This course deals with the fundamentals important in Psychology as a science. Psychology is the study of behavior and the mind. But all of us have tried to understand and predict behavior throughout our lives, first with our parents, then with our peers and teachers, and finally with our friends and co-workers. The difference is that psychological scientists conduct research that discovers the facts about behavior and our minds, so its principles are based on science and not just on intuition and experience. The course covers the fundamentals of learning, memory, motivation, emotion, and how behavior changes as we age. The content of the course has received approval from "Quality Matters", an organization that evaluates on-line courses. The learning outcomes are: (1) Students will be able to recognize and describe major psychological principles of learning; (2) Students will be able to distinguish between different types of memory; (3) Students will be able to describe how motivation and emotion can affect how we behave; and (4) Students will know how cognitive behavior and social behavior develops as we age.
Lecture Video 4.1: Cognitive Development
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From the course by Georgia Institute of Technology
Introduction to Psychology as a Science 2 – Fundamentals of the Mind and Behavior
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Georgia Institute of Technology
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From the lesson
Section 4: Development
We also need to understand how behavior changes as we age. In this section we will discuss how cognitive and social behavior develops. We will also discuss my area of research, how memory changes in old age.
Meet the Instructors
Dr. Anderson D. SmithRegents’ Professor Emeritus
School of Psychology
This week, we're talking about developmental psychology.
And no individual psychologist is more important to understanding development
than Jean Piaget. He was a Swiss psychologist and he
developed a theory of cognitive development, how we develop thought and
how we interact with the environment, cognitive development.
Now most observations that he made about cognitive development were his own three
children. So, he wasn't the greatest scientist in
the world but he's had profound impact on both psychology and education.
Now he believed that cognitive, cognitive development occurred in stages and that's
was a very popular theory in, in his per-, period of time.
The first stage was the Sensorimotor stage, from birth to two years.
Then, the Preoperational stage, from two to seven.
And then, Concrete Operational stage, stage from 7-11.
And then after 11, the Formal Operational stage.
Now let's look at those individually. First, the Sensorimotor stage.
In a Sensorimotor stage, the child knows the world through its senses and acts to
form /g, perform on the world. In other words, only what is available in
the sensory processes of the child is it able to deal with.
This wasn't part of his theory but I want to point out that even in this very early
stage of life, these children can be conditioned.
For example, if you infants like to see things moving, and if you put a mobile on
the crib. And then, attached a light, so that when
the child moved its legs the light would interact with the leg and cause the
mobile to move. Pretty soon that child is really flashing
its, its legs because it really wants to see movement.
So, it can be conditioned even in its early stage to perform.
In a sensorimotor stage, in the first four months, the child is just learning
to grasp, just learning eye-hand coordination and there's no object
permanence. What that means is if the objects in
where they can sense it, and they believe it's a part of their world.
But if it's taken away, it doesn't exist. The only things that exist are things
that they can see or hear or touch. If they have object permanence, which we
will see at a later stage, then when you remove the object, it still has a
representation of that object. And from 4 to 8 months it, it becomes
interested in an object. He tries to reach for them.
He tries to grab them. He tries to deal with them, when they're
in the environment the sensory environment of the child.
From eight to 12 is where you start seeing object permanence.
So, if I take an object, a toy let's say, the child is playing with, and put it
behind a card, it sort of knows that it's still there even though they can't see
it. Even though they can't sense it, they
have some idea that it's still there. And now when I remove the card they'll
see it again. And then from 12 to 18 months, the child
actively explores the environment to look for objects when they're not there.
So, you sort of see crude hypothesis testing.
For example, if I put the card in front of the toy, the child would try to look,
behind the card to see the toy and understands that the object is still
there. Sensorimotor.
And then from 18 to 24, two, two years of age, it starts making inferences about
objects that it has experienced but might not be present in the environment.
Now, this is really important because the child is learning that they, they can
have representations of objects. And that's very important for cognitive
development. In the Preoperational stage, from two to
seven, the child is developing language. So, it really is developing a conceptual
way in which to think about its world. And it fully can represent objects and
events when they're not present. In the concrete operational stage, from
seven to 11, now the child is beginning to have complex manipulations of
representations of concrete objects because it has language and is able to do
that. And it can classify objects into
categories and hierarchies. For example, it might see a dog and have
a concept of dog, a representatioin of what a dog is.
But it might ear-, in very early part of it's development of categories, say, that
all four legged creatures are dogs. But then it sees a cat.
And mom says, No, that's not a doggy, that's a cat.
It starts developing new categories and new hierarchies, ways of representing
objects. And then it, for the first time shows
conservation. Conservation of quantity, mass, volume.
In other words, let me just show you the example what a conservation test might
look like. We might have two cylinders filled with
water, and I'll take one of the cylinders, and I'll pour into a another
cylinder. So, it looks like that.
And then I ask the child, which cylinder has more water in it.
Even though it saw that I poured from one cylinder to the other, it will always
pick the tall one. It doesn't have conservation of mass or
conservation of volume. It simply looks at which one is taller.
And this is important because it shows that the child can make inferences about
the manipulation that I made. And it could be with number.
It could be with size. It could be with anything that I can
manipulate. But the child still will think, if I take
five coins and spread them out over a larger area, then it would say that has
more coins in it, than the five coins over a smaller area, or the conservation
of volume that you see here. Piaget's Theory has some processes that
are very important. First, this idea of cognitive development
being a representational acquisition. In other words, the child acquires
schemas, these, these categories in which to place things.
A cognitive structure or pattern by which we organize the world through schema or
schemata. Now, he does that in two ways.
First as assimilation, we incorporate our experiences of the world into existing
schemas. So, if I learned that all four legged
animals, cats, dogs, zebra, are mammals, then I might develop that hierarchic
through assimilation, taking new objects and bringing them in to existing schemas.
Or, I can create new schemas or chain schemas when necessary.
So, when I find that a zebra is not really a horse but a seperate category,
now I develop a new, through accommodation, I develop a new category
of zebras which is different from horses. So, it's a constant changing of the
schemas that we have and adding new schemas or changing schemas or adding new
objects into existing schemas that allows cognitive development to occur.
It allows us to organize the world in meaningful ways through our use of
language. So, cognitive development, according to
Piaget, is a continual process of assimilating, as long as possible, and
accommodating by making new schemas. And that's how we develop cognition.
Let me just, one other task that's very important, and so the idea that before we
are able to take other people's perspectives, our perspective is the, is
the thing. And he developed this mountain task,
where he stood with a child in front of sort of a, plastic mountain.
And then, showed the child pictures of, of the mountain from different
perspectives. He said, which one is my perspective?
The child when, when it's egocentric, would always pick his own perspective.
Looking at the mountain from his height, not from the height of the experimenter.
So, Piaget's theory has had certain kinds of challenges since it was developed.
First, are the stages as discrete and as consistent as Piaget argued?
No, the correspondence between the different tasks is really relatively low.
It's important to know that these are the different ways in which the child can
interpret their environment but the actual correlation with stages is not as
strong as Piaget would believe. Is, if the egocentric test is made
simpler, then the child, like flat-, flatter mountain for example, then the
child can actually, at a younger age, develop other peoples perspectives as
well as their own. And, also the conservation is present at
younger ages if you test it just the way, just right.
But it does not generalize with other conservation task until about seven as
Piaget suggested. So, there have been some challenges to
the theory, but it has also been a very important contribution to understanding
development, especially development cognition.
Thanks.
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