Cognitive Development and Education

Johanna Turner

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351806305
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychologie cognitive et cognition

Children think in a different way to adults. They also think differently at different ages. This book, originally published in 1984, studies the growth of those processes by means of which thinking evolves from infancy through childhood and adolescence into adulthood. It covers perception, memory, language and, above all, the development of mental 'programmes', or strategies, through which people structure and hence comprehend the information coming to them from their environment.

The study of cognitive development has obvious educational implications. Development in the pre-school period, the appropriateness of schooling for levels of cognitive competence, and the significance of ageing are just some of the issues considered.

1

Introduction

Approaches to cognitive development

Imagine a student sitting with this book before her (or, of course, him). As she glances around she will see objects and people. She will be able to categorize these objects as ‘a chair’, ‘a table’, and so on. She may notice, momentarily, a fly settling on the book or a bird flying past the window. She will be able to remember what has happened in the immediate or distant past and make plans for the future. She can communicate with people in the room, and abstract meanings from the symbols on this page. She may look at a picture on the wall or listen to a piece of music. Such behaviour is taken for granted, much is automatic, yet for it to happen at all requires the utilization of complex cognitive processes. Were she to become ill, or injured, had she been born blind, deaf, or brain-damaged, much behaviour that is now simple and obvious could become difficult, if not impossible. What, then, must she be doing in order to carry out such behaviours? First, she must be ‘perceiving’, ‘attending to’, ‘taking in’ the visual and auditory stimuli surrounding her. Secondly, she must be ‘holding’ these in her ‘mind’ while she decides what they are and whether to ignore the perception, for example, the momentary recognition of the fly, or store it for future use so as to remember what has happened or what she has read. The fact that she can recognize a ‘chair’ as a chair means that she is using previously stored memories and has developed both a concept of ‘objects’, as a whole, and the more particular concept of a ‘chair’. She has developed her use of language in order to communicate, she can translate the symbols in this book, or in the picture on the wall, or in the music. These processes of perception, memory, concept formation, language and symbolization are basic cognitive processes. In addition cognitive processes underlie the ability to solve problems, to reason and to learn. To study cognition, then, is to study those structures and processes whereby human beings selectively take into their minds aspects of external events, sort out these initial impressions, either reject or store them and, finally, retrieve and use these systematically stored contents of the mind when required in order to carry out the activities of their daily lives.

To speak of ‘cognitive development’ can be subtly misleading in that the phrase combines both the processes and the content to which these processes are applied, suggesting that both develop. In fact infants and young children may well have available to them the same processes as adults; they can perceive, remember, form concepts and communicate, but the use to which they put these processes is, initially and necessarily, different from that of adults. Much of what an adult sees around him or her is familiar enough to be recognizable. While the student may not have seen that particular bird before she does recognize it as ‘a bird’ and may be able to categorize it more precisely as ‘a seagull’ or ‘a starling’. The infant or young child, on the other hand, is continually being presented with totally novel stimuli. Clearly the child cannot attend to all this novel stimuli at once. The most efficient strategy would seem to be to attend to those aspects of the environment which are most salient for survival at any one time. The fact that the child’s cognitive behaviour appears to be deficient when compared with that of an adult may simply reflect the fact that, in a given situation, the two are presented with differing tasks. The adult, as it were, knows her or his way around and can choose how to employ her or his cognitive powers, whereas the child has to use these powers to make sense of a largely novel environment. However, as cognitive processes are used and as the environment becomes more comprehensible, it is possible that by the very act of trying to understand the environment the processes themselves develop. In psychology today there is considerable discussion of what develops when cognition develops. This controversy, obviously, cannot be resolved here but we should be aware that when we speak of ‘cognitive development’ we may be speaking of the development of the processes themselves or the development of the application of such processes to different contents, or both.

Contemporary psychology is often thought to have its roots in the ‘behaviourism’ of Watson (1913) and the ‘neobehaviourism’ of Hull (1943). This approach is characterized by limiting its enquiry to the investigation of overt behaviour; thus ruling out the study of internal processes. Any item of human behaviour, including cognition, is described as a ‘response’ to a ‘stimulus’. The reason why a person gives a particular response to a particular stimulus was thought to be either because the two were associated in some way, that is, the response was ‘conditioned’, or because the appearance of this response had been rewarded previously. Experiments in discrimination learning were often used to demonstrate this. Characteristically in such experiments a rat would be presented with a choice between two stimuli, for example, a black and a white passageway. If, whenever it chose the black passageway it was rewarded, it would, ultimately, ‘learn’ to choose the black passageway each time. If the animal were still in the process of learning, a question of interest was whether reversing the schedules of reinforcement, so that a choice of the white passageway was rewarded, would retard the animal’s learning since it had already experienced the black passageway as rewarding, or whether this reversal would make no difference as the animal had not ‘learnt’ to respond to black. Spence (1936), in his ‘single unit’ theory, argued that the process of learning was continuous, so that even if the animal were still making mistakes, reversing the schedules would retard learning as it was beginning to learn to respond to black. He predicted that an animal whose schedules had been reversed would learn to discriminate more slowly than one who had always had the same choice rewarded. Experiments at the time showed that Spence’s prediction received the most support (Riley, 1968). An implication, that was not made explicit at the time, is that such incremental learning requires a ‘storage’ system of some kind. The Kendlers (1962) then extended this work. In one of their experiments a child was presented with four cups: a large black one, a large white one, a small black one and a small white one. In the first stage of the experiment the child learnt to respond positively to one dimension, for example size, so that the large cup was positive and small one negative, but colour was ignored. In a ‘reversal’ shift the child had to learn, in stage 2, to respond to the same dimension but to reverse her or his choice so that small became positive and large negative. In a non-reversal shift in the second stage she or he changed dimension by ignoring size and concentrating on colour so that black became positive and white negative. The results showed that children below the age of six, slow-learning children and rats found non-reversal shifts easier to learn whereas older children and college students found reversal shifts easier. The Kendlers’ argument was that if the older children and adults were using mediating responses such as ‘size’ in stage 1, all they needed to do in a reversal shift in stage 2 was to choose ‘small’ instead of ‘large’, whereas in a non-reversal shift they had to develop the new mediating response of ‘colour’. On the other hand, if the young children were not using mediators but behaved as single unit theory would predict then the relative ease of the tasks should be reversed, since in the non-reversal shift all the child had to do was to associate the new stimulus ‘black’ with a positive response which, colour having not been involved before, was comparatively easy; whereas in a reversal shift that which had been positive had to become negative. It was this ‘unlearning’ which gave the younger children greatest difficulty. It therefore appeared that while non-human animals and young humans learn in a continuous, single unit fashion, older humans use an internal mediator which interposes between the stimulus and the response. The Kendlers and their associates then considered the development of mediation more closely (T.S. and H.H. Kendler and Learnard, 1962; H.H. and T.S. Kendler, 1971; T.S. Kendler and Ward, 1972). As a result of these studies they concluded (1975):

Infrahuman behaviour is consistent with the single unit continuity model … college students with the mediational model. The probability that a child’s choice will fit one or the other depends on his age: the younger he is the more likely he is to behave according to a single unit theory, whereas the older he is the more likely his performance will be consonant with the mediational model, (pp. 207–8)

In a further study of the nature of mediators (Kendler, Glasman and Ward, 1972) they compared the behaviour of three groups of pre-school children. The first group received no training, the second were trained to attend to the essential characteristics of the stimulus, for example, size or colour, and the third were trained to use the verbal label for the stimuli. After the training the second and third group were both more able to make reversal shifts in a discrimination task than were the untrained group, but the verbally trained group were the most proficient. They explained this (1975) by saying that ‘the verbal label provides symbolic representation, a cognitive operator that mediates an RS. Although the perceptual differentiation may be required for this symbolic representation and may encourage its production, it does not by itself guarantee its occurrence’ (p. 219). In this they drew attention to the significance of symbolization and the role of internal cognitive processes.

Over time, in psychology, interest has shifted from the study of responses to how people acquire and process ‘knowledge’ or ‘information’. The ‘information-processing’ approach to cognition is, in some senses, the most intuitively obvious. The model is that of a person who perceives stimuli, stores it, retrieves it, and uses it. Thus an information-processing system (IPS) (Newell and Simon, 1972) is thought to consist of a sensory system, a response generator, a memory and a central processor. A basic assumption is that information is transformed in various ways at certain stages in its processing. The role of memory is central as is the way knowledge is represented in memory. For example, when a person remembers the concept of a ‘chair’ what can he or she be said to be doing? Memory can be divided into ‘short-term’ memory, where what has just been taken is held for a few seconds, and ‘long-term’ memory, the more permanent storage system. Tulving (1972) further distinguished ‘episodic’ from ‘semantic’ memory believing that these each represented a different processing system. ‘Episodic’ memory stores memories which can be located in time and space and refer to some particular event that happened, whereas ‘semantic’ memory contains generalized information about the nature of things, for example, that a chair is a type of furniture. An important question is how knowledge is represented in memory. Here we must distinguished between the ‘content’ of the knowledge, for example all the features of ‘a bird’, and the ‘code’ or the way we express this concept, for example by the word ‘bird’ in English and ‘oiseau’ in French; finally the ‘medium’ is the physical representation of a code as in written or spoken language. The information-processing approach to cognition is particularly concerned with the nature of these representations, in particular representational codes.

A person processes information from the environment by applying existing ‘programs’ to it in a serial, step-by-step manner and these programs are situation specific (Newell and Simon, 1972; Dawes, 1975). The information-processing approach starts from the question ‘What processing routines and what kinds of internally stored information would a person need in order to generate the observed behaviour?’ (Klahr, 1980, p. 128). The answer is expressed as a set of rules which could be interpreted by a computer program and therefore needs to be exact. It is thought that when environmental stimuli are processed this is done on a number of layers, each of which has a storage capacity. Initially information is received and passed to short-term memory (STM) where it will be rejected or moved to long-term memory (LTM) which

appears to be of essentially unlimited capacity. It is organized as a network of associated concepts and propositions, and a collection of strategies and procedures. The routines of LTM control information transfer among the layers of processing, the searching of the conceptual and propositional network, and programs for the modification of LTM. (ibid., p. 129)

This approach argues that children process information in exactly the same way as adults, but that adults have better ‘production systems’ defined as

a formalism for expressing how an information-processing system might respond to the momentary state of knowledge in which it finds itself. That is, how it might determine what to do next, given what it now knows, (ibid., p. 129)

On this model children both know less than adults, and are poorer at knowing what to do with what they know.

A difficulty with the information-processing model is that it can be taken to imply that ‘information’ and ‘processing’ can be independent of each other, that is that there is an objective entity called ‘information’. However, it is possible that qualities in the processor may determine what, for that person, the ‘information’ will be. For example, expectation may distort perception in that we may see what we expect to see. Piaget developed a theory which explicitly took account of the contribution of the ‘subject’, that is the person who processes, and the ‘object’, that is the information to be processed. Piaget’s view was that the child constructs, during the course of development, an individual understanding of the real world. Thus intelligence is interactionist in essence. What the child knows is neither determined by her or his own ideas nor wholly by the object, but rather by an interaction between the two. Piaget called this the ‘invention’ or ‘construction’ of reality, not the ‘discovery’ of a reality that exists ‘out there’ independent of the knowing subject. The child’s knowledge, therefore, is neither based wholly on experience (empiricism), nor on pre-existing mental structures (rationalism). For example, the child could not have learnt the principle of conservation empirically (see p. 83). It is a concept that is seldom directly taught or even mentioned. Nor was such a concept necessary for the child to experience the world at all and, indeed, the child’s early exchanges with the world do not make use of such a concept. Similarly if A is bigger than B and B than C then the fact that A is bigger than C is true by definition and needs no empirical verification, but the child was found, by Piaget, not to use such transitive inferences initially. Nevertheless, over time, the child moves from a prelogical state to a logical one through, according to Piaget, the constructive processes of cognitive growth.

For Piaget, knowledge was inextricably linked with development. The source of development was integral to the nature of knowledge itself, since for Piaget ‘to know’ meant that the person had constructed a cognitive structure. In so far as an existing structure proves inadequate in the subject’s dialogue with the object, so it would need to be transformed into a new structure. Thus cognitive development was conceived of as the construction by the child of those logical structures by means of which reality is comprehended. It was not thought to be the development of the means by which the person is able to produce ever closer copies of, or approximations to, reality.

Since, for Piaget, the epistemological question, ‘What is knowledge?’ and the psychological question, ‘How do we come to know?’ were closely related, he developed a general theory of cognitive development on the basis of his epistemology. He argued that all human cognition is rooted in biology and that human knowledge is the result of an evolutionary process.

He maintained, first, that man, like all other biological phenomena, has a characteristic internal organization which determines how people respond to external stimuli; secondly, that this determines man’s unique ‘mode of functioning’ which is invariant or unchangeable. A person when faced with environmental stimuli will attempt to make sense of it by using her or his existing structures, that is, to ‘assimilate’ it. If the existing structures are inadequate for the task they will have to change or ‘accommodate’ themselves to take account of the new information. The result of using the invariant functions of assimilation and accommodation is that the person’s structures are changed or ‘adapted’. Thus, Piaget’s third point was that the invariant functions gave rise to the ‘variant’, or changeable, ‘structures’, that is, the person’s cognitive abilities at any one time, through organism/environment interaction. This development was thought to start with action since, for Piaget, the source of knowledge was action. He argued that at first the infant merely acts when she or he comes into contact with reality; soon, the initial reflex or random actions are co-ordinated into sets, such as the set of actions related to sucking. These sets of co-ordinated actions form ‘schemes’. The various schemes which a person has developed at any one time in turn form a ‘structure’. There is therefore, according to Piaget, a developmental sequence from reflex scheme, to sensori-motor (or action) scheme, to structure.

The structures and their component schemes were said to change over time through the process of ‘equilibration’. Briefly, this means that if a subject finds that her (or his) present schemes are inadequate to cope with a new situation which has arisen in the environment so that she cannot ‘assimilate’ the new information, she will be thrown, cognitively, into disequilibrium. She will then ‘accommodate’ her schemes so that she can take in the information and thus adapt, or reconstruct, her structures. Here Piaget’s belief in the interpenetration of organism and environment can be seen. The subject is not dominated by the object, or vice versa, but rather the subject’s internal organization enables her to comprehend objects, and the properties of the objects cause the subject to reorganize her internal organization. Once the structure is reorganized equilibrium is restored. Equilibrium, however, is not static; it represents ‘an active system of compensation’ (Inhelder, 1962, p. 28), and is indicative of the self-regulating aspects of the organism as well as its activity. There is no final point of equilibrium. Throughout life the transformation of structures will continue. The above five postulates: internal organization, invariant functions, variant structures, equilibration and organism/environment interaction were fundamental to Piaget’s theory.

The process of equilibration gives rise to the ‘stages’ of cognitive development which represent different forms of action by the subject towards the objects in the environment. These have been given excessive weight by popularizers of Piaget’s theories. In one of his earliest works Piaget introduced these stages thus:

The question of reasoning and particularly of contradiction in the child is closely bound up with the problem of modality or of the different planes of reality on which the child uses his thought … there may be several realities for the child and these realities may be equally real in turn instead of being arranged in a hierarchy as with us…. Four stages can be picked out in the evolution of modality. The first lasts till the age of 2–3, the second extends from 2–3 to 7–8, the third from 7–8 to 11–12 and fourth begins at this age. During the first stage reality may be said to be simply and solely what is desired. Freu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Infancy (0–2 years)
• 3 The pre-school years (2–5)
• 4 The first school (5–8)
• 5 Middle school (8–13)
• 6 Secondary schooling and beyond: adolescence to senescence
• 7 Conclusion
• Suggestions for further reading
• References and name index
• Subject index