What can I learn about cognition throughout the life span? - Chapter 7

Cognition is the activity of knowing and the proceses through which knowledge is gained and problems are solved. 

What is Piaget's constructivist approach to cognition?

Piaget was huge for his theory of cognitive development. He found children of different ages have different ways of thinking. Next to observing children, he used a question-and-answer technique that is now known as the clinical method. With this method, he interviewed different children: with a consistent initial question, but the following questions varying upon the child. Though now some see this as an imprecise way of testing, Piaget wanted to follow every unique's child way of thinking. 

According to Piaget, intelligence is a basic life function which helps an organism to adapt to the environment. He viewed children as active in their own development, learning through observing, investigating and experimenting. He thought that in response to these explorations, the brain would form schemes (organized cognitive structures/patterns that people construct to interpret their experiences). These schemes are used to adapt to different situations. In very young childhood, children just make use of behavioral/action schemes, but as they get older they also develop symbolic schemes (concepts). So as they grow up children develop new and more complex schemes and are better able to adapt to the environment. 

Piaget had an interactionist approach when it comes to nature vs. nurture. He believed children create knowledge by constructing schemes from their experience, using two innate intellectual functions. The first is called organization and means that children combine existing chemes into new, more complex ones: they reorganize simple structures in their mind to complex structures. The second is called adaption and means adjusting to the demands of environment. This happens through two complementary processes. The first is assimilation and stands for the process by which we interpret new experiences using existing schemes. We try to fit something new in an existing category. The second process is accomodation and stands for modifying existing schemes to fit a new experience. When you enter something that does not fit your schemes right, you might have to adjust your scheme. Piaget thought, as new events challenge old schemes or make them seem inadequate, we experience cognitive conflict (disequilibrium). This conflict stimulates cognitive growth. We always want to reduce conflict, through in this case equilibration (process of making internal thoughts consistence with the evidence from the outside world, hereby achieving mental stability). And so, developing, children go through the different stages that Piaget found and that are mentioned before, and that still seem accurate. 

Though Piaget's impact was huge and critical, there are still 4 common criticisms to him:

1. Underestimating young minds. Piaget maybe failed to discriminate competence (understanding something) from performance (passing a test). And Piaget may have overemphasized his idea that knowledge is all-or-nothing, while it's actually gradual change.
2. The wrongful claiming that broad stages of development exist. Individuals are often at different stages when it comes to different problems. So transitions between stages are probably lenghty and subtle, instead of swift and abrupt like Piaget suggests: maybe stages are not even possible when it comes to describing development.
3.  Failing to explain development well. Description may be adequate, however what about the explanation? He tried, but it's still vague. 
4. Giving too little attention to social influences from adults. Social and cultural influences lack in Piaget's theory but they sure influence a child. Piaget thought children do not view adults as similar to themselves, and so adults can not cause cognitive conflict as much as peers with different perspectives can: so adults can, according to Piaget, not really cause cognitive growth. 

The neuroconstructivism theory builds on Piaget's beliefs and states that new knowledge/schemes are constructed through changes in the neural structures of the brain, as a response to experience. It modernizes Piaget, connecting the patterns of thought he talked about with neural activity patterns. Development of cognition ultimately is not static, and reflects complex and ongoing interplay of different factors all throughout the lifespan. 

What is Vygotsky's sociocultural perspective to cognition?

Vygotsky's main theme is that cognitive growth occurs in a sociocultural context and evolves out of the child's social interactions. The cultural society gives children mental tools. According to Vygotsky, learning precedes development, while according to Piaget development precedes learning. 

One of the concepts of Vygotsky's theory is the zone of proximal development, which is the difference between what a child can accomplish alone and what can be accomplished with the guidance and encouragement of a more knowledgeable partner. Skills outside of this zone are already mastered or still too difficult, and thus within the zone is the opportunity for development and learning. Another concept is guided paticipation and stands for a child learning through actively participating in culturally relevant activities, with the support of knowledgeable guides. Parents can provide scaffolding for their children's development: the more-skilled person gives help to a less-skilled person but gradually reduces this help as the less-skiled person learns more. 

Adults use tools to pass cultural ways of thinking and problem solving to their children, like language or applying memory strategies. Tools depends on culture, it could either be computer skills or a set of hunting strategies. Vygotsky believes tools influence thought. Whereas Piaget believed cognitive development influences language development, Vygotsky believed language shapes thought. He believed private speech (talking to yourself) is an important step in developing mature thought, and eventually goes over into the silently thinking-in-words adults do all day. Adults first guide children with speech, and children adopt speech as a tool they first use externally, like they learned from adults. Private speech can help children solve problems and they can encourage themselves through it, like adults did to them. Thus, social speech turns into private, inner speech, meaning a social process turns into an individual psychological one. Piaget's view on this was that children talking to themselves were using egocentric speech, which eventually becomes social speech as they grow. 

Vygotsky has been criticized for emphasizing social interaction too much and leaving out the individual. However his theory of conceptual growth through interaction seems accurate. Possibly the best would be to combine individual exploration with social guidance when needed. 

What is Fischer's dynamic skill framework to cognition?

Fischer's perspective was that behavior cannot be analyzed without taking the context into consideration. He believed behavior emerges from interactions between person and context. For instance, you can sing the high part perfectly when practicing, but in front of an audience it doesn't go as well. Or maybe you thrive with the support of an audience and love feeling a bit more pressure. Consistency across different context seems like a machine instead of human. Human's performance is dynamic and changes in response to environment. So instead of Piaget's testing in artificial environments, Fischer preferred natural contexts. And whereas Piaget believed in the development of cognitive structures, Fischer believed in the development of skill levels, and skills are task-specific and context-specific. Fischer took over the zone of proximal development and believed that it represented the opportunity for growth that exists between a person's optimal ability and their actual performance, thus their current skill level. According to him the zone explains how cognition can advance from one level to another. Fischer also came up with the concept of developmental range: meaning with a supportive context, people can perform optimally, whereas with an unsupportive environment causes performance below our optimal level. Thus high levels of support can lead to large steps in learning a skill, and low support levels can result in slow and linear skill learning. So, Fischer was interested in variability of performance. 

What does cognition mean to the infant?

Piaget believed the groundwork for cognitive development occurred during the first 2 years of life. The dominant cognitive structures in this stage are behavioral schemes (action patterns that evolve as infants begin to coordinate sensory input and motor responses). So infants solve problems mostly with their actions and not their minds. This is the sensorimotor stage and it contains six substages:

1. Reflex activity (birth - 1 month): active exercise and refinement of innate reflexes. 
2. Primary circular reactions (1 - 4 months): repetition of interesting acts centered on the child's own body, typically beginning randomly but then repeated for pleasure.
3. Secondary circular reactions (4 - 8 months): repetition of interesting acts on objects. 
4. Coordination of secondary schemes (8 - 12 months): combination of actions to solve simple problems or achieve goals. The first evidence of intentionality. 
5. Tertiary circular reactions (12- 18 months): experimenting to find new ways of solving problems or producing interesting outcomes (like pinching, squeezing, and patting a cat to see what it does).
6. Beginning of thought (18-24 months): first evidence of insight, ability to solve problems mentally and the use of symbolic thought. For instance, visualizing how a stick could be used, but also imitating models that are no longer present (mental representations can be made), and learning a word can represent an object.

Piaget thought newborns lack an understanding of object permanence, thus the understanding that objects continue to exist when they are no longer detectible to the senses. Infants have to learn that reality exists apart from their experience of it. The concept of object permanence develops gradually over the sensorimotor stages. The tendency of 8-12 month olds to search for something in the place where they last found it (A) instead of in the new hiding place (B) which they know about, is called the A-not-B error. However, simplifying this task showed some understanding of object permanence in younger infants. This shows Fischer's notion that skill depends on the task demands and the context as well. Another important accomplishment of the sensorimotor period is the emergence of symbolic capacity, thus the ability to use images, words or gestures to represent objects and experiences. Now thinking can evolve! 

What does cognition mean to the child?

The greatest cognitive strength of the preschooler is symbolic capacity. Pretend play flourishes now, even with imaginary companions. The preschooler's thinking is preoperational, thus logical mental operations do not yet work. There is a focus on perceptual salience meaning preschoolers are easily fooled by appearances. For instance there's the concept of conservation which is the idea that certain properties of an object or substance do not change when its appearance is altered in a superficial way. Piaget says young children are easily fooled since they lack certain mental operations: they cannot engage in decentration (ability to focus on two or more dimensions of something at once) so they engage in centration (attenting to just one aspect of the problem). And they do not master reversibility yet: the process of mentally undoing an action. They also have limitations in transformational thought (the ability to conceptualize transformations), and instead they engage in static thought and just perceive the final states instead of the change that happens. An older child can understand conservation since it can master all these cognitive things and can think logically. Neuroconstructivists say that success on logic tasks goes with increased activity in parts of the frontal cortex associated with greater cognitive control, that inhibits responding with perceptual salience. So for logical thinking a good strategy has to be activated and an incorrect one has to be inhibited. 

Preschool children are also egocentric and can not well see other perspectives than their own, says Piaget. However again, he may have underestimated them. Another thing is that they lack the concept of class inclusion: understanding that parts are included within a whole. They also classify objects by one dimension at a time which is called single classification. Older children can classify objects by multiple dimensions (multiple classification) and can understand class inclusion. Furthermore, preoperational thinkers make use of transductive reasoning: combining unrelated facts, for instance drawing faulty cause-effect conclusions, just because two things happen at the same time. Older children, that can reason logically, make use of inductive reasoning and can draw logical cause-effect conclusions.

So eventually children get from the preoperational stage to the concrete-operational stage, and they learn to think logically and can do things like the conversation task. Logical operations also contribute to math skills like adding and subtracting things. 

Concrete-operational children are also capable of seriation which enables them to arrange items mentally, along a certain dimension like length. And they master transitivity, describing the necessary relations among elements in a series (like: John is taller than Mark, and Mark is taller than Sam. Who is taller: John or Sam?) They can logically understand this, unlike the preoperational child. They also get better at classification and can understand subclasses are included in a whole class, and they get less egocentric. They can inhibit the earlier strategies of the preoperational time. However, they can not fully understand abstract and hypothetical things yet. 

What does cognition mean to the adolescent?

The formal operations stage begins. Now it's time for mental actions on ideas instead of objects or events, and thus possibilities instead of realities. They learn to think more abstractly and hypothetically, and a more scientific and systematic approach to problem solving is adopted. Hypothetical-deductive reasoning emerges which is reasoning from general ideas or rules to their specific implications, and thus forming hypotheses and testing them experimentally. While Piaget claimed perceptual reasoning is replaced by scientific reasoning,it actually shows that the two forms coexist in older thinkers. They just have to select the appropriate strategy for the situation. 

There is still a division between early and late formal operations, so the capabilities increase quite gradually. For instance, younger adolescents can show awareness of scientific reasoning, but cannot yet produce it. Due to school education, formal-operational skills seem to improve over time (teens in 1967 showed less formal-operational thought than in 1996). Furthermore, adolescents are increasingly able to decontextualize, or in other words separate prior knowledge and beliefs from the current demands of the task.

Formal-operational thought may help the individual to gain a sense of identity, understand others better and think about moral issues differently. It may also be related to some of the painful aspects of the experience of adolescence, like confusion, doubt and disagreements or rebellion. Adolescents may become frustrated when the world does not follow their sense of logic. Furthermore, formal-operational thought can lead to adolescent egocentrism, meaning the individual has difficulty differentiating their own thoughts and feelings from other people's.  There are 2 forms. Firstly, the imaginary audience phenomenon means that your own thoughts seem like the thoughts of a whole audience: like not liking your hair and then feeling everyone else will also think your hair is ugly. This may also come from adolescence's awareness that how they are perceived by others has consequences for their lifes. Secondly, there is personal fable, which means you and your thoughts and feelings are unique, like feeling like no one else has ever been as in love as you are. High scores on measures of adolescent egocentrism are related to risky behavior. However, not all research supports the phenomenon of adolescent egocentrism. 

What does cognition mean to the adult?

Piaget did not study further than the formal-operational stage which ended around age 18. However, some adults progress to even more advanced forms of thought. At the other end, some adults do never really solve formal-operational problems (when it comes to Piaget's tasks). It seems a certain level of intelligence is essential to achieve this kind of thought, and there's a big role for formal education. So, if achieving formal-operational thought has to do with education and experience, Piaget's theory is probably not universal but culturally-biased. It also seems that adults are more likely to use formal operations in a field they have expertise in, but go back to concrete operations in a less familiar field. This could have influenced Piaget's testings results. Adopting a contextual perspective like Fischer's, helps to understand that the individual's experience and the nature of the tasks influence cognitive performance across the life span. 

Some scholars think there is a stage beyond formal operations, namely postformal thought. This could have to do with applying logic to open sets of ideas, instead of a closed set like in the formal operational stage. It may be different because of two things: relativistic thinking and dialectial thinking. Relativistic thinking is about understanding that knowledge depends on context and perspective. While an adolescent may think he is right and the teacher's stupid, adults realize there are two sides to every story. Adolescents think there is a logically correct answer for everything, whereas adults can think more flexibly and know there is not always just a good or bad answer. So, from adolescence to adulthood people turn from absolutists into relativists, and then finally commit themselves to certain positions, aware of the role of perspective and the limits of knowledge. The second term, dialectical thinking, is about detecting paradoxes and inconsistencies among ideas and then trying to reconcile them. So it's about challenging and changing your understanding of the truth. Thus: drawing a conclusion, then finding something that contradicts that conclusion and adjusting it. So in sum the features of of postformal thinking are understanding that knowledge is relative, accepting that the world is filled with contradicitions, and attempting to integrate the contradictions into a larger understanding. Whereas many research confirms that cognitive abilities keep growing in adulthood, it's not sure that this means a new Piagetian stage, since this thinking may not be qualitatively different, universal and irreversible. 

Seemingly, the cognitive abilities of elderly decrease as they age, but this could also be due to difference in style instead of due to deficits. They perform better in everyday contexts. Education and motivation might have to do with it.