Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development: Sensorimotor Stage and Object Permanence, Apuntes de Desarrollo Cognitivo

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SENSORIMOTOR PERIOD AND PECEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT • Piaget´s cognitive processes. - Piaget believed that the basic building blocks of the way we understand the world are mental structures called schemes. - Schemes are organized patterns of functioning that adapt and change with mental development. • At first, schemes are related to physical, or sensorimotor activity, such as picking up or reaching for toys. • As children develop, their schemes move to a mental level, reflecting thought. • Schemes are similar to computer software: They direct and determine how data from the world, such as new events or objects, are considered and dealt with. - There is a very important assumption that underlies Piaget’s view of intelligence: If children are to know something, they must construct that knowledge themselves. - Indeed, Piaget described the child as a constructivist — an individual who acts on novel objects and events and thereby gains some understanding of their essential features. • Organization: Is the process by which children combine existing schemes into new and more complex intellectual schemes. • For example, an infant who has “gazing,” “reaching,” and “grasping” reflexes soon organizes these initially unrelated schemes into a more complex structure— visually directed reaching—that enables him to reach out and discover the characteristics of many interesting objects in the environment. • Assimilation: Is the process by which people understand an experience in terms of their current stage of cognitive development and way of thinking. Assimilation occurs, then, when a stimulus or event is acted upon, perceived, and understood in accordance with existing patterns of thought. • For example, an infant who tries to suck on any toy in the same way is assimilating the objects to her existing sucking scheme. Similarly, a child who encounters a flying squirrel at a zoo and calls it a "bird" is assimilating the squirrel to his existing scheme of bird. • Accommodation: In contrast, when we change our existing ways of thinking, understanding, or behaving in response to encounters with new stimuli or events, accommodation takes place. • For instance, when a child sees a flying squirrel and calls it "a bird with a tail," he is beginning to accommodate new knowledge, modifying his scheme of bird. - Piaget believed that the earliest schemes are primarily limited to the reflexes with which we are all born, such as sucking and rooting. Infants start to modify these simple early schemes almost immediately, through the processes of assimilation and accommodation, in response to their exploration of the environment. • Piaget´s stages of Cognitive Development. - Piaget identified four major periods, or stages, of cognitive development. • the sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years), • the preoperational stage (2 to 7 years), • the stage of concrete operations (7 to 11 years), • and the stage of formal operations (11 years and beyond). - These stages of intellectual growth represent qualitatively different levels of functioning and form what Piaget calls an invariant developmental sequence; that is, all children progress through the stages in the same order. - Piaget argued that stages can never be skipped because each successive stage builds on the accomplishments of previous stages. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT • The Sensorimotor stage: - During the sensorimotor period, infants coordinate their sensory inputs and motor capabilities, forming behavioral schemes that permit them to “act on” and to get to “know” their environment - During the first 2 years, infants develop from reflexive creatures with very limited knowledge into problem solvers who have already learned a great deal about themselves, their close companions, and the objects and events in their everyday world. - So drastic is the infant’s cognitive growth that Piaget divided the sensorimotor period into six substages (see Table 3.1) that describe the child’s gradual transition from a reflexive to a reflective being. - Our review will focus on three important aspects of sensorimotor development: problem-solving skills (or means/ ends activities), imitation, and the growth of the object concept. - Substage 1: Simple reflexes: • The first substage of the sensorimotor period, encompassing the first month of life. • During this time, the various inborn reflexes, are at the centre of a baby´s physical and cognitive life, determining the nature of his or her interactions with the world. • At the same time, some of the reflexes begin to accommodate the infant´s experience with the nature of the world. • For instance, an infant who is being breastfed, but who also receives supplemental bottles, may start to change the way he or she sucks, depending on whether a nipple is on a breast or a bottle. - Substage 2: First Habits and Primary Circular Reactions: • Occurs from 1 to 4 months of age. In this period, infants begin to coordinate what were separate actions into single, integrated activities. For instance, an infant might combine grasping an object with sucking on it or staring at something while touching it. • If an activity engages a baby's interests, he or she may repeat it over and over, simply for the sake of continuing to experience it. • This repetition of a chance motor event helps the baby start building cognitive schemes through a process known as a circular reaction. • Primary circular reactions are schemes reflecting an infant's repetition of interesting or enjoyable actions, just for the enjoyment of doing them, which focus on the infant's own body. - Substage 3: Secondary Circular Reactions: • The infant's actions are more purposeful. • According to Piaget, this third stage of cognitive development in • infancy occurs from 4 to 8 months of age. • During this period, a child begins to act upon the outside world. For instance, infants now seek to repeat enjoyable events in their environments if they happen to produce them through chance activities. • She is engaging in what Piaget calls secondary circular reactions, which are schemes regarding repeated actions that bring about a desirable consequence. • The major difference between primary circular reactions and secondary circular reactions is whether the infant's activity is focused on the infant and his or her own body (primary circular reactions), or involves actions relating to the world outside (secondary circular reactions). - Substage 4: Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions: • Which lasts from around 8 months to 12 months. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT - Between 2 and 12 months of age, the infant’s visual system is rapidly maturing. She now sees better and is capable of making increasingly complex visual discriminations, eventually even including temporal movement sequencing into her discriminations. - She is also organizing what she sees to perceive visual forms and sets of separate forms. - To demonstrate this new ability to perceive forms, Philip Kellman and Elizabeth Spelke presented infants with a display consisting of a rod partially hidden by a block in front of it (Figure 3.4., displays A and B). - Would they perceive the rod as a whole object, even though part of it was not visible, or would they act as though they had seen two short and separate rods? - To find out, 4 month olds were first presented with either display A (a stationary hidden rod) or display B (a moving hidden rod) and allowed to look at it until they habituated and were no longer interested. Then infants were shown displays C (a whole rod) and D (two rod segments), and their looking preferences were recorded. - Infants who had habituated to the stationary hidden rod (display A) showed no clear preference for display C or display D in the later test. - They were apparently not able to use available cues, such as the two identical rod tips oriented along the same line, to perceive a whole rod when part of the rod was hidden. - Infants did apparently perceive the moving rod (display B) as “whole,” for after habituating to this stimulus, they much preferred to look at the two short rods (display D) than at a whole rod (display C, which they now treated as familiar). - It seems that these latter infants inferred the rod’s wholeness from its synchronized movement— the fact that its parts moved in the same direction at the same time. So infants rely heavily on motion cues to identify distinct forms. - Interestingly, this impressive ability to use object movement to perceive form is apparently not present at birth (Slater et al., 1990), but has developed by 2 months of age. • Explaining form perception: - New-borns are biologically prepared to seek visual stimulation and make visual discriminations. These early visual experiences are important, for they keep the visual neurons firing and contribute to the maturation of the visual centres of the brain (Nelson, 1995). - By about 2 to 3 months of age, maturation has progressed to the point of allowing an infant to see more detail, scan more systematically, and begin to construct visual forms, including one for faces in general, as well as more specific configurations that represent the faces of familiar companions. • Perception of Three-Dimensional Space: - When are infants capable of perceiving depth and making reasonably accurate inferences about size and spatial relations? - Size Constancy: • A 1 month old reacts defensively by blinking his eyes as a looming object approaches his face. • Until recently, researchers claimed that size constancy could not emerge until 3 to 5 months of age, after infants had developed good binocular vision (stereopsis) that would help them to make accurate spatial inferences. But even COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT newborns know something about an object’s real size, although this ability is not yet fully developed. • Size constancy steadily improves throughout the first year; however, this ability is not fully mature until 10 to 11 years of age (Day, 1987). - Development of Depth Perception: • Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk (1960) developed an apparatus they called the visual cliff to determine whether infants can perceive depth. • The visual cliff consists of an elevated glass platform divided into two sections by a center board. On the “shallow” side, a checkerboard pattern is placed directly under the glass. On the “deep” side, the pattern is placed several feet below the glass, creating the illusion of a sharp drop off, or a “visual cliff.” • The investigator tests an infant for depth perception by placing him on the center board and then asking the child’s mother to try to coax the infant to cross both the “shallow” and the “deep” sides. • Testing infants 6 to 61⁄2 months of age and older, found that 90 percent of them would cross the shallow side but fewer than 10 percent would cross the deep side. Apparently, most infants of crawling age clearly perceive depth and are afraid of drop offs. • One reason that many 6 to 7 month olds come to fear drop offs is that they are more sensitive to kinetic, binocular, and monocular depth cues than younger infants are. • So motor development provides experiences that change infants’ interpretation of the meaning of depth. • Infants who have crawled for a couple of weeks are much more afraid of drop offs than infants of the same age who are not yet crawling. • In fact, pre-crawlers quickly develop a healthy fear of heights when given special walkers that allow them to move about on their own. • So motor development provides experiences that change infants’ interpretation of the meaning of depth. • Why does self produced movement make such a difference? Probably because young creepers and crawlers have discovered that the visual environment changes when they move, so that they are more inclined to use a spatial landmark to help them define where they (and hidden objects) are in relation to the larger spatial layout. • Self produced movement also makes an infant more sensitive to optical flow — the sensation that other objects move when she does—which may promote the development of new neural pathways in the sensory and motor areas of the brain that underlie improvements in both motor skills and spatial perception. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT