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UoM: PSYC10211 Introduction to Developmental Psychology
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## 1. Piaget’s Theory

• Four characteristics
1. Constructionist
2. Stage Theory
3. Invariant sequence
4. Universal
• Development involves continuities and
discontinuities

### 1.1. Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
- Most widely known and influential theorist of child development 
- His theory is often labelled constructivist because it depicts children as constructing knowledge
for themselves 
- Piagetian children are seen as “little scientists”
- learning many important lessons on their own
- Intrinsically motivated to learn

### 1.2. Concepts
#### 1.2.1. Assimilation

*The process by which people translate incoming information into a form they already understand*

#### 1.2.2. Accommodation

*The process by which people adapt current knowledge structures in response to new experiences/theories about the world*

#### 1.2.3. Equilibration

*The process by which people balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding*

### 1.3. Discontinuities

In addition to continuous aspects of development, most famous part of Piaget’s theory concerns discontinuities
- Hierarchical stages
- Each stage represents a unified way of understanding one’s experience
- Each transition between stages shows a discontinuous intellectual leap

### 1.4. Central Properties

Qualitative change
- e.g. morality – behaviour vs. intent
- Broad applicability
- Across contexts
- Brief transitions
- Fluctuation between stages
- Invariant sequence
- Everyone goes through the same stages without skipping

### 1.5. 4 Stages

Piaget’s theory is considered a discontinuous view of
development because of his distinct, hierarchical
stages
• Hypothesized that children progress through four
stages of cognitive development, each building on
the previous one

#### 1.5.1. Sensorimotor (birth – 2 years)

- Infants get to know the world through their senses and through their actions.
- Babies are born with many reflexes –grasping, sucking…
- They learn to integrate reflexes in the first few months (grasp + suck)
- Critical cognitive achievement by ~8 months: 
	- **Object permanence: the knowledge that objects continue to exist even when they are out of view**

#### 1.5.2. Pre-Operational (2 – 7 years)

• Toddlers and young children start to
rely on internal representations of the
world based on language and mental imagery
• A mix of impressive cognitive acquisitions and equally
impressive limitations
– A notable acquisition is symbolic representation, the use of one object
to stand for another, which makes a variety of new behaviours possible
– A major limitation is egocentrism, the tendency to perceive the world
solely from one’s own point of view
– Pre-Operational children also make conservation errors, where they
incorrectly believe that merely changing the appearance of objects can
change their quantity

- Symbolic representation
- Egocentrism
	- Perceive the world solely from one’s own viewpoint
	- Difficulty in taking other people’s spatial perspectives
	- According to Piaget, most 4-year-olds can’t do this
- Egocentric conversations
- Centration: focus on one perceptually salient aspect of the stimulus and ignore the other stimulus dimensions

#### 1.5.3. Concrete Operational (7 – 12 years)

*Children begin to reason logically about the world. Thinking systematically remains difficult.*

They can solve conservation problems, but their successful reasoning is largely limited to concrete situations

#### 1.5.4. Formal Operational (12+ years)

### 1.6. Critique of Piaget’s theory
- Although Piaget’s theory remains highly influential, some
weaknesses are now apparent
- Piaget’s theory is vague about the cognitive processes that give
rise to children’s thinking and about the mechanisms that
produce cognitive growth (what are the processes that lead
children to think in a particular way? Piaget doesn’t elaborate…)
- The stage model depicts children’s thinking as being more
consistent than it is (but e.g., conservation of number vs. solidquantity)
- Infants and young children are more cognitively competent than
Piaget recognized (they pass easier versions of the tests)
- It understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive
development (what about the role of other people in the child’s
development?)

## 2. Vygotsky’s theory

Piaget considered children to be “little
scientists” trying to understand the
world on their own
• Vygotsky portrayed them as social beings,
intertwined with other people who are eager to
help them gain skills and understanding that
they need to interact successfully with the
world
• Children are viewed as social beings, shaped by and shaping
their cultural contexts. Children develop and learn by
interacting with other members of their society
• It sees development as continuous, rather than abrupt changes

### 2.1. Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934)
• Sociocultural approach to child
development
• His theory presents children as social
beings, intertwined with other people
who are eager to help them gain skills
and understanding
• His work didn’t reach the attention of
western psychologists until the 1960s
• Subsequent psychologists (such as
Jerome Bruner) extended and developed
Vygotsky’s work by adding
interpretations

### 2.2. Sociocultural approaches
• Focus on the contribution of other people and the
surrounding culture to children’s development
• Emphasize guided participation, a process in which
more knowledgeable individuals organize activities in
ways that allow less knowledgeable people to engage
in them at a higher level than they could manage on
their own
• Present interactions as occurring in a broader
sociocultural context that includes cultural tools, the
innumerable products of human ingenuity that
enhance thinking

### 2.3. Mental functions
- Vygotsky distinguished between two levels of mental functioning
- Lower mental functions are regarded as elementary mental abilities closely tied to biological processes that are innate and involuntary, and involve simple perception, memory and responding directly to the environment
- Higher mental functions are regarded as consciously controlled transformations of lower functions that are developed through cultural mediation, and involve voluntary attention, conceptual thought and logical planning

### 2.4. Internalisation
 Higher mental functions develop through cultural mediation: the transmission of knowledge through social interactions with other people
- Interactions allow a child to learn the cultural tools (also known as cultural artefacts) of his/her society
- These include language, values, skills and other symbolic systems that represent the shared knowledge of a culture
- Eventually, a child understands a cultural tool and can use it independently (i.e., without the help of social interaction); this process is known as internalisation

### 2.5. Children’s private speech

Vygotsky viewed it as foundation for all higher cognitive processes. Indeed, that language and
thought are integrally related

- Most evident between 4-6 years
- Helps guide behaviour
- Used more when tasks are difficult, after errors, or when confused
- Gradually becomes more silent
- External-to-internal develops with age, but also experience
- Children with learning and behavioural problems use it for longer

