• CHYS 2P10
Child Development
Lecture 4 – Cognitive Development
• Dr. Tony Volk
•
• Course Business
• Lab debates begin this week
• Make sure you contact your TA if you missed your sign-up!
• Cognitive Development
• Cognitive development is the development of thought
• Generally limited to non-emotional, social, etc. dimensions of thought
• Jean Piaget
• Jean Piaget
• His first publication was at age 10!
• Continued studying biology (mollusks) for his PhD
• After, he left the field and studied psychology and philosophy at the Sorbonne for 2 years
where he met Theodore Simon, who worked on Binet’s intelligence tests (IQ)
• Jean Piaget
• This led to his life’s biggest interest- how children’s thought developed
, • Originally, he was interested in how it could be used it as a means of understanding the
origins of human thought, soon changed to just understanding children’s development of
thought
• Ontogeny-Phylogeny
• Piaget and His Family
• Structures (Schemes)
• Structures are unobservable mental systems that underlie intelligence
• They are what change with development
• Children are motivated to learn by a need to satisfy their curiosity
• Discovery is the best way to learn
• Children build their own representations of reality; these change with child’s (st)age
• Processes of Development
• Adaptation to new information & mental reorganization are the driving forces behind
cognitive development
• Broadly evolutionary idea, but more like development and embryonic development
• Assimilation
• Assimilation - is the incorporation of new information into existing schemas as well as
the active representation of new stimuli
Child Development
Lecture 4 – Cognitive Development
• Dr. Tony Volk
•
• Course Business
• Lab debates begin this week
• Make sure you contact your TA if you missed your sign-up!
• Cognitive Development
• Cognitive development is the development of thought
• Generally limited to non-emotional, social, etc. dimensions of thought
• Jean Piaget
• Jean Piaget
• His first publication was at age 10!
• Continued studying biology (mollusks) for his PhD
• After, he left the field and studied psychology and philosophy at the Sorbonne for 2 years
where he met Theodore Simon, who worked on Binet’s intelligence tests (IQ)
• Jean Piaget
• This led to his life’s biggest interest- how children’s thought developed
, • Originally, he was interested in how it could be used it as a means of understanding the
origins of human thought, soon changed to just understanding children’s development of
thought
• Ontogeny-Phylogeny
• Piaget and His Family
• Structures (Schemes)
• Structures are unobservable mental systems that underlie intelligence
• They are what change with development
• Children are motivated to learn by a need to satisfy their curiosity
• Discovery is the best way to learn
• Children build their own representations of reality; these change with child’s (st)age
• Processes of Development
• Adaptation to new information & mental reorganization are the driving forces behind
cognitive development
• Broadly evolutionary idea, but more like development and embryonic development
• Assimilation
• Assimilation - is the incorporation of new information into existing schemas as well as
the active representation of new stimuli
