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Developmental Psychology/Theories of Development.md

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+---
+UoM: PSYC10211 Introduction to Developmental Psychology
+---
+## 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
+