 1.

WRITE THE LARGEST

NUMBER YOU CAN
 2. If you were running a race
and you overtook the second
person in 2nd place, what place
would you be in now?
A H I M N O U V W

3. Which of the letters above does

not belong with the rest?
 Definition of Cognition
Intellectual processes • Obtained
• Perception • Transformed
• Memory • Stored
• Thinking • Retrieved
• Language • Used

through which
information is
 Cognition processes information
 Cognition is active
› Information is
 Obtained through senses
 Transformed through interpretive processes
 Stored and retrieved through memory
 Used in problem solving and language
  Swiss psychologist,
developmental
theorist, and
philosopher

1896-1980
Typical Age Description Developmental
Range of Stage Phenomena
Birth to nearly 2 years Sensorimotor •Object permanence
Experiencing the world through •Mental Invention
senses and actions (looking, •Imitation
touching, mouthing)
About 2 to 7 years Preoperational •Symbolic representation
Representing things •Egocentrism
with words and images •Irreversibility
but lacking logical reasoning •Perceptual centration
About 7 to 11 years Concrete operational •Reversibility
Thinking logically about concrete •Conservation
events; grasping concrete analogies •Decentration
and performing arithmetical operations
About 11 through Formal operational •Abstract
adulthood Abstract reasoning logic/reasoning
 Piaget believed that “children are active thinkers,
constantly trying to construct more advanced
understandings of the world”

 These “understandings” are in the form of

structures he called schemas
 Concepts or mental frameworks that
people use to organize and interpret
information
 Sometimes called schemes
 A person’s “picture of the world”
 Interpreting a new experience within
the context of one’s existing schemas

 The new experience is similar to

other previous experiences
 Assimilation
› Children interpret new experiences based upon
their present interpretation of the world.
› Child assimilates past experience
 Past experience tells child to use one hand to
grab large ball because it worked with rattles
and smaller objects.
 Interpreting a new experience by adapting
or changing one’s existing schemas

 The new experience is so novel the

person’s schemata must be changed to
accommodate it
 Accommodation
› Adjustments or modifications in the
thinking process that will become a part of
a child’s new cognitive repertoire.
› Child accommodates new information
 Child is unable to grasp the ball with one
hand.
 He accommodates by using two hands or
adapting the one-handed grasp.
As children assimilate new information and experiences, they eventually change their way of
thinking to accommodate new knowledge
1. Sensorimotor stage
› from birth to age 2

2. Preoperational stage
› from age 2 to age 7
 3. Concrete operational stage
› from age 7 to age 11

4. Formal operational stage

begins during adolescence and continues into adulthood.

 Each new stage represents a fundamental shift in

how the child thinks and understands the world
 Stage lasts from birth until
significant language is acquired,
about 2 years old.

 Abilities: Uses senses and motor

skills to explore and develop new
schemas
 Children in this stage understand
the world through their senses and
motor activities such as
grasping, sucking, seeing,
touching, tasting, etc.
 Knowledge is obtained through physical
experience with the environment

 Infant uses senses to experience the

environment and his/her physical motor
actions t interact with it.
 The more a child has seen and heard, the more
he/she wants to see and hear
 Object Permanence
the awareness that things continue to exist even when
not perceived
Mental invention
• Capacity to think out an action before representing
it
 Imitation
• Capability to copy behaviors
 operations refer to logical, mental activities; thus,
the preoperational stage is a prelogical stage

 Children can understand language but not logic

 Emergence of symbolic thought - ability to use
words, images, and symbols to represent the
world.
 Centration - tendency to focus, or center, on only
one aspect of a situation, usually a perceptual
aspect, and ignore other relevant aspects of the
situation

 Egocentrism - inability to take another person’s

perspective or point of view
 Lack the concept of conservation - which holds
that two equal quantities remain equal even if the
appearance of one is changed, as long as nothing is
added or subtracted

 Irreversibility - child cannot mentally reverse a

sequence of events or logical operations back to
the starting point
 The inability to mentally
reverse actions

i.e. 5+6 = 11 is not 11-6=5

 Ability to think logically about concrete
objects and situations
 Child can now understand conservation
 Classification and categorization
 Less egocentric
 Inability to reason abstractly or
hypothetically
 Ability to mentally reverse events

i.e. 5+6 = 11 is also 11-6=5

 Imagine the water being poured back and
forth between containers of different shapes
and sizes
› the principle that
properties such as mass,
volume, and number
remain the same despite
changes in the forms of
objects
(Pre-operational children tended to say there was more liquid
in C as they focused on height)
 The ability to pay attention to others
characteristics of an object or problem

 i.e. The school-aged child can see that a clay

ball rolled into a sausage shape is wider than it
was before, but also shorter
 Ability to reason logically about hypothetical process and
events that may have no basis in reality

› Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning
 a formal operational ability to think
hypothetically.

› Thinking Like a Scientist

 Inductive reasoning- type of thinking
where hypotheses are generated and
then systematically tested in
experiments.
 What do you think of Piaget’s
theory?
 Are the assumptions
acceptable? Why or why not?
 Underestimated developing minds
 Failed to distinguish competence from
performance
 It is believed by some that Cognitive
development does not evolve in a
qualitative and stage like manner- it tends
to develop gradually
 Provides a vague explanation on cognitive
maturation

 Devoted little attention to social and

cultural influences
OTHER THEORIES
 What are the implications of Piaget’s theory for
parents and teachers?
› Children build understanding of the world through
interaction and association.
› Kids are not PASSIVE “buckets” waiting to be filled
with a teacher’s knowledge!
› Young people are incapable of adult logic!
 Acquisition of knowledge was
active and socially constructed

 Role of social interaction

 Zone of Proximal Development

› Scaffolding
 ZPD

Can solve
Cannot solve Can solve
w/
w/help
help or
or
problem independently
“scaffolding”
 Computer metaphor and human
thinking

 CODING , STORING and

RETRIEVING information
Information Processing System
 Environment – source of input

 Receptors – sensory system that allows the child

to see, hear, smell, taste and feel

 Sensory register – for storage

STM and LTM

SENSORY INPUT
STORAGE RETRIEVAL
Coding

- Converting - The process

information into a - The process
whereby a
form that can be whereby a
encoded
entered and stored memory
information is
stored in the is brought into
held for future
memory. consciousness.
use.
 Three memory systems:

SENSORY SHORT TERM MEMORY LONG TERM

MEMORY MEMORY
1. Limited capacity
1. Large capacity
2. Brief storage of items 1. Unlimited capacity
2. Contain sensory (30 seconds) 2. Storage thought
information by some to be
3. Involve in conscious permanent
3. Very brief 3. Information
processing of
retention of organized and
information
images (1/2- 2 indexed
sec)
 Applications of Info
Processing System
 TECHNIQUES TO REMEMBER
 helping us associate the
information we want to remember
with a visual image, a sentence, or
a word.

 i.e. Visual Image

To remember the name Angela dela
Rosa, picture an angel surrounded
by roses.
 i.e. WORD
ROYGBIV – colors of the rainbow
 i.e. Sentence

My Dear Aunt Sally (mathematical order

of operations: Multiply and Divide before you
Add and Subtract)
 My Very Eager Mother Just Sent Us
New Potatoes – 9 planets
-Grouping items
together which can
be remembered only
a bit of information.
 09177645118
 4953827169
 924751861783

 Apple, cucumber, paper, ink,

cabbage, banana, grapes, beans,
stapler, orange
Apple, cucumber, paper, ink,
cabbage, banana, grapes, beans,
stapler, orange

3 chunks:
 Apple, banana, grapes, orange
 Cucumber, Cabbage, Beans
 Paper, Ink, Stapler
 "Thirty days have September
April, June and November
All the rest have thirty-one
February has twenty-eight alone
Except in leap year, then the time
When Feb days are twenty-nine."
 Which months of the year
have 30 days and 31
days?
 Contributing factors
› Combination of heredity and experience
 Monozygotic twins – evidence of heredity
› Intellectual environment one is raised in
 Enriched environments can increase IQ