Psychology
Cognitive Development in Childhood
Cognitive development in childhood refers to the growth and maturation of a child's mental processes, including perception, memory, problem-solving, and language acquisition. This development is influenced by both biological and environmental factors, and it occurs in distinct stages, as proposed by theorists like Jean Piaget. Understanding cognitive development in childhood is crucial for educators, parents, and psychologists in supporting children's learning and overall well-being.
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9 Key excerpts on "Cognitive Development in Childhood"
- Mary Gauvain(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Studies of what develops focus on changes over time in mental capacities, knowledge, and skills. This Element describes the develop- ment in a wide range of aspects of cognition: attention, language, social cogni- tion, memory, metacognition and executive function, and problem-solving and reasoning. Cognitive development is simultaneously universal and context-specific. Some cognitive changes are common to all human beings, and others vary within individuals and between groups or populations. This arrangement reflects a hallmark of human cognition – flexibility. People use their mental capabilities to deal with the problems of daily life. Culture, the natural eco- logical setting or habitat of human beings, plays a significant role by providing support and direction for cognitive development. 2 Cognitive Development: Coming to Understand and Act in the World The world is a complicated place. It is full of objects, some natural and others human-made. It is also full of people and activities. How do children make 1 Cognitive Development in Infancy and Childhood sense of it all, learn what the world has to offer, and then use this knowledge in productive and satisfying ways? This task, which is already huge, is further complicated because, while children are learning about the world, they are developing in many other ways. They are maturing physically, establishing relationships with the people in their lives, and acquiring and honing a large number of skills that allow them to participate in the activities around them. Cognitive development is one part of the biological, psychological, and social changes that make up human development. These changes are coordin- ated with and inform one another over time. They also have contingency relations; changes in one area may enable or facilitate changes in another area. For instance, what children perceive and the objects they explore contrib- ute to cognitive development.
eBook - ePub- Peter Mitchell, Fenja Ziegler(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
You might have noticed a child aged around 5 years speaking on the telephone about things only he can see: He seems to overlook the fact that the person he is speaking to is in a completely different location and cannot see the same things. Perhaps this is a sign that the young child is incapable of putting himself in someone else’s shoes. In the broadest sense, it is tempting to suppose that the child does not understand that other people can have different perspectives. Cognitive developmentalists look at particular difficulties children have, such as poor communication ability, and then draw general conclusions about their underdeveloped knowledge of the world. An exciting aspect of cognitive developmental psychology concerns the things children say and do in various situations, and then speculating about the meaning of these in terms of what the child does or does not know about the world.Not everybody is in agreement about the way children understand the world, and how that understanding develops. This is mainly because what children say and do is open to interpretation with respect to the implications for their level of competence. For example, a commonsense explanation for young children’s difficulty in communicating on the telephone might simply say that their lack of experience has not allowed them to develop a suitable “telephone manner.” If this were true, the problem would not be attributable to the child’s immaturity, but to lack of practice. By the same token, an adult who had little experience of using telephones would be equally poor at communicating. Cognitive developmentalists thus look for independent evidence to support their suggestion of children’s immature understanding. The result is that cognitive developmentalists who hold different opinions try to present evidence and argument to show that their theory is compelling.The most interesting aspect of cognitive developmental psychology is, of course, making discoveries about how children understand the world. But there is also an interesting subplot surrounding the discovery process itself. The interest in this process is stimulated by some ingenious tasks which have been presented to children in order to investigate their thinking, coupled with some brilliantly insightful arguments that have been developed in support of particular ideas about the character of children’s understanding. The purpose of these arguments is to persuade us to accept one view of children in preference to a competing one.
eBook - ePub- Stephen Schiffer, Susan Steele(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
6 Cognitive Development in Childhood
DOI: 10.4324/9780429042553-10Susan CareyA pendulum swing in views of cognitive development has occurred over the past 20 years. The issue in this pendulum swing is the proper description of the child’s cognitive capabilities -- the proper description of how the child’s conceptual system differs from the adult’s. Twenty years ago, we had all assimilated Piaget’s description of the incompetent child. Today, we are coming to grips with the competent child — SuperKid.A sketch of this recent bit of intellectual history makes the point clearly. Piaget presented us with hundreds of phenomena that diagnosed (so the story went) the fundamental differences between the young child’s thought processes and the adult’s thought processes. Most of these phenomena have been replicated literally thousands of times. So, for example, hundreds of thousands of children have been submitted to conservation experiments — asked to equate the size of two balls of playdough (Figure 6-I ), asked to watch while one is flattened into a pancake, and then asked whether they both are still the same amount of playdough, whether they still weigh the same, whether they would still displace the same amount of water. One MIT professor’s 5-year-old, upon being asked one of these questions, answered, "I don’t know, ask my older brother, he’s got conservation." What is universally found in all of these studies is that young children (say 4- to 7-year-olds) maintain that the quantity of substance, the weight, the volume, have changed, while older children look at you as if you are crazy to be asking such a silly question and tell you that quantity, weight, and volume are conserved, that the two blobs of playdough only look different, that they’re really
- Usha Goswami(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Whether the child is learning morality or reading, the behavior of surrounding adults and the emotional and cultural context of learning can have an important impact on what is learned. Finally, many of the domains discussed in this section also show similar theoretical developments. In these domains, early research searching for universal laws of reasoning and ignoring the importance of background and collateral information in children’s cog-nition has been found to be flawed. Research strategies have changed accordingly. Instead of seeking to describe cognitive change in terms of the discovery of the formal laws or rules that actually describe a given domain, research in many areas has converged instead onto a theoretical model that can be broadly described as “explanation-based.” The focus of interest is not the laws themselves, but children’s understanding of the mechanisms that bring about the particular changes in their environments described by these laws, and their developing theories or explanations for why these mechanisms operate in the ways that they do. Whether these theoretical changes necessitate a change in the research strategies currently used in cognitive developmental psychology is considered in the intro-duction to the final section of this handbook. Cognitive Development in Childhood 235 CHAPTER ELEVEN Memory Development in Childhood Wolfgang Schneider In a recent review of children’s memory development (Schneider & Bjorklund, 1998), it was emphasized that memory development has been one of the most-studied topics in all of cognitive development, and deservedly so. In fact, an impressive amount of scien-tific studies on this issue have been published within the last three decades, stimulated by a shift away from behaviorist theories to information-processing considerations.
eBook - PDF- James Kalat, , , (Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
1 3 9 Development 5 MODULE 5.1 Cognitive Development in Infancy and Childhood Research Designs for Studying Development The Fetus and the Newborn Infancy Jean Piaget’s View of Cognitive Development Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage Piaget’s Preoperational Stage Piaget’s Stages of Concrete Operations and Formal Operations In Closing: How Grown Up Are We? MODULE 5.2 Social and Emotional Development Erikson’s Description of Human Development Infancy and Childhood Social Development in Childhood and Adolescence Adulthood Old Age The Psychology of Facing Death In Closing: Social and Emotional Issues through the Life Span MODULE 5.3 Diversity: Gender, Culture, and Family Gender Influences Culture and Ethnicity The Family In Closing: Many Ways of Life Liderina/Shutterstock.com Copyright 2022 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 1 4 0 / C H A P T E R 5 D E V E L O P M E N T S uppose you buy a robot. When you get home, you discover that it does nothing useful. It cannot even maintain its balance. It makes irritating, high-pitched noises, moves its limbs haphazardly, and leaks. The store you bought it from refuses to take it back, and it is illegal to disconnect or discard this robot. So you are stuck with it. A few years later, your robot walks and talks, reads and writes, draws pic-tures, and does arithmetic. It follows your directions (usually) and sometimes does useful things without being told. It beats you at memory games. How did all this happen? After all, you know nothing about how to pro-gram a robot.
- Lorelle J. Burton, Drew Westen, Robin M. Kowalski(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
In other words, speed increases rapidly from about ages 6 to 12 and starts to level off by age 15. 3 Response time 2 1 12 15 6 9 Age 18 21 Source: Adapted from Fry and Hale (1996). Cognitive strategies Use of cognitive strategies also develops throughout childhood and adolescence (Siegler, 1996, 2007). In memory tasks, young children tend to rely on simple strategies such as rote repetition. As they get older, children use increasingly sophisticated rehearsal strategies (chapter 10), such as arranging lists into categories before trying to remember the items (see Alexander & Schwanenflugel, 1994; Brown et al., 1983). In many respects, cognitive development reflects a process akin to evolution: children try out new ‘mutations’ (different problem-solving strategies), weed out those that do not work as well and gradually evolve new strategies depending on changes in the situation (Siegler, 1996.) Metacognition A final variable involved in cognitive development is metacognition — thinking about thinking (Bogdan, 2000; Flavell, 1977; Metcalfe & Shimamura, 1994; see also Pintrich, 2002). Metacognition involves cognition that reflects on, monitors and regulates an individual’s thinking (Kuhn, 2000). To solve problems, people often need to understand how their mind works — how they perform cognitive tasks such as remembering, learning and solving problems. For example, when asked if they understand something, young children often have trouble discriminating whether they understand something or not, so they simply nod in assent or fail to ask questions (Brown et al., 1983). Similarly, preschoolers do not recognise the importance of ‘inner speech’ — using words inside one’s head — while performing tasks such as mental arithmetic (Flavell et al., 1997). A key factor in the transfer of learning is a child’s development of metacognitive skills and thinking; a process defined as metalearning (Fisher, 1998).
eBook - PDF- Ronald Comer, Elizabeth Gould, Adrian Furnham(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
Still other critics have charged that Piaget ’s theory fails to account fully for social factors, the influences that other people may have on a child ’s cognitive development (Carpendale & Lewis, 2010; Freund & Lamb, 2010). Piaget ’s theory, instead, focuses on how children guide their own development through experimentation and reflection. Later in his life, Piaget himself also wondered whether his theory said enough about the role of social experiences in development (Inhelder & Piaget, 1979; Piaget, 1972). As we will see, a contemporary of Piaget ’s had more to say about social influences on cognitive development. FIGURE 3.4 Theory of mind. Participants with a theory of mind recognize that the child in the story will look for the leftover chocolate in the blue cupboard, because the child is not aware of the mother’s switch of locations. theory of mind a recognition that other people base their behaviours on their own perspectives, not on information that is unavailable to them. CHAPTER 3 BIOLOGICAL AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 64 Adolescence LEARNING OBJECTIVE 6 Summarize the major physical, cognitive and emotional changes that take place during adolescence. With the possible exception of the first couple of years of life, the amount of change that occurs during adolescence rivals that of any other developmental passage. Most crucially, puberty begins. In the cognitive sphere, adolescents dis- play features of both children and adults, and they begin to learn how to function independently. In this section, we will describe some key biological, cognitive and social transitions that characterize this dramatic period. Physical Development Pubert y refers to the physical devel- opment of primary and secondary sex characteristics (Herdt, 2010). Primary sex characteristics are the body struc- tures that have to do specifically with the reproductive system, including growth of the testes and the ovaries.
eBook - PDFPsychology
Modules for Active Learning
- Dennis Coon, John Mitterer, Tanya Martini, , Dennis Coon, John Mitterer, Tanya Martini, (Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
From the earliest days of life, babies are learning how the world works. They immediately begin to look, touch, taste, and otherwise explore their surroundings. In the first months of life, babies are increasingly able to think, to learn from what they see, to make predictions, and to search for explanations. For example, Jerome Bruner (1983) observed Copyright 2022 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 115 MODULE 14 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT: LANGUAGE AND Cognitive Development in Childhood Mental Structures and Processes Like any new parent, Piaget immediately recognized that babies are born “blank slates.” That is, we come into life equipped with very little learned specific knowledge or skills (also sometimes referred to as crystallized intelligence ). For example, Lily knew nothing about horses when she was born; she had, of course, never even seen one. But she eventually saw horses on television and was given a stuffed toy horse for her second birthday. She even knew the word “horse.” According to Piaget, Lily had formed a schema — an organized learned body of knowledge or skills about a particular topic—in this case, for her understanding of the concept of “horse.” Piaget also realized that babies are born with a remark-able capability for rapid learning ( fluid intelligence ). He pro-posed that intellect grows through mental processes that he called assimilation and accommodation . Assimilation refers to the application of an established schema to new objects or problems. Let’s say that little Lily is taken for a drive in the country.
eBook - PDF- Alan Slater, J. Gavin Bremner, Alan Slater, J. Gavin Bremner(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- BPS Blackwell(Publisher)
For example, the researchers presented these young street vendors with a problem in which the street vendors had four pieces of mint chewing gum and two pieces of grape chewing gum for sale, and simply asked the children whether it would be better to sell the mint chewing gum or all of the gum. Under such conditions the Brazilain street vendors outperformed children attending school. Other researchers have examined the effect of how long children have been attending school. When children of the same age are tested on transitive inference problems, those that have been in school the longest perform best (Artman & Cahan, 1993). Such findings suggest that culture and context play an important role in children acquiring the forms of logic required to pass classical Piagetian tasks. 326 AN INTRODUCTION TO DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY It is worth noting that Piaget theorised that the final stage of cognitive development is that of formal operations, by the end of which adolescents reach the highest level of thinking humanly possible. This period of development is discussed in Chapter 16. Overall evaluation of Piaget’s theory Piaget’s contribution to the study of cognitive development was groundbreaking. Piaget demonstrated that young children think differently from adults and the questions he raised about how children develop continue to inspire today’s developmental researchers (Desrochers, 2008; Feng et al., 2007). Although Piaget’s theory remains highly influential, a number of weaknesses are now becoming apparent. Many researchers argue that the basic processes (e.g. assimilation, accommodation and equilibrium) are vague (e.g. Siegler & Ellis, 1996) and tend to describe, rather than explain how change occurs.
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