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Exam 2 Study Guide Chapter 6 Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development Process of Development ● Schemes - (in piaget’s theory) actions or mental representation that organize knowledge; how infants seek to construct an understanding of the world, and develop over time ○ Behavioral schemes - physical  activities, characterize infancy ○ Mental schemes - cognitive activities, develop in childhood ● Assimilation and Accommodation - two concepts offered by Piaget to explain how children use and adapt their schemes ○ Assimilation - piagetian concept in which children use existing schemes to incorporate new information ■ Ex. a toddler who has learned to use the word car to identify the family’s car. The toddler might call all moving vehicles on the road “cars”, including motorcycles and trucks; the child has assimilated theses objects to his/her existing scheme ○ Accommodation - piagetian concept of adjusting schemes to fit new information and experiences ■ Ex. the child soon learns that motorcycles and trucks are not cars and fine-tunes the category to exclude motorcycles and trucks, accommodating the scheme ● Organization - piagetian concept of grouping isolated behaviors and thoughts into higher-order, more smoothly functioning cognitive system ○ Ex. a child who has a vague idea how to use a hammer may also have a vague idea about how to use other tools. After learning how to use each one, the child relates these uses, organizing his knowledge. ● Equilibrium - a mechanism piaget proposed to explain how children shift from one stage of thought to the next

Stages of Development

Sensorimotor Stage ● Lasts from birth to 2 years ● Infants construct and understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences (seeing and hearing) with physical, motoric actions ● Beginning of this stage - newborns have little reflexes ● End of this stage - 2 year olds can produce complex sensorimotor patterns and use primitive symbols ● Divided into 6 substages ○ 1. Simple reflexes - first month after birth; sensation and actions are coordinated primarily through reflexive behaviors, such as rooting and sucking ○ 2. First habits and primary circular reactions -  develops between 1 and 4 months of age; infants coordinate sensation and two types of schemes: habits and primary circular reactions ■ Habit - scheme based on a reflex and has become completely separated from its eliciting stimulus ■ Circular action - repetitive action ■ Primary circular reaction - scheme based on the attempt to reproduce an event that initially occurred by chance ○ 3. Secondary circular reactions - develops between 4 and 8 months; infant becomes more object oriented, moving beyond preoccupation with oneself

■ Infants schemes are not intentional or goal-directed, but they are repeated because of their consequences ■ Secondary circular reaction - an action repeated because of its consequences ○ 4. Coordination of secondary circular reactions - develops between 8 and 12 months of age; to progress into this stage, the infant must coordinate vision and touch, hand and eye; actions become more outwardly directed ■ Significant changes involve coordination of schemes and intentionality ■ Infants readily combine and recombine previously learned schemes in a coordinated way ○ 5. Tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and curiosity - 12 to 18 months; infants become intrigued by the many properties of objects and by the many things they can make happen to objects; they experiment with new behavior ■ Tertiary circular reactions - schemes in which the infant purposely explores new possibilities with objects, continually doing new things to them and exploring the results ○ 6. Internalization of schemes - 19 to 24 months; infants develop the ability to use primitive symbols and form enduring material representations

Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive Development Zone of Proximal Development ● Vygotsky’s term for the range of tasks that are too difficult for the child to master alone but can be learned through guidance and assistance from adults or more skilled children ● Lower limit - the level of skill reached by the child working independently ● Upper limit -  level of additional responsibility the child can accept with the assistance of an able instructor ● ZPD’s effectiveness is enhanced by factors such as better emotion regulation, secure attachment, absence of maternal depression, and child compliance Scaffolding ● In cognitive development, a term vygotsky used to describe the changing level of support over the course of a teaching session, with the more skilled person adjusting guidance to fit the child’s current performance level ○ Dialogue -  an important tool of scaffolding in the ZPD; helps make the child’s concepts more systematic, logical, and rational Key Terms ● A-not-B error - error that occurs when infants make the mistake of selecting the familiar hiding place (A) of an object rather than its new hiding place (B) as they progress into stage 4 in piaget’s sensorimotor stage ● Accommodation - piagetian concept of adjusting schemes to fit new information and experiences ● Adolescent egocentrism - the heightened self-consciousness of adolescents, which is reflected in adolescents beliefs that others are interested in them as much as they are themselves, sense of personal uniqueness and invincibility ● Animism - the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of action ● Assimilation - piagetian concept in which children use existing schemes to incorporate new information ● Centration - focusing attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others ● Conservation - the awareness that altering the appearance of an object or substance does not change its basic properties ● Core knowledge approach - states that infants are born with domain-specific innate knowledge systems. Among these specific knowledge systems are those involving space, number sense, object permanence, and language ● Egocentrism - the inability to distinguish between one’s own and someone else’s perspective; an important feature in preoperational thought

● Equilibrium - a mechanism that piaget proposed to explain how children shift from one stage of thought to the next ● hypothetical -deductive reasoning - piaget's formal operational concept that adolescents have the cognitive ability to develop hypotheses about ways to solve problems and can systematically deduce which is the best path to follow in solving the problem ● Imaginary audience - the aspect of adolescent egocentrism that involves feeling that one is the center of attention and sensing that one is on stage ● Intuitive thought substage - the second substage in preoperational thought (4-7); children begin to use primitive reasoning and want to the know the answers to all sorts of questions ● neo-Piagetians - developmentalists who have elaborated on piaget’s theory, emphasizing attention to children’s strategies; information-processing speed; the tasks involved; and division of the problem into more precise, smaller steps ● Object permanence - the piagetian term for one of an infant’s most important accomplishments: understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot directly be seen, heard, or touched ● Operations - reversible mental actions that allow children to do mentally what before they had done only physically ● Organization - piagetian concept of grouping isolated behaviors and thought into a higher-order, more smoothly functioning cognitive system ● Personal fable - the part of adolescent egocentrism that involves adolescent’s sense of personal uniqueness and invincibility ● Postformal thought - thinking that is reflective, relativistic, and contextual; provisional, realistic, and influenced by emotions ● Seriation - the concrete operation that involves ordering stimuli along a quantitative dimension ● Social constructivist approach - an emphasis on the social contexts of learning and construction of knowledge through social interaction. Vygotsky’s theory reflects this approach ● Symbolic function substage - first substage of preoperational thought, occurring roughly between the ages of 2 and 4; the young child gains the ability to represent mentally and object that is not present ● Transitivity - the ability to logically combine relations to understand certain conclusions

Chapter 7 The Information-Processing Approach ● This approach analyzes how individuals encode information, manipulate it, monitor it, and create strategies for handling it ● Shares some characteristics with the theories of cognitive development; reject the behavioral approach

● “How people think” ● According to Seigler, three mechanisms work together to create changes in children’s cognitive skills: encoding, automaticity, and strategy construction ○ Encoding - the process by which information gets into memory (cursive writing vs. normal writing) ○ Automaticity - the ability to process information with little or no effort ○ Strategy construction - creation of new procedures for processing information ● In addition, Siegler argues that children’s information processing is characterized by self  modification; children learn to apply what they have learned in previous circumstances to adapt their responses to a new situation ● Part of self-modification draws on metacognition -- “thinking about thinking, knowing about knowing” Speed of Processing Information ● A limitation on processing information is the speed at which it takes place ● Changes in Speed of Processing: ○ Speed with which cognitive tasks are completed improves dramatically during childhood ○ Twelve-year-olds were approximately 1.5 times slower than young adults, but 15-year-olds processed information on the tasks as quickly as the young adults. Also, a study of 8- to 13-year-old children revealed that processing speed increased with age and, further, that the developmental change in processing speed preceded an increase in working memory capacity (Kail, 2007). A recent study of 9- to 14-year-olds also revealed that faster processing speed was linked to a higher level of oral reading fluency (Jacobson & others, 2011). ○ Processing speed increases across childhood and adolescence. Processing speed slows in middle and late adulthood. However, strategies that people learn through

experiences can compensate for age related decline in processing speed to some degree

Attention Types of Attention ● Attention - focusing of mental resources ● Selective attention - focusing on a specific aspect of experience that is relevant while ignoring others that are irrelevant ○ Ex. focusing on a single voice in a crowded restaurant ● Divided attention - concentrating on more than one activity at the same time ○ Ex. listening to music and reading a book at the same time ● Sustained attention - the ability to maintain attention to a selected stimulus for a prolonged period of time ○ Also called vigilance, being alert, as well as paying attention ● Executive attention - cognitive process involving planning actions, allocating attention to goals, detecting and compensating for errors, monitoring progress on tasks, and dealing with novel or difficult circumstances Infancy ● Older infants can scan patterns more thoroughly, and the preferred level of complexity increases, ensuring that they are learning to process more complex information ● Orienting/Investigative Process ○ Process dominates the first year of life ○ Involves directing attention to potentially important locations in the environment (where) and recognizing objects and their features (what) ○ From 3-9 months, infants can deploy their attention more flexibly and quickly ● Habituation and Dishabituation ○ Closely linked to attention ○ Habituation - decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated presentations of the stimulus ○ Dishabituation - the recovery of responsiveness after a change in stimulation ○ Attention is often linked to novelty and habituation; when an object becomes familiar, attention becomes shorter, making infants more vulnerable to distraction ● Joint Attention - focus by individuals on the same object or event: requires: ○ 1. an ability to track another’s behavior ○ 2. one individual to direct another’s attention ○ 3. reciprocal interaction ○ Plays important roles in many aspects of infant development and considerably increases infant’s ability to learn from other people

Childhood and Adolescence ● Child’s ability to pay attention improves significantly during preschool years ( have most vigilance) ● Young children especially make advances in two aspects of attention: ○ Executive attention ○ Sustained attention ● In at least two ways the preschool child’s control of attention is still deficient: ○ Salient vs. relevant dimensions  - children are more likely to pay attention to stimuli that stand out (salient), even though those stimuli are not relevant to performing a task ○ Planfulness - planning improves as part of advances in executive attention; elementary school children are more likely to systematically compare the details ● Attention to relevant information increases steadily during elementary and secondary school years ● Processing of irrelevant information decreases in adolescence ● Older children and adolescents are better than younger children at tasks that require shifting attention -- multitasking Adulthood ● Attentional skills are often excellent in early adulthood ● Older adults have more difficulty in attention that involves various aspects of driving, distraction, selective attention, and comlex vigilance tasks ● Older adults tend to be less adept at exercising selective attention -- focusing on a specific aspect of experience while ignoring others -- than younger adults are ● Older adults experiences and wisdom might be able to offset some of their declines in vigilance

Memory What is memory? ● Memory - the retention of information over time

● Process of memory (listed above) ● Constructing Memory ○ Memories may be inaccurate for a number of reasons ○ According to schema  theory, people mold memories to fit information that already exists in their minds ○ This process is guided by schemas, which are mental frameworks that organize concepts and information ○ Schemas influence the way in which people encode, make inferences about, and retrieve information Childhood ● Children’s memory improves considerably after infancy; progress includes improvements in short-term and long-term memory, as well as the use of strategies ● Short term and working memory ○ Long term memory - relatively permanent and unlimited ○ Short term memory- involves retaining information for up to 30 seconds without rehearsal of the information ■ Has a limited capacity ■ Memory-span - can be used to assess the capacity of short term memory ■ Rehearsal of information is important; speed of processing is important ○ Working memory - mental “workbench” where individuals manipulate and assemble information when they make decisions, solve problems, and comprehend written and spoken language ■ Described as more active and powerful in modifying information than short-term memory ■ Linked to many aspects of child development (reading comprehension, math skills, problem solving) ● Long term memory - relatively permanent type of memory that stores huge amounts of information for a long time ○ Autobiographical memory - memory of significant events and experiences in one’s life (who was your first grade teach?) ● Strategies - involve the use of mental activities to improve processing information (rehearsing and organizing) ○ Rehearsing - short term ○ Organization - long term; elaborate information, make it personally relevant ○ Imagery - creating mental images ○ Elaboration - strategy of engaging in more extensive processing of information

● Fuzzy Trace Theory - emphasizes the reconstructive aspects of memory provides an alternative to strategies in explaining developmental changes in children's memory; states  that memory is best understood by considering two types of memory representations: ○ Verbatim memory trace -consists  of the precise details of the information ○ Gist - central idea of the information → fuzzy traces build up ● Knowledge - important influence on memory; influences what people notice and how they organize, represent and interpret information→ affects tje ability to remember, reason, and solve problems Adulthood ● Working Memory and Processing speed - two important cognitive resources linked with aging ○ Decline in working memory during late adulthood ○ Exercise and cognitive training improved working memory in older adults ○ Older adults have less efficient inhibition in preventing irrelevant information from entering working memory and have an increased distractibility ○ Declines in processing speed in middle and late adulthood may play a role in working memory decline as well ● Explicit and Implicit Memory ○ Included in long-term memory systems ○ Explicit memory - (declarative memory) conscious memory of facts and experiences; can be subdivided into episodic  memory  and semantic  memory ■ Episodic memory - retention of information about the where and when of life’s happenings ■ Semantic memory - a person’s knowledge about the world; includes a person’s fields of expertise, general academic knowledge of the sort learned in school, and “everyday knowledge” ○ Implicit memory - (procedural memory) memory of skills and routine procedures that are performed automatically ● Aging and Explicit Memory ○ Older adults often take longer to retrieve semantic information, but usually they can ultimately retrieve it ○ Common memory problem for older adults is the tip-of-the-tongue ( TOT) phenomenon - individuals can’t quite retrieve familiar information but they have the feeling that they should be able to retrieve it ● Aging and Implicit Memory ○ Less likely than explicit memory to be adversely affected by aging ○ Processing speed may be slower, but the knowledge is remembered

● Source Memory - the ability to remember where one learned something ( physical setting, emotional context, identity of the speaker) ● Prospective memory - involves remembering to do something in the future (ex. Remembering to take medicine)

Thinking What is Thinking? ● Thinking - manipulating and transforming information in memory; we think in order to reason, reflect, evaluate ideas, solve problems, and make decisions Infancy and Childhood ● Concept Formation and Categorization in Infancy ○ Concepts - cognitive groupings of similar objects, events, people, or ideas ■ key aspects of infant’s cognitive development ■ Categorization ● Executive Function ○ Executive function - an umbrella-like concept that encompasses a number of higher level cognitive processes linked to the development of the brain’s prefrontal cortex ○ Involves managing one’s thoughts to engage in goal directed behavior and exercise self-control ○ In early childhood, executive function involves developmental advances in cognitive inhibition, cognitive flexibility, goal-setting, and delay of gratification ○ Most important cognitive developments for 4-11 year old children: ■ Self control/inhibition - children need to develop self control that will allow them to concentrate and persist on learning tasks, to inhibit their tendencies to repeat incorrect responses, and to resist the impulse to do something now that they would regret later ■ Working memory - children need an effective working memory to effectively process the masses of information they will encounter as they go through school and beyond ■ Flexibility - children need to be flexible in their thinking to consider different strategies and perspectives ● Critical Thinking ○ Involves grasping deeper meaning of ideas, keeping an open mind about different approaches and perspectives, and deciding for oneself what to believe or do ● Scientific Thinking ● Solving Problems

Adolescence ● Cognitive Control ○ Involves exercising effective control in a number of areas, including focusing attention, reducing interfering thoughts, and being cognitively flexible ○ Increases in adolescence and emerging adulthood ○ Cognitive flexibility - involves being aw...