Theories of Cognitive Development: Piaget & Vygotsky

It's hard to overestimate the importance of Piaget's theory

• Piaget applied Darwin's evolutionary ideas to humans infant cognitive development i.e., order of development is fixed and determined by biology of the human brain. 
• Constructivist approach: child constructs and discovers the world through their activity - active learner. 
• Domain-general approach: same mechanisms apply to all domains of cognitive development.
• A 'grand stage theory' that provides holistic explanations of development where stages of cognitive development have a constant order.
• Development as a self-regulating exploration of the environment where knowledge systems ("Schemes") evolve over time.
• Schemes: structured organisation of experience that organise the way we make sense of our experiences and also change with age.
• Cognitive systems seek equilibrium, achieved through "accommodation" and "assimilation".
• Equilibrium naturally evolves into higher forms; when one cognitve scheme becomes inadequate for making sense of the world, it is replaced.

Adaption: 

• Accommodation: Altering a schema to fit the new environment.
• Assimilation: Applying your schema to a newly encountered aspect of your environment.

• The sensorimotor stage (0-2 years)

Learning through actions (S-R)

• The preoperational stage (2-7 years)

Learning through perception

• Stages of concrete operations (7-11 years)

Mental operations based on stable knowledge 

• Stages of formal operations (11-12 years +)

Abstract, hypothetical-deductive

Mental representations:

Internal representation of the environment, that the mind can manipulate, to make sense of it. E.g., images, concepts.

Can you ever find 100% convincing evidence for the existence of a particular represenation in the mind? - 

NB. this is a general problem for cognitive psychology)

• Qualitative difference in thinking: different structure of mental processes.
• Invariant order of emergence.
• Concurrent across stages in different domains i.e., development is domain-general.
• Univeral.

• 0 to "24" months when...
• Thinking and reasoning are governed by interactions with the world.
• Action --> Thought
• Progressive growth and refinement of knowledge structures 
• Accommodation and Assimilation 
• Babies are interpreting and reinterpreting perceptual information in light of their hypotheses, which were drawn from their sensorimotor experiences.

1) Reflective schemes:- Birth - 1 month= Newborn relexes.

2) Primart circular reactions: - 1-4 months= Simple motor habits around own body.

3) Secondary circular reactions:- 4-8 months= Repeat interesting effects in surrounding.

4) Co-ordination of secondary circular reactions:- 8-12 months= Intentional, goal-directed behaviour; object permanence.

5) Tertiary circular reactions:- 12-18 months= Explore properties of objects through novel actions.

6) Mental representations:- 18 months- 2 years= Internal depictions of objects or events; deffered imitation.

• Key idea of Piaget's - babies' searching behaviour tells us about the development of the concept of the permanence of objects.
• Represents his key approach: what is going on when 'errors' are made, when do they happen, and how does it lead to cognitive development?
• Initally babies do not search for hidden items (<8mo)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVqJacvywAQ
• Later, they search, but commit the A not B error (8-12mo)
• (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jW668F7HdA)
• WHY?
• A not B error disappears ~12-15mo, 15-18mo start to systematically search for objects.
• eg., a game of peekaboo.

• Kellman & Spelke, (1983)
• Hood & Willatts (1986)/ Shinskey & Munakata (2003)
• Baillargeon (lots)
• Diamond (1985)

• Habituation-dishabituation 
• 4-month-olds
• Highly influential 
• Nativist
• Adults perceived A as a single rod, especially when synchronised movement is added. Do infants? Habituated infants to A, then showed them B and C. If the infants believe the rod is whole, which should they look at more? B or C?

Piaget: Children learn about objects by reaching and manipulating them. They first perceive object as a scence. Object perception develops through action.

• Kellman & Spelke: @4 months, when actions are limited, infants already have object representation, and show knowledge of partially hidden objects.
• "Humans may begin life with the notion that the environment is composed of things that are coherent, that move as units independently of eachother, and that tend to persist, maintaining their coherence and boundaries as they move."

• 6.5 month olds reach for the location if an object even when they cannot see it anymore (dark) - object permanence?
• 32 ppts (6.5mo)
• Controll for previous methodological differences in the literature.
• Design was 2x2
• Toy (toy vs. no toy) - within-subjects.
• Occluder (cloth vs. dark) - within-subjects.
• Counterbalanced order of familiarisation and test blocks.
• Ran 2 experiments, to contorl for some potential methodological issues in Expt 1.
• Search behaviours seen @ younger age than Piaget described, and under 2 different occlusion conditions.

• Underestimates intial knowledge?
• Emphasis on motor abilities?
• Underestimates representational power?
• Or, maybe Piaget's critics adopt a 'loser' criterion for 'knowledge' than he did?

Approximate Age                      Cognitive Milestone

1-4 months                              Violation-of-expectation paradigm showed object. permanence

                                                 Deferred imitation of facial expression.

18-24 months                          Ability to find an object while out of sight.

                                                Deferred imitation of everyday behaviours, pretend play.

• 'Pre-logical'.
• About 2 to about 7 years.
• Where the infant started as a solisist (the self is all that is known), the preschooler is an egocentrist (there are other things and others, but they all feel and think like me).
• Thinking and reasoning by manipulation of symbols -> schemes move to mental representation.
• But incompatible beleifs may be held at certain times.
• Knowledge is not 'concrete'.
• First one dimension, then the other.

Lack of reversibility:

5+3=* does not imply 8=3+5

• Centration: Focus on one aspect of a situation at the time.
• Symbolic representation: Knowledge that something stands for something else.
  • Language 
  • Pretend play
• Artificialism: Aspects of the environment interpreted as made by people.
• Irreversibility: Inability the reverse the direction of a sequence of events to their starting point.

• Class-inclusion/Problems with hierarchial classification: Organisation of objects in classes and sub-classes (linked to centration).
• Egocentrisim:  Inability to see the situation from another's perspective.
  • In conversation. 
  • Three mountain task. 
• Conservation errors:
  • Focus on states not transformations.
  • Centration.
  • Reversibility.
• Animism- inanimate objects have human feelings. 

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDJ0qJTLohM
• Pre-operational children usually pick the picture of what they themselves can see.
• What else might be causing the child to fail the task?

• Operation= mental representation of actions that obey logical rules.
• Preoperational vs. Concrete operations: 
  • Operations are reversible mental transformations. 
  • Operations are not subject to interference from perception. 
  • Pre-operational children have not attained the ability to perform these reversible transfromations (dominated by immediate perceptions).

• Piaget's conservation task:
• "There is less now, because the water is way down here"
• "The water is shorter, but the gladd is wider- Pour it back you will see it is the same."
• Pre-operational children fail
• Concrete operational children pass 
• What else might be causing the child to fail the tasks?

• Piaget - Number conservation task (Preoperational and Concrete Operational Stages) - YouTube

• "Now watch what I do. I'm going to spread this row out and not add anything to it and not take away anything from it."
• [transformation]
• "Now do they still have the same number of buttons, or does one row have more buttons than the other?"
• "Which one?"
• "How do you know that?"

Hidden transitive inference (Elkind & Schofiel, 1972)

• A failure to distinguish relevant from irrelevant transformation: ignore perceptially misleading cues on logical properties.
• Children appear to lack knowlesge of invariance.
• Conservation failures occur in a variety of domains:
  • Number 
  • Liquid volumes 
  • Mass
• Linked to failures in other tasks:
  • Perspective-taking (three mountains)
  • Theory of mind (Sally-Anne).

Conducted by: Baron-Cohen (1985)

• Testing theory of mind in three groups of children:

1) Those with Autism 

2) Those with Down's syndrome 

3) Control group with no developmental disorder 

• Study involved showing the children a story involving two dolls called Sally & aNNE.
• Shown Sally putting her ball in a basket and leaving the room. While she was out of the room Anne moved the ball from the basket to her box.
• When Sally came back, the child was asked where Sally wold look for her ball.
• IF THEY HAD DEVELOPED THEORY OF MIND= they would say in the basket because that is where Sally had left it and she did not know that it had been moved. 
• Most of the control group and most of the children with Down's syndrome gave the correct answer, but only 20% of those with Autism provided the right answer.

• Memory?
• Misunderstanding?
• Language difficulty?
• Task does not maske sense? (Donaldson)
• Subtle changes affect performance (Siegel)
• Degree of difficulty 
• Universal aspect?
• Piaget is unfalsifiable
  • We should think about what children can do, not what they can't (Hughes, 1986)

• Maybe children just couldn't recall all the knowledge they needed at the time they needed it?
• Train children so they don't forget the information they need.
• Byrant & Trabasso (1971; see Harris & Butterworth, 2002)

Bryant & Trabasso (1971)

• Five rods.
• Training study.
• Four-year-olds learned that A>B B>C and C>D and D>E
• They were then able to report that B>D 
• THEREFORE: the problem is not with transitive inferences, but with memory limitations.
• Well covered by Harris & Butterworth (2002) pp238-239.

• Piaget underestimated the role of language?
• Rose & Blank (1974) argued that asking the same conservation question task is...
  • not usual pragmatics 
  • child asks "was I wrong first time?"
• Incorrect responses is primed by interaction of perceptual context and linguistic input. 

• 4 to 6 year olds.
• 'Naughty teddy' comes in and rearranges one of the rows.
• Contrasted 'accidental' with 'intentional' transformations: when the adult does the rearrangement the child assumes it must have to do with the question asked. If Teddy does it, this assumption is dropped.

Problems with McGarrigle & Donaldson:

• Distraction by Teddy: consistent with centring by preoperational children= pay attention to Teddy, not the possible change.
• Moore & Frye (1986): Experiment with 5-year-olds:
  • McG & D= a false positive?
  • Contrasted effects of two factors:
    • Relevance of transformation (to quantity) -> when Teddy added beads, the children still said that the two rows had the same number.
    • Cause of accident -> when the task is presented as a game, and the experimeter made unreliable (he is said to be trying to trick the child), the children still made the conservation errors.

• Gradual change rather than stages.
• Nothing- necessarily 
• Do it piaget's way - you get Piaget's results 
• Interpretation is all important.
• There are usually severall theoretical possibilities underlying any given observation...

• Born in (what is now) Belarus, died age 37 of TB.
• Strongly influenced by Marxist Theory. 
  • Emphasised importance of culture & social organisation on child development.
  • Believed children were social learners, heavily influencec by (and influential to) cultural contexts.
• Vygotsky was working around the same time as Piaget, but much of his work wasn't widely known or recognised until later (1960's/1070's)

• Cogntive development is context specific- social, cultural & historical context is important.
• Therefore, Vygotsky did not believe in an 'individualistic' view- learning and developmeny do not take part in isolation from others.
• Cognitive development is a socially-mediated process (passed on from one generation to the next).
• Developement of language is particularly significant - leads to a qualitiative change in thinking. Emphasised a strong link between language and thought.
• Interaction with and instruction from more knowledgeable people are especially important. 
•  Basic mental capacities (not unique to humans) -social experiences-> Higher congnitive capacities (are unique to humans).

Example:

• Parent assists child.
• Verbal interaction.
• Instruction.
• Child's development and learning occurs in a social context.

• Intersubjectivity 
  • (+Joint attention)
• Zone of Proximal Development
• Social Scaffolding
  • (Guided Participation)
• Cultural Tools)
• Private Speech 

• The mutual understanding that two people arrive at and share during communication
  • "Meeting of the minds" enables people to focus on the same thing.
• Basic tools for intersubjectivity are present from a young age and then built upon:
  • Imitation
  • Social referencing 
  • Gaze-following 
  • Joint Attention (JA)
  • Conversational skills 
• Develop with age 

• Both parties intentionally focus on the same referant in the environment 
• Initating vs. responding to JA 
• JA is particularly important for language development (e.g. Baldwin, 1991; 1996; Brooks & Meltzoff, 2008)-Infants who follow with their gaze and point have higher vocabulary (correlational, longnitudinal)
• "Look at the Blicket! Can you see the Blicket?"

• JA interactions often called 'hotspots' for learning because they've been associated with improvements in language development, e.g., Carpenter et al. (1998). 
• This improvement is observed mor eoften when the obect that a parent/carer talk about is the current focus of their child's attention.
• Bigelow et al., therefore suggested that a parent/carer's sensitivity to their child's current focus of attention might be important during the early stages of an infant's early language development.
• They therefore studied 12mon children's behaviour within and outside JA episodes with parent/carer and infants' play when alone.
• It was predicted that:
  • Infants would show increases in more advanced play within JA compared to outside JA.
  • Infants would show an increase in more advanced play with their mother/primary carer than when alone.
• Maternal/carer attention was assessed following infants' play interests and for scaffolding infants' play activities to determine whether one or both of these forms of maternal sensitivity would facilitate infants' play.
• Add results from slide 50 graph

• The range of tasks that are too difficult for a child to manage along, but which can be mastered with help and guidence from a more knowledgeable person.
• "... the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers.' (Vygotsky, 1978, p.86).
• This zoneis where most learning takes place.

Example:

• We give two-7-year-olds the same IQ test. They perform at the exacrt same level as each other.
• QUESTION: What if one of them was given leading questions, examples and demonstrations rather than just completing the test normally?
• Potentially may be more important than actual achievement when assessing development?

• Vygotsky thought this was another kind of ZPD- supports the development of new skills and abilities.
• Viewed it as a central process in development during pre-school years, that has a social origin. 
• Make-believe play contains lots of private speech.

Evidence:

• Many studies show that make-believe play enhances children's development of cognitve and social skills (MBP doesn't just habe social origins, it also has social benefits).
• More complex make-believe play = greater subsequent ability to follow classroom rules.

• Scaffolding= the context provided by the more knowledgeable person to helpm the child developp his or her cognitive skills.
• Support adjusted to complement the child's level.
• Allows child to learn through doing.
• The language of the adult (or more knowledgebale individual) is particularly important.
• As the child's skills develop, support is gradually withdrawn, until the child functions independently.

• Scaffolding= the context provided by the more knowledgeable person to helpm the child developp his or her cognitive skills.
• Support adjusted to complement the child's level.
• Allows child to learn through doing.
• The language of the adult (or more knowledgebale individual) is particularly important.
• As the child's skills develop, support is gradually withdrawn, until the child functions independently.

• Scaffolding is where the interaction = teaching.
  • Applies most clearly to academic or academic-like tasks.
  • Has specific communication features - involves explicit instruction.
• 'Guided particiation'  proposed by Rogoff (1998; 2003)
  • More general term; applies to broader rangeof situations.
  • Refers to the 'process in which more knowledgeable individuals organise activities in ways that allow less knowledgable people to learn.' (Siegler et al., 2014).
  • Shared endeavours. 
  • No specific communication features - allows variation across cultures. 
  • Can be seen in classroom/ nursery layouts and set-up.

• Example from Siegler et al., 2014:
• Symbol systems 
• Lego diagram
• Language 
• Language proficiency 
• Skills
• Ability to interpret/read diagram 
• Spending time with child 
• Values
• Child learning construction skills 
• Technology 
• Other factors- e.g., economic 
• Lego blocks 
• Artefacts 

• Basically.. children talking to themselves.
  • Speech is notobviously directed to another person 
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuDeh_raBxM
• Most prevalent bwtween 4-6 years 
• Increases with task difficulty (e.g., colour experiment, Patrick & Abravanel 2000- see Berk)

Three phases:

1) Behaviour controlled by others' statements (e.g. parents).

2) Behaviour controlled by private speech.

3) Behaviour controlled by internalised private speech (i.e., thought).

Piaget said:

• Egocentric speech.
• Langauge and thought are relatively unrelated.
• Private speech doesnt serve any developmental purpose.
• Decline as a child becomes aware of others having different views/mind to their own (i.e., develops with Theory of Mind).

Vygotsky said:

• Language & thought are integral to one another.
• As adults, our thoughts = internalised speech.
• Therefor private speech = self-guidance.
• Acts as a precursor to thought.

• Social context and guidance from others does influence children's cognitive development.
  • How do we know this? look for studies as evidence
• Allows for and explains some cutural differences in cognitive development.
• Positive inlfuence of education - at school & at home. 
  • Can also inform educational practice. 
• Scaffolding can be very effective. 
  • Numerous examples in the research literature (look for studies).
• Are the roles of social context and language exaggerated?
• Children's motivation, interests & abilities play a significant role in their learning too.
• Some social interactions hinder, rather than help, development.
• Social facilitation might accoutn for some of the apparent effects of social interaction.
• Whta about biology?

• Demonstrates importance of social interaction in learning. 
  • Effectiveness of peer collaboration (providng that children are able to work together...) 
• Scaffolding can clearly be applied to educational settings.
• Ideas of assisted discovery within the ZPD.
  • Remember the ZPD is not a property of the child.
• Reciprocal Teaching: Collaborative group of students and teacher; Questioning, summarising, clarifying, predicting- ZPD
• Cooperative Learning: Group of people working towards a common goal- intersubjectivity, scaffolding & ZPD.

• Self-initated discovery 
• Ego-centric speech 
• Child as scientist
• Cognition -> Social interactions 
• Assisted discovery 
• Private Speech 
• Child as part of society
• Social interaction -> Cognition

Vygotsky Piaget

• Piaget's theory continues to provide a framework for research.
• Vygotsky's work is compelling, but doesn't have same reach.
• Read C11 of Goswami's book for a more nuanced exploration of these issues (optional)