Cognitive Development ( Part 1 of 3)

Coginition-

Refers to all inner processesand products of the mind that leads to knowing. It includes all mental activicties- attending, remembering, symbolizing, catagorizing, planning, reasoning, problem solving, creating, fantasizing. Other species have camouflage, feathers and fur coats. We stand out in our extraordinary mental capablities.

Children move from a simpler to more complex coginitive skills, ie, cognitive skills are not developed in one day. This chapter intend to learn how these coginitive skills develop stage by stage.

Jean Piaget, a zoologist by education, proposed a theory with biological favour. According to Piaget, human infants does not start out as coginitive beings. Instead, out of their perceptual and motor activicties, they build and refine psychological structures. Piaget viewed children as discovering, or constructing virtually all knowledge about their world through their own activicties. Hence his approch is called a constructivistic approch to cognitive development.

Basic Characteristics of Piaget’s Stages-

 Piaget believed that children move through 4 stages in course of cognitive development. These stage sequence has three important charecteristics.

a.    Stages provide general theory of development, in which all aspects of coginition change in an integrated fashion, following a similiar course.

b.    Stages are invarient- they always occur in fixed order.

c.    The stages are universal- they are assumed to characterize children everywhere.

But he did mention that individualistic difference can affect in speed at which development takes place.

Piaget’s Ideas About Coginitive Change-

Schemes- Organized way of making sense of an experience. These schemes change with age. At first, schemes are sensorymotor action patterns. A 6 months old baby’s throwing scheme is different from that of an 18 month baby.

Mental Representation- Internal description of information thst mind can manipulate. At a later stage, than just acting on objects, toddler shows evidence of thinking before he acts. Generally they are two kinds-

a.    Images- mental pictures of objects, people, spaces.

b.    Concepts- Catagories in which similiar objects or events are grouped together.

According to piaget, two processes causes change from sensorymotor to higher stages. They are-

1.   Adaptation-

Adaptation involves building schemes through direct interactions with the environment. It consists of two complimentary activicties-

a.    Assimilation- We use our current scheme to interpret the external world.

b.    Accomodation- We create new schemes or adjust old one’s after noticing that our way of thinking does not capture

According to Piaget, balance between assimilation and accomodation varies over time. When they assimilate, they are in a state of coginitive equlibrium. But when drastic changes happens, accomodation is needed and it changes into a state of 

disequilibrium.

2.   

Organization-

This process takes place internally, apart from direct contact with the environment. Once child forms new schemes, they rearrange them, linking them with other schemes to create a strongly interconnected coginitive system.

Stage 1

Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2 years)

The basic concept is that infants and toddlers think with their eyes, ears, hands and other sensorimotor equipments. They cannot yet carry out many activicties inside their head.

At birth infants know little about their world that they cannot purposefully explore it. The circular reaction provides special means of adapting their first schemes. It involves stumbling onto a new experiences caused by baby’s own motor activicty. 

The reaction is circular as infant tries to repeat the event again and again. As a result, a sensorimotor response that first occured by chance becomes strengthened inro a scheme. At the first circular reaction is focussed on infants own body, later it turn outwards.

There are 6 substages in Sensorimotor Stage-

1.    Reflexive Schemes (0-1)- New born reflexes

2.    Primary Circular Reactions (1-4)- Simple motor habits centered around the infants own body

3.    Secondary Circular Reactions (4-8)- Actions aimed at repeating intresting effects in the surrounding world; imitating of familiar words

4.    Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions (8-12 mnths)- Intentional or goal-directed behaviors, ability to find a hidden object

5.    Tertiary Circular Reactions (12-18)

6.    Mental representation (18-24)-

Repeating Chance Behaviors-

When babies enter substage 2, they start to gain voluntary control over there actions through primary circular reactions, ie, repeating chance behaviors largely motivated by basic needs. Eg- sees hands touch, open and close.

During substage 3, infants sits up and become skilled at reaching for and manipulating object. Using secondary circular reactions, they try to repeat intresting events that are caused by their own actions.  Eg-playing with swinging toy.

Intentional Behavior-

In substage 4, infant combine schemes into more complex action sequences. Hence, the behaviors that lead to new schemes are no longer random but intentional. Intentional behaviors involve coordinating schemes delibrately to solve simple problems. Eg- Object hiding task- showing object and hiding, babies find it, which is major advancement in coginitive development

                                  Finding hidden objects indicate that child have begun to master object permanence ie, understanding object continue to exist even when out of sight. But awareness is still not complete because babies make A not B search error- if they reach several times for an object at first hiding place (A), and see it moved to second (B), they will still search for it in first hiding place (A). Also infants can better anticipate events in substage 4.

                                  In substage 5, toddlers repeat behaviors with variation, provoking new outcomes. Eg- Push objects from table some forcefully, some slowly.

Mental Representation

                                  In substage 6, sensorimotor development completes with formation of mental representation. One sign of this capacity is that 18-24 month olds arrive at solutions to problem suddently, rather than through trial and error method. This representaation results in several other capacities.-

a.    Invisible displacement-

                        Finding a toy moved while out of sight.

b.    Deferred Imitation-

                        The ability to remember and copy the behavior of models who are not present.

c.    Make believe play-

                        Children acting out everyday and imaginary activicties.

INFORMATION PROCESSING APPROCH

This approch analyze how individuals manipulates information, monitor it, and create strategies for handling it. Affective information processing involves attention, memory and thinking, one after other in sequential order.

These process may overlap, but always goes in left to right sequence.

Information Processing Approch Applied to development-

According to seigler, three mechanism works together to create changes in children’s cognitive skills-

1.    Encoding-  process by which information gets into memory. Changes in children’s cognitive skills depend on increased skill at encoding relevant information and ignoring irrelevant information.

2.    Automaticity- ability to process information with little or no effort.practice allows children to encode increasing amount of information automatically. Eg- learning to read. This automaticity increases speed as they can encode more at a given time.

3.    Strategy Construction- creation of new procedures for processing information. Ie, a strategy that makes information processing more effective.

Sieglar argues that childrens information processing is charecterized by self modification- ie, Child learns to use what they have learned in previous circumstances to adapt their response to new situation. This happens due to presence of metacognition in child. Ie, cognition about cognition.

Speed of processing information-

          Increases drastically over childhood years. Can be due to biological maturation or due to experience. Speed declines at middle adulthood and slowdown continues as late adulthood progress. But the strategies aew used to compensate slowdown in processing. 

Vygotsky’s socio-cultural Theory

Piaget emphasises biological side of cognitive development.  Social and cultural context emphasised in Vygotsky. Child is active learner as in piaget, but rejects individualistic view of developing the child.

Basic idea- Individuals are endowed with basic perceptual, attention and memory capacities like all animals which grows in first 2 years. Aquisition of language leads to profound change in thinking through participation in social dialogues and masters culturally important tasks. As a result basic mental capacities are transformed into uniquely human higher cognitive processes.

 Private speech- Piagets ego centric speech reflects childs difficulty in taking perspectives of others. Changes as cognitive develpment. Sees others have diff. Openions, so changes it into social speech. But vygotsky objects it, calls it self guidance. Tasks difficult at begining so self talk to keep motivated, decision making etc. Later it goes off coz task easy. Accepted version.

Social Orgin of Cognitive development- learning of new cognitive skills happens in zone of proximal development- tasks too difficult for child to do alone but possible with help of adults or more skilled.  To promote cognitive development, social interaction must have certain features-

(a)  Intersubjectivity- process by which two paricipants who begin a task with different understanding arrived at a shared understanding. Common ground for communication

(b)  Scaffolding- adjusting the support offered during teaching session to fit child’s current level of performance. Also called guided participation

Make believe play-  its important source of development during preschool days.- learns in two ways- (i) create imaginary situation,learn to act acoording any internal ideas, and not just react to external stimuli. (ii) its rule-based nature, also strengthens childs capacity to think before they act.  Make believe play serves as a zone of proximal development, supporting emergence and refinement of many competencies.

Vygotsky and Education-

Emphasises the importance of social context. Vygotskian classroom is similiar to Piagetian in terms of accepting individual differences and promote active participation, yet goes beyond a step by promoting assisted discovery. Teachers intervent in each students zone of proximal development. Two typical Vygotskian educational innovations are-

(a)  Reciprocal Teaching- a  teacher and two to four children take a group and takes turn leading dialogues on content of text passage. Within dialogues, group members apply four coginitive strategies- questioning, summarizing, clarifying and predicting.  (Reading Comprehension)

(b)  Cooperative Learning- among more expert children. Peeers help fellow being to fit less mature child’s zone of proximal development.

Evaluation of Vygotsky’s Theory

Vygostsky’s theory includes cultural variation in cognitive skills unlike Piaget who spoke of universal . Undervalues role of teaching in coginitive development.

 -ves- Over emphasis on language, Overseeing biologivcal contribution to childs cognition.