Psychology
Cognition and Development
Cognition and development refer to the mental processes and growth that occur as individuals acquire knowledge, solve problems, and understand their environment. This area of study explores how cognitive abilities, such as attention, memory, language, and reasoning, evolve from infancy through adulthood. It also investigates the impact of social, cultural, and environmental factors on cognitive development.
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6 Key excerpts on "Cognition and Development"
eBook - ePub- Graham C. Davey, Graham C. Davey(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
- Another approach to studying cognitive development, which gained prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, is from the point of view of cognitive functions such as memory, attention, planning, and so on. In this line of enquiry, cognitive developmentalists have tended to examine developmental changes in the ability to process knowledge or information. This approach is often referred to as the information-processing perspective on cognitive development.
- The cognitive functions that are of most interest at the moment are executive functions.
- Vygotsky (1978) proposed what has become known as a sociocultural approach to cognitive development, underpinned by the concept of the zone of proximal development.
- There has been particular interest in the development of the cognitive abilities and knowledge we use in social contexts. In particular, researchers have sought to understand the development of the ability to understand mental states: the development of a theory of mind, examined by using a false-belief task.
CHAPTER SUMMARY
This chapter has considered the enormous idea that every process or phenomenon you will study in psychology as a discipline has some kind of developmental history. For this reason alone the potential scope of developmental psychology is huge. We did this by covering the very substantial literature on cognitive development in a necessarily sparse fashion but we have highlighted a number of areas that are of current interest in recent scientific publications.We began with perceptual development, and looked not just at how visual and auditory perception develop but also at some of the less studied senses that are gaining prominence in research, such as touch and olfaction (smell). We also examined how changes in the interactions among the senses develop in early life. Given the crucial role of multisensory interactions in determining how we perceive the world, it is likely that research into multisensory development will continue to grow (Bremner, Lewkowicz, & Spence, 2012). We then examined the contemporary interest in the role of the brain in cognitive development.
eBook - ePub- E. Mavis Hetherington, Richard M. Lerner, Marion Perlmutter(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
9 COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN LIFE-SPAN PERSPECTIVE: From Description of Differences to Explanation of Changes Marion Perlmutter University of Michigan ABSTRACT The purposes of this chapter are to articulate an agenda for cognitive developmentalists and to consider how well it is being met. It is suggested that cognitive developmentalists should be addressing two major questions: What are the ways that cognition changes with age? and What are the causes of this change? An overview of alternative approaches to the study of cognitive development is presented, and an integrative, three tier model, framed within a multidisciplinary perspective is forwarded. It is argued that research on cognitive development has made considerable progress with respect to describing the ways that cognition changes with age but has failed in explaining the causes of age change. Some conceptual reasons for the paucity of such information are discussed, and recommendations are made for the reconceptualization of research design, adoption of a life span perspective, and reassessment of assumptions. INTRODUCTION Cognition is a psychological construct that refers to all of mental life. It includes perception, memory, intelligence, reasoning, judgment, and decision making. It permits humans to represent and to think about the world, to conceptualize experience, to fantasize beyond experience, to maintain a sense of self, and to communicate with others. It expands individual competence and allows us to solve and to circumvent problems. Memory, for example, keeps track of events that have occurred in different times and distant places. Intellectual skills enable us to reflect upon experiences and to attach meaning and significance to them. As individuals, this ability gives us the power to anticipate and plan for the future, to develop strategies, to hypothesize alternatives, and to evaluate consequences
eBook - ePubForensic Psychiatry
Fundamentals and Clinical Practice
- Basant Puri, Ian H. Treasaden, Basant Puri, Ian H. Treasaden(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- CRC Press(Publisher)
8Developmental psychology
NATHALIA L. GJERSOE AND CATRIONA HAVARD Introduction Cognitive development Personality Social development Sexual development The child as witness Conclusion ReferencesINTRODUCTION
Developmental psychology is a discipline that encapsulates the full spectrum of psychological processes throughout the life span. Theories developed as part of this research have important implications not just for our understanding of children’s behavior and growth but also for how we conceptualize the human mind as a whole. Often there are processes so inextricably interwoven and sophisticated in adults that understanding them requires examination from their inception in the developing brain. This chapter focuses on the age range between infancy and late childhood and summarizes theories of children’s cognitive, personality, social, and sexual development, concluding with an outline of current opinion regarding children’s capacities as eyewitnesses.COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Even newborns come into the world with a toolkit of basic sensory capacities and biases to attend to specific types of information. This stream of information forms the basis for mental representations—patterns of neuronal activity that refer to aspects of the external world. Developmental cognitive psychology examines mechanisms of change in mental representations throughout the life span. Examining cognitive development in infants and young children requires its own set of methodologies distinct from those used to examine adults. Children have limited communication and -comprehension abilities, disorganized or slow motor responses, and are easily distracted. Traditionally, research into cognitive development utilized naturalistic observation of children’s behavior at different ages and manipulated situations to determine if children’s responses changed in a reliable manner from age to age. This work has revealed a host of cognitive capabilities that all typically developing children seem to attain within a very similar time period—referred to as cognitive milestones
eBook - ePubChild Development
Concepts and Theories
- Jean A. Mercer(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
Chapter 5 Concepts Related to the Development of Cognition and PerceptionChapter 5 is concerned with concepts that contribute to our understanding of children’s development of thinking, memory, and other cognitive processes. Theory plays an important role in the study of cognitive development, with valuable concepts having been contributed by the Swiss theorist Jean Piaget, by behaviourist thinkers, by dynamic systems theorists, and by others. Research methods specific to the study of cognitive development have been created. As these have shown, memory, thinking skills, communication, and language use all typically change developmentally from birth to age 12, following predictable developmental trajectories. Atypical cognitive development may interfere more or less severely with other aspects of children’s development.Introduction
The concept of cognition is a broad one that includes a range of mental and intellectual states and processes, including learning, memory, problem-solving, and symbol use. Cognition also includes the idea of concept use and formation that is the focus of this book. The extent of developmental change in cognition during childhood is evident when we think about the limited capacities of a 1-year-old and compare them to the much more advanced, almost adult-like, cognitive skills of a 12-year-old. Perception is a concept less frequently used in everyday thinking about child development; it may be thought of as involving processes that combine the sensory abilities discussed in Chapter 4 with cognitive advances, allowing the individual to make sense of the complex sensory world.Development story 5.1Five-year-old Oliver’s teacher, Ms McDonald, felt that he was ‘different’ soon after she met him. She noticed that he did not play much with other children at breaks, and did not even watch them as though he were interested but too shy to make friends. He seemed to be focused on his own concerns and would watch beetles or worms carefully. He did not seem unhappy and would answer briefly if asked a question. However, when frustrated Oliver would have a screaming tantrum, and Ms McDonald could usually not even understand what had frustrated him. Ms McDonald arranged a meeting with Oliver’s parents in the hope that she could find out more about him and understand what he needed before he got much older.
eBook - ePub- Peter Mitchell, Fenja Ziegler(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
3 DOI: 10.4324/9780203736357-3Contents
Introduction Stages of cognitive development Piaget’s explanation of cognitive development Traditional learning theory as a contrasting explanation of development A supplement to Piaget’s theory: Self-centered adolescents SummaryThe development of thinking 3
Chapter Aims- To introduce Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. To detail Piaget’s stages.
- To detail the evidence that lends support to Piaget’s stage theory.
- To present the mechanism that Piaget posited as responsible for cognitive development.
Introduction
The discipline concerned with studying the development of thinking is cognitive developmental psychology. The word “cognitive” refers to knowledge, but not necessarily according to the common meaning of the word. When people talk about knowledge, they usually mean the kind of information useful for answering questions in games such as The Weakest Link or Who Wants to be a Millionaire, or in order to do college exams. In contrast, cognitive developmentalists think of knowledge as referring to understanding about things.You might have noticed a child aged around 5 years speaking on the telephone about things only he can see: He seems to overlook the fact that the person he is speaking to is in a completely different location and cannot see the same things. Perhaps this is a sign that the young child is incapable of putting himself in someone else’s shoes. In the broadest sense, it is tempting to suppose that the child does not understand that other people can have different perspectives. Cognitive developmentalists look at particular difficulties children have, such as poor communication ability, and then draw general conclusions about their underdeveloped knowledge of the world. An exciting aspect of cognitive developmental psychology concerns the things children say and do in various situations, and then speculating about the meaning of these in terms of what the child does or does not know about the world.
eBook - ePub- Paul Hirst, R S Peters, Paul H Hirst, R S Peters(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
These contrasting ways of approaching education still survive in schools and colleges of education. The subject specialist in a school or college of education might well view his task in terms of the development of specialist knowledge. Other teachers, especially primary teachers and lecturers in education departments in colleges of education, would probably argue that what is important is the development of the child as a person. They might also maintain that a subject-centred type of approach to education is both artificial and a hindrance to personal development. Education, it might be argued, should be based on the development of the child. What has to be shown in more detail, if the synthesis of the previous chapter is to be sustained, is that the notion of public modes of experience can reconcile these two approaches in a way that does justice to the valuative aspects of education and which puts the contrasting emphasis on specialist knowledge and personal development into a proper perspective. In this chapter, therefore, the concept of ‘development’ will be critically and constructively examined with these ends in view.1The concept of ‘development’
‘Development’ suggests changes of an irreversible nature through time, the direction of which is characteristic of that which develops. Ernest Nagel in his contribution to the book edited by D. B. Harris (see ‘Further Reading’), gives tighter criteria for ‘development’ which are taken from a range of cases in which the potential becomes actual - e.g. cases such as the development of a photograph or oak tree. He therefore suggests the criteria of (a) some pre-existing structure, (b) processes which either ‘unfold’ or are more actively assisted by outside agencies and which are irreversible, (c) some end-state which is the culmination of the process. In biology, due to the influence of the theory of evolution, this end-state was thought of as involving an increased capacity for self-maintenance, and as characterized by an increased complexity and differentiation of functions which are integrated at a higher level of functioning.There is little difficulty in using these tight criteria when applying the concept to human beings at the physical level. The bodies of men, together with their basic biological functions, develop in this way. The question is, however, whether this concept can be applied with these criteria at the mental level. Let us, therefore, consider each of these criteria in turn, not because they can be applied to mental development in any precise way, but because by seeing where they do and do not fit, we may in the process become clearer about the main contours of ‘human development’.
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