"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (4) —— The Development of Thought

Lecture 5: The Development of Thought

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny is the belief guided Piaget to study the emergence of knowledge in general via studing how a kid develop his knowledge.

Schemas are frameworks that people develop to help organize knowledge. Child developed their understanding through two sorts of mechanisms:

1. assimilation: process of taking new information or a new experience and fitting it into an already existing schema.
2. accommodation: process by which existing schemas are changed or new schemas are created in order to fit new information.

Stage theory:

1. Sensorimotor stage(birth -2): Child is purely a physical creature. Information is gained through the senses and motor actions. Child perceives and manipulates but does not reason. In this stage, child acquire object permanence: The understanding that objects exist independent of one’s actions or perceptions of them.
2. Preoperational stage(2-7 years): the capacity to represent the world, to have the world inside your head, comes into being. The limitations are:
• egocentric--children at this age literally can't understand that others can see the world differently from them.
• Lack the concept of conservation-The notion of conservation is that there's ways to transform things such that some aspects of them change but others remain the same. Kids don't know that.
3. Concrete operations(7-12 years):Understanding of mental operations leading to increasingly logical thought to some extent stuck in the concrete world. The mathematical notions of infinity or logical notions like logical entailment are beyond a child of this age.
4. Formal Operational Stage(12~adulthood):you could get abstract and scientific reasoning.

Limitations in Piaget's theory:

• theoretical
• methodological
• factual

Methods for studying infants:

• Brain wave
• Sucking: look at how much they suck on the pacifier to determine what they like.
• Looking times: preference, habituation & surprise

How do we explain development?
• Neural maturation
• Problems with inhibition --A-not-B
• The accumulation of knowledge

Another alternative view developed by by Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor is a modular conception of development -- There are separate pre-wired systems for reasoning about the world. These systems have some built-in knowledge, and they have to do some learning, but the learning pattern varies from system to system and there's a separateness to them.