Cognitive Development

How a mind adapts to the environment to reduce uncertainty

Cognitive Development

How humans acquire:

knowledge/understanding about the world
skills/abilities to solve problems
their disposition/sense of ‘self’

Sources & Topics

Findings - what research has demonstrated
Theories - how people think cognitive development works
Theorists - who are/were the most influential minds leading the field
Methods - how do researchers find evidence that supports or refutes theories?

Early Influential Theorists:

Jean Piaget (1896 - 1980)

Lev Vygotsky (1896 - 1934)

Piaget was a Swiss clinical psychologist. He got his PhD not in psychology, but in Malaculogy. And was well recognized in the field of malaculogy by the age of 20. Published his first paper at the age of 10, about an albino sparrow that he found in his backyard. Got into psychology in his post-doctoral work where he worked under Theodore Simon (a student of Alfred Biney) where he developed a standard test of children’s understanding of Aristotelian Syllogisms (when two true premises validly imply a conclusion; If all humans are mortal and all greeks are humans, then all greeks are mortal).

Lev Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist. What you may notice here is he had a tragically short life. He died at the age of 37, succumbing to Tuberculosis. But before he died he was a prolific writer and thinker and developed some profound new ideas about how development occurs across time.

These were not the only two theorists who were making big influential theories during this time, there were others (G. Stanley Hall, Arnold Gesell, Charles Darwin).

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Stages

More stages: 6 Sensorimotor Substages

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development

“How do I reach my goals?”

Do different theories always compete?

Piaget’s Theory: Ways in which cognitive development generally changes across time, mutatis mutandis
Vygotsky’s Theory: What is the engine of cognitive development? What activities enhance learning?

Different Theories may differ on key aspects

Continuous vs. Discontinuous
Nature vs. Nurture
Global vs. Local
Variable vs. Invariant

How is development taking place, according to Piaget?

Schemes: organized patterns of functioning that can adapt and change throughout development.

Assimilation: a process by which people understand an experience using their current scheme(s).
Accommodation: the process by which people change their existing schemes in light of a novel stimuli.

Stages of Development: Emphasizing specific Schemes or “Crucial Knowledge”

Babies/children are learning a huge amount about the world
Research tends to fixate on a selection of crucial knowledge
All knowledge is not equally represented in the research

Sensorimotor Stages: Object Permanence

That objects continue to exist when they are not in view
Piaget noticed infants (~9months) would behave in ways that suggested that the infants thought objects that were no longer in view no longer existed.
What is that behaviour? The A-not-B error

A-not-B error

Object Permanence

Between 8-12 months of age infants begin to stop making the ‘A-not-B error’
They point to location ‘B’

Renee Baillargeon & the Violation of Expectation Paradigm

Baillargeon’s Findings:

Infants show that they have a concept of object permanence at 5-months of age.
Much earlier than originally thought!

Pre-operational Stage: Egocentrism

Piaget’s Experiments on Egocentrism

Children (2-7 years old) often incorrectly chose the photograph that represented their own view, instead of the doll’s view.
As children got older, they were more likely to correctly choose the photograph representing the dolls’ view
Piaget concluded that part of the developmental progression at this age is away from an egocentric view of the world, and toward one that accomodated other people’s perspectives.

Challenges to the Three Mountains Experiment

It involves the child needing to do mental spatial rotation, which is hard!
It requires children to select between different photographs, and this choice may be especially difficult

Critiques: maybe the task is hard, not because it requires perspective-taking, but due to other task features and if the task didn’t have those features, they would answer correctly!

Metacognition: Talking about thinking

By 3rd birthday, children realize that thinking happens in the head.
& that a person can think about something even if it isn’t physically present.
Limits: 3-4 year olds think that thinking stops when people are waiting, looking at pictures, or reading books.
Distinctions between words for mental representations (“knowing” vs. “forgetting”) are difficult.

Talking about thinking: Metacognition

Concrete Operational Stage: Seriation

Children begin to understand that different objects can be ordered along quantitative dimensions (e.g., length, weight, color)
Transitive Inference: if A > B and B > C then A > C
Limits: Struggle with transitive inference when there is no visual/tangible objects to compare

Formal Operational Stage: Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning

During the concrete operational stage, people can imagine operations on concrete objects, when they reach the Formal operational stage, they begin to imagine operations on operations! (abstract reasoning)
Shift from Inductive reasoning to Deductive Reasoning

Inductive = using specific observations to form a general conclusion
Deductive = Using a general premise to form a specific conclusion

Theory of Mind (ToM)

Also known as “mindreading” or “mentalizing”

Theory of Mind (ToM)

Social interactions are built upon predictions about other people’s behaviour
We learn that other people have normative reasons for their behaviour
Chris stopped speaking because he saw something unusual at the back of the room

Mental States

dispositions about the world which guide a person’s actions:
She got on the bus to the beach because she wants to go swimming

Mental States about other people

We can have mental states about other people’s actions:
I think that she took the bus to the beach

Mental States about others’ mental states

We can have mental states about other people’s mental states:
I think that she thinks that she is on the bus to the beach

Mental States can be counterfactual

I think that she thinks that she is on the bus to the beach, when actually, she is on the bus to the city.
In this situation, we suspect that the woman getting on the bus may have a false belief

Mental States are Complex!

At what age do children begin to demonstrate an awareness of other peoples’ mental states?
& that they are different than our own
& that they can be false

False Beliefs - ‘Unexpected Transfer’ Tasks

Findings in ‘Sally Anne’ Task:

Children begin to answer correctly (i.e., they choose the basket) around their 4th birthday.

Onishi & Baillargeon (2005) Familiarization Trials

Onishi & Baillargeon (2005) Belief Induction Trials

Onishi & Baillargeon (2005) - Test Trials

Onishi & Baillargeon (2005) Results

Conclusions

15-month olds looked longer after the agent acts in a way that violates her false belief!
Explanation: They look longer because they are surprised and they are surprised because they expected her to act on her false belief
Therefore, 15 month-olds have a theory of mind!?

Contradictory findings!

Children cannot correctly answer questions about other peoples’ minds until ~4 years of age

Infants show looking behaviour that suggests they do know about other people’s minds