CHAPTER 7COGNITION

Learning Objectives

• What is cognition?• How did Piaget define intelligence?• According to Piaget’s theory, how do

organization, adaptation, and disequilibrium function in the development of intelligence?

• According to Piaget’s theory, what are the stages through which cognition develops?

Cognition

• Cognition is the activity of knowing and the processes through which knowledge is acquired and problems are solved

• Humans are cognitive beings throughout the lifespan, but cognition changes in important ways

Piaget’s Constructivist Approach

• Piaget noticed that children of the same age often made similar kinds of mental mistakes– Studied how children think, not just what

they know

• Piaget’s initial studies were his naturalistic observations of his own infant children

• Piaget also used a clinical method, a flexible question-and-answer technique, to discover how children think about problems

Piaget’s Constructivist Approach – What Is Intelligence?

• Piaget’s definition of intelligence: a basic life function that helps an organism adapt to its environment

• Piaget viewed infants as active agents, learning about people and things by observing, investigating, and experimenting

• Through exploration, the brain responds by creating schemes/schema/schemata– Cognitive structures – organized patterns of action

or thought that people construct to interpret their experiences

– Rules or procedures that structure our cognition

Piaget’s Constructivist Approach – How Does Intelligence Develop?

• Knowledge is created by building schemes from experiences using two inborn functions, organization and adaptation– Organization – existing schemes are

systematically combined into new and complex schemes

– Adaptation – process of adjusting to the demands of the environment that occurs through assimilation and accommodation

Piaget’s Constructivist Approach – How Does Intelligence Develop?

• Adaptation– Assimilation – an adaptive process through

which we interpret new experiences in terms of existing schemes or cognitive structures

• Example: we have a scheme for dogs and fit our experience with a new animal into our existing scheme for dogs

Piaget’s Constructivist Approach – How Does Intelligence Develop?

• Accommodation – an adaptive process of modifying existing schemes in order to better fit new experiences– Example: We have a scheme for dogs, but

the animal we see is larger or barks in a different way, so we must change our scheme in order to account for the animal

Piaget’s Constructivist Approach – How Does Intelligence Develop?

• According to Piaget, cognitive conflict occurs when new events seriously challenge old schemes or prove our existing schemes to be inadequate– Stimulates cognitive growth – Motivated to reduce cognitive conflict

through equilibration• Process of achieving mental stability so

that our internal thoughts are consistent with the evidence in the external world

Piaget’s Constructivist Approach – How Does Intelligence Develop?

• Humans progress through four invariant stages of cognitive development– Sensorimotor stage: birth to approximately

2 years of age– Preoperational stage: approximately 2-7

years of age– Concrete operations stage: approximately

7-11 years of age– Formal operations stage: approximately 11

years of age and beyond

Caption: Process of change in Jean Piaget’s theory

Learning Objectives

• What are the major achievements of the sensorimotor stage ?

• How do infants progress toward these achievements?

The Infant

• Sensorimotor Stage– The world is understood through the

senses and actions– The dominant cognitive structures are the

behavioral schemes that develop through coordination of sensory information and motor responses

The Infant – Substages of the Sensorimotor Stage

• Reflexes – first month– Reflexive reaction to internal and external

stimulation

• Primary circular reactions – 1-4 months– Infants repeat actions relating to their own

bodies

• Secondary circular reactions – 4-8 months– Repetitive actions involving something in

the infant’s external environment

The Infant – Substages of the Sensorimotor Stage

• Coordination of secondary schemes – 8-12 months– Secondary actions are coordinated in order to

achieve simple goals (i.e., pushing or grasping)

• Tertiary circular reactions – 12-18 months– Experimentation; actions are repeated with

variations• Beginning of thought – 18 months

– Symbolic thought permits mental representation, imitation, and recall

The Infant – The Development of Object Permanence

• Object permanence develops during the sensorimotor period– The understanding that objects continue to exist when

they are not visible• From 4-8 months, “out of sight, out of mind”• By 8-12 months, make the A-not-B error

– Infants will search for an object in the place they last found it (A), rather than in a new place (B)

• By 1 year, A-not-B error is overcome, but continued trouble with invisible displacement

• By 18 months, object permanence is mastered– The infant can mentally represent an invisible

action (a toy is being hidden) and conceive of the object in its final location

The Infant – The Development of Object Permanence

• Research suggests that infants may develop at least some understanding of object permanence far earlier than Piaget believed– By 3 months, infants appear to understand that

objects have qualities that should permit them to be visible when nothing obstructs them

– Success on object permanence tasks also may be influenced by task conditions, such as the time interval between seeing something hidden and being able to search for it

• Infants improve their looking and reaching skills between 8 and 12 months

• By 24 months, infants can play complex hide-and-seek games

The Infant – The Emergence of Symbols

• Symbolic capacity is the crowning achievement of the sensorimotor stage– Ability to use images, words, gestures to

represent or stand for objects and experiences

– Can use internal behavioral schemes to construct mental symbols that can guide future behavior

• By 24 months, children are deliberate thinkers with a symbolic capacity that lets them solve problems in their heads

Learning Objective

• What are the characteristics and limitations of preoperational thought?

The Child – The Preoperational Stage

• Symbolic capacity is the greatest cognitive strength of the preschooler– Can refer to past and future– Pretend or fantasy play flourishes

• Can include imaginary companions– Focus on perceptual salience – the most

obvious features of an object or a situation – means that preschoolers can be fooled by appearance

– Have difficulty with tasks that require logic

The Child – The Preoperational Stage

• Reliance on perceptions and lack of logical thought means that children have difficulty with conservation– The idea that certain properties of an object or

substance do not change when its appearance is altered in a superficial way

– Piaget’s conservation-of-liquid-quantity task• Children younger than 6 or 7 typically do

not understand that the volume of liquid is conserved despite the change in the shape it takes in different containers

The Child – The Preoperational Stage• Why do preschoolers have difficulty with the conservation

task?– Unable to engage in decentration, the ability to focus on

two or more dimensions of a problem at once• Preoperational thinkers engage in centration, the

tendency to center attention on a single aspect of a problem

– Preschoolers lack reversibility, the process of mentally undoing or reversing an action

– Preoperational thinkers engage in static thought, thought that is fixed on end states rather than the changes that transform one state into another• They lack transformational thought, the ability to

conceptualize transformations or processes of change from one state to another

The Child – The Preoperational Stage

• Comparison of a preoperational thinkers and concrete-operational thinkers on the conservation task– Younger children do not understand

conservation because they engage in centration, irreversible thought, and static thought

– Older children understand conservation because they have mastered decentration, reversibility, and transformational thought

The Child – The Preoperational Stage• Additional limitations of preoperational thinkers

– Egocentrism • A tendency to view the world solely from one’s

own perspective and to have difficulty recognizing other points of view

– Difficulty with classification • Using criteria to sort objects on the basis of

characteristics such as shape, color, function• Lack class inclusion, the ability to relate the

whole class (furry animals) to its subclasses (dogs, cats)

– The preoperational child does not understand that the subclasses are included within the whole class

Caption: A typical class inclusion problem in which children are asked whether there are more dogs or more animals in the picture

The Child – The Preoperational Stage

• Did Piaget underestimate the preschool child?– Researchers have used simple tasks to identify

cognitive abilities• Gelman (1972) discovered that children as

young as 3 have some grasp of the concept that a number remains the same even when items are rearranged spatially

• Preschoolers may not be as egocentric as Piaget claimed

• Preschool children seem to have more understanding of classification systems than Piaget believed

Learning Objective

• What are the major characteristics and limitations of concrete-operational thought?

The Child – The Concrete-Operations Stage

• Concrete operations involve mastering the logical operations missing in the preoperational stage– Conservation

• The concrete-operational child can decenter and can use reversibility and transformational thought

– Operational abilities evolve in predictable order• Horizontal décalage – different cognitive

skills related to the same stage of cognitive development emerge at different times

The Child – The Concrete-Operations Stage– Seriation enables the concrete-operational

child to arrange items mentally along a quantifiable dimension such as weight or height

– Transitivity is the understanding of relationships among elements in a series• If John is taller than Mark, and Mark is taller

than Sam, who is taller—John or Sam?• School-age children are less egocentric and are

better at recognizing the perspectives of others• Classification abilities improve and subclasses

are understood to be included in a whole class

Caption: Some common tests of the child’s ability to conserve

Learning Objectives

• What are the main features of formal operational thought?

• In what ways might adult thought be more advanced than adolescent thought?

The Adolescent – The Formal-Operations Stage

• Formal operations are mental actions on ideas– More abstract than concrete operations

• Formal operations permit systematic and scientific thinking about problems, hypothetical ideas, and abstract concepts– Piaget’s pendulum task illustrates the use of

hypothetical-deductive reasoning• Involves reasoning from general ideas or rules

to their specific implications– Forming hypotheses and systematically

testing them through an experimental method

The Adolescent – The Formal-Operations Stage

• According to Piaget, the transition from concrete operations to formal operations takes place gradually over years– Adolescents may show an awareness of scientific reasoning but

may not be able to produce logical scientific reasoning skills until later

– Intuitive and scientific reasoning coexist in older thinkers• Being able to shift between the two forms of reasoning

provides flexibility in problem-solving situations– With age, adolescents are increasingly able to decontextualize,

or separate prior knowledge and beliefs from the requirements of the task at hand

– The achievement of formal-operational thinking depends on opportunities to learn scientific reasoning, as through exposure to math and science education

The Adolescent – The Formal-Operations Stage

• Formal operations contribute to positive aspects of adolescent development.– Sense of identity, complex thinking, appreciation of

humor• Formal operations contributes to not-so-positive

aspects of adolescent development– Questioning can lead to confusion and to

adolescent idealism and rebellion against ideas that are not logical

– Can lead to adolescent egocentrism, difficult differentiating one’s own thoughts and feelings from those of other people

The Adolescent – The Formal-Operations Stage

• Adolescent egocentrism can take two forms– Imaginary audience

• The phenomenon of confusing one’s own thoughts with those of an hypothesized audience for your behavior

• Characterized by self-consciousness– “They’re all thinking that I am a slob”

– Personal fable• A tendency to think that you and your thoughts are unique

– “You could never understand how I feel!”– Characterized by a sense of specialness

• High scores on measures of adolescent egocentrism are associated with risky behavior

• The self-consciousness and the sense of specialness are most evident in early adolescence and decline by late high school

• However, adolescent egocentrism may persist when adolescents have insecure relationships with their parents

Learning Objectives

• How do theories of postformal thought explain cognitive development in adulthood?

• What happens to cognitive capacities in later adulthood?

The Adult – Limitations in Cognitive Performance

• Research has revealed limitations in adult cognitive performance– Only about half of all college students show firm

and consistent mastery of formal operations on Piaget’s scientific reasoning tasks

– Many American adults do not solve scientific problems at the formal level

– There are some societies in which no adults solve formal-operational problems

• Adults are likely to use formal operations in a field of expertise and to use concrete operations on unfamiliar problems

The Adult – Growth Beyond Formal Operations

• Theorists have proposed two forms of postformal thought or ways of thinking that are more complex than formal operations– Relativistic thinking – understanding that

knowledge depends upon its context and the subjective perspective of the knower

– Dialectical thinking – detecting paradoxes and inconsistencies among ideas and trying to reconcile them• Advanced dialectical thinkers challenge and

change their understanding of what constitutes “truth”

The Adult – Aging and Cognitive Skills

• Cross-sectional comparison studies have shown poorer cognitive performances by elderly individuals relative to young and middle-aged adults

• The results should be interpreted with caution– Poorer performance could result from a cohort effect: older

adults may have less formal education than the younger adults

– Training can reactivate cognitive abilities– The tasks may not be relevant to older adults– Older adults may use modes of cognition that are useful in

daily life but that are not helpful in laboratory tests– Cultural differences can affect older adults’ performances

• Summary: an age-related decline in operational abilities has not been firmly established

Piaget in Perspective – Piaget’s Contributions

• Piaget’s theory has stimulated much research and continues to guide the study of human development

• Piaget showed us that infants are active in their own development

• Piaget showed us that infants and children think differently at each stage of development

• Piaget’s account of the direction of cognitive development (sequence) was basically correct, even though cultural factors may influence the rate of cognitive growth

Piaget in Perspective – Challenges to Piaget

• Piaget seems to have underestimated the cognitive abilities of young minds

• Piaget failed to distinguish between competence and performance– Overemphasized the idea that knowledge is an all-or-nothing

concept• Piaget wrongly claimed that broad stages of development exist

– That thinking within a stage is coherent or consistent and that transition between stages is swift and abrupt

• Piaget failed to adequately explain development– Perhaps a better job of describing development than

explaining development?• Piaget gave inadequate attention to the social influences upon

cognitive development

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective

• Culture and society are pivotal in Vygotsky’s theory– Knowledge depends on social experiences– Cognitive development varies from society

to society depending upon the mental tools such as language that the culture values and makes available

– Children acquire mental tools through interaction with parents and other more experienced members of society and by adopting their language and knowledge

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective• Vygotsky’s ideas about how social interaction fosters

cognitive children’s growth– Zone of proximal development

• The gap between what a learner can accomplish independently and what she can accomplish with the guidance and encouragement of a more skilled partner

– Guided participation• Children’s active participation in culturally

relevant activities with the aid and support of parents and other knowledgeable guides

– Parents provide scaffolding when they give structured help and gradually reduce the help as the child becomes more competent

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective• Vygotsky believed that mental activity is mediated

by tools– Spoken language, writing, using numbers,

applying problem-solving and memory strategies• Vygotsky argued that thought changes

fundamentally once we begin to think in words– Private speech – speech to oneself that guides

one’s thoughts and behavior• Helps children think their way through

challenging problems• Allows them to incorporate into their own

thinking the problem-solving strategies learned during collaborations with adults

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective – Evaluation

• Vygotsky has been criticized for placing too much emphasis on social interaction and insufficient attention upon individual construction of knowledge