of the object.
The Formal Operational Stage (Age 12 and Beyond) Formal operational thinking, which includes the ability to think abstractly and to reason hypothetically, is the pinnacle of Piaget’s stage progression. The difference between reasoning in this stage and in the previous one is clearly illustrated by formal operational reasoners’ approach to the pendulum problem. Framing the problem more abstractly than do children in the concrete operational stage, formal operational reasoners see that any of the variables—weight, string length, and dropping point—might influence the time it takes for the pendulum to swing through an arc, and that it is therefore necessary to test the effect of each variable systematically. For example, to test the effect of weight, they compare times to complete an arc for a heavier weight and a lighter weight, attached to strings of equal length dropped from the same position. To test the effect of string length, they compare the travel times of a long and a short string, with equal weight dropped from the same position. Such systematic experiments allow the formal operational thinker to determine that the only factor that influences the pendulum’s travel time is the length of the string. Piaget believed that unlike the previous three stages, the formal operational stage is not universal: not all adolescents (or adults) reach it. For those adolescents who do reach it, however, formal operational thinking greatly expands and enriches their intellectual universe. Such thinking makes it possible for them to see the particular reality in which they live as only one of an infinite number of possible realities. This insight leads them to think about alternative ways that the world could be and to ponder deep questions concerning truth, justice, and morality. It no doubt also helps account for the fact that many people first acquire a taste for science fiction during adolescence. The alternative worlds depicted in science fiction stories appeal to adolescents’ emerging capacity to think about the world they know as just one of many possibilities and to wonder whether a better world is possible.
Piaget’s Legacy Although Piaget’s theory was formulated many years ago, it remains a very influential approach to understanding cognitive development and includes many valuable insights (summarized in Table 4.2). However, it also has some crucial weaknesses (Miller, 2016): Video: Cognitive Development
Piaget’s theory is vague about the mechanisms that give rise to children’s thinking and that produce cognitive growth. Piaget’s theory provides any number of excellent descriptions of children’s thinking. It is less revealing, however, about the processes that lead children to think in a particular way and that produce changes in their thinking. Assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration have an air of plausibility, but how they operate is unclear. Infants and young children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized. Piaget employed fairly difficult tests to assess most of the concepts he studied. This led him to miss infants’ and young children’s earliest knowledge of these concepts. For example, Piaget’s test of object permanence required children to reach for the hidden object after a delay; Piaget claimed that children do not do this until about 8 months of age. However, alternative tests of object permanence, which analyze where infants look immediately after the object has disappeared from view, indicate that by 3 months of age, infants at least suspect that objects continue to exist when they are no longer visible (Baillargeon, 1987a, 1987b, 1993). Piaget’s theory understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development. Piaget’s theory focuses on how children come to understand the world through their own efforts. From the day that children emerge from the womb, however, they live in an environment of adults, older children, and cultural institutions and values that shape their cognitive development in countless ways. A child’s cognitive development reflects the contributions of other people, and of the broader culture, to a far greater degree than Piaget’s theory acknowledges. The stage model depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it is. According to Piaget, once children enter a given stage, their thinking consistently shows the characteristics of that stage across diverse concepts. Subsequent research, however, has shown that children’s thinking is far more variable than this depiction suggests. For example, most children succeed on conservation-of-number problems by age 6, whereas most do not succeed on conservation-of-solid-quantity until about age 8 (Field, 1987). TABLE 4.2 Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development Stage Approximate Age New Ways of Knowing Sensorimotor Birth to 2 years Infants know the world through their senses and through their actions. For example, they learn what dogs look like and what petting them feels like. Preoperational 2–7 years Toddlers and young children acquire the ability to internally represent the world through language and mental imagery. They also begin to see the world from other people’s perspectives, not just from their own. Concrete operational 7–12 years Children become able to think logically, not just intuitively. They now can understand that events are often influenced by multiple factors, not just one. Formal operational 12 years and beyond Adolescents can think systematically and reason about what might be, as well as what is. This allows them to understand politics, ethics, and science fiction about alternative political and ethical systems, as well as to engage in scientific reasoning. These weaknesses of Piaget’s theory do not negate the magnitude of his achievement: it remains one of the major intellectual accomplishments in the history of psychology. However, appreciating the weaknesses as well as the strengths of his theory is necessary for understanding why alternative theories of cognitive development have become increasingly prominent. In the remainder of this chapter, we consider the four most prominent alternative theories of cognitive development: information-processing, core-knowledge, sociocultural, and dynamic-systems. Each can be seen as an attempt to overcome a major weakness of Piaget’s approach. Information-processing theories emphasize precise characterizations of the mechanisms that give rise to children’s thinking and that produce cognitive growth. Core-knowledge theories focus on the surprisingly early knowledge and skills that infants and young children show in areas thought to be of evolutionary importance. Sociocultural theories emphasize the ways in which children’s interactions with
