Piaget's fundamental question
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What makes a human intellect?
- How do you take sensations and make them into concepts?
- What is the nature of these concepts?
- How do these concepts change?
Sociocultural
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, - Lev Vygotsky
- Development is an apprenticeship
- Children are social learners: they advance most when they collaborate
with others who are more skilled
Two important concepts:
1. Zone of proximal development: difference between what children can
do with assistance versus alone
2. Social scaffolding: more competent people provide a temporary
framework that supports children's thinking at a higher level than children
would manage alone
Concepts of objects
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- Children typically divide objects into 3 categories --> inanimate objects,
people, other animals (plants?)
- Infants form categories of objects in first months of life --> Rely on
perceptual categorization: grouping objects by appearances (ex. "cats" at
3 months)
- By 2nd year, children categorize by shape
- Beyond infancy, children form category hierarchies: categories
organized in set-subset relations
Animal --> Dog --> Labrador // Superordinate (very general) --> Basic:
usually learned first --> Subordinate (very specific)
- *Understanding inanimate objects: naive physics
- But infants' naive physics is not complete (ex. gravity understanding in
infants vs. elementary-school children vs. physics students) --> Still, infants
do create reasonably accurate working theories of basic object properties
- Understanding living things: naive biology
Information processing skills
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, 1. Attention: mental process that determines which information an individual
processes further
- Orienting response: when individual views a strong or unfamiliar stimulus,
she orients to it
- Habituation: after repeated exposure, individual becomes unresponsive
to stimulus
2. Memory: how information is encoded, stored, and retrieved
- Working (or short-term) memory: moment-to-moment; involved in
actively attending to, gathering, maintaining, storing, processing
information (ex. taking notes during lecture)
- Long-term memory: knowledge retained over lifetime (ex. knowing
capitals of countries, how to tie my shoes)
- Autobiographical memory: coherent set of memories about one's own life
(ex. how you spent the summer after high school)
3. Executive Functioning: control of cognition
- inhibiting tempting actions that are counterproductive
- enhancing working memory through strategies (ex. repeating a phone
number)
- being cognitively flexible (ex. shifting goals as needed)
- All of these improve dramatically over development —> children respond
more appropriately, learn more effectively, demonstrate greater cognitive
competence
Both heredity and environments account for individual differences in IQ scores
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- Heritability of intelligence is between 40% and 60%
- Environment plays a significant role as well
- Most promising approach is likely to identify which environments place
children at high risk for failure, and work to improve those environments
Give this one a try later!
What makes a human intellect?
- How do you take sensations and make them into concepts?
- What is the nature of these concepts?
- How do these concepts change?
Sociocultural
Give this one a try later!
, - Lev Vygotsky
- Development is an apprenticeship
- Children are social learners: they advance most when they collaborate
with others who are more skilled
Two important concepts:
1. Zone of proximal development: difference between what children can
do with assistance versus alone
2. Social scaffolding: more competent people provide a temporary
framework that supports children's thinking at a higher level than children
would manage alone
Concepts of objects
Give this one a try later!
- Children typically divide objects into 3 categories --> inanimate objects,
people, other animals (plants?)
- Infants form categories of objects in first months of life --> Rely on
perceptual categorization: grouping objects by appearances (ex. "cats" at
3 months)
- By 2nd year, children categorize by shape
- Beyond infancy, children form category hierarchies: categories
organized in set-subset relations
Animal --> Dog --> Labrador // Superordinate (very general) --> Basic:
usually learned first --> Subordinate (very specific)
- *Understanding inanimate objects: naive physics
- But infants' naive physics is not complete (ex. gravity understanding in
infants vs. elementary-school children vs. physics students) --> Still, infants
do create reasonably accurate working theories of basic object properties
- Understanding living things: naive biology
Information processing skills
Give this one a try later!
, 1. Attention: mental process that determines which information an individual
processes further
- Orienting response: when individual views a strong or unfamiliar stimulus,
she orients to it
- Habituation: after repeated exposure, individual becomes unresponsive
to stimulus
2. Memory: how information is encoded, stored, and retrieved
- Working (or short-term) memory: moment-to-moment; involved in
actively attending to, gathering, maintaining, storing, processing
information (ex. taking notes during lecture)
- Long-term memory: knowledge retained over lifetime (ex. knowing
capitals of countries, how to tie my shoes)
- Autobiographical memory: coherent set of memories about one's own life
(ex. how you spent the summer after high school)
3. Executive Functioning: control of cognition
- inhibiting tempting actions that are counterproductive
- enhancing working memory through strategies (ex. repeating a phone
number)
- being cognitively flexible (ex. shifting goals as needed)
- All of these improve dramatically over development —> children respond
more appropriately, learn more effectively, demonstrate greater cognitive
competence
Both heredity and environments account for individual differences in IQ scores
Give this one a try later!
- Heritability of intelligence is between 40% and 60%
- Environment plays a significant role as well
- Most promising approach is likely to identify which environments place
children at high risk for failure, and work to improve those environments
