Theories of cognitive development From P

Theories of cognitive development: From Piaget to today Pierre Barrouillet, Theories of cognitive development: From Piaget to today, Develop- mental Review (2015), doi: 10.1016/j.dr.2015.07.004

information processing approaches introduced, through the computational simulation of production systems, a rigor in theorizing that was then uncommon (Klahr & Wallace, 1976; Simon, 1962).      Klahr, D., & Wallace, J. G. (1976). Cognitive development: An information processing view. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.      Simon, H. A. (1962). An information processing theory of intellectual development. In W. Kessen & C. Kuhlman (Eds.), Thought in the young child (pp. 150–161).           Yellow Springs, OH: The Antioch Press.

Piaget undercut by neglect of social, cultural factors in learning, lack of theoretical power, and new, more rigorous methods ( AI simulations)

Piaget, Vygotsky share a skepticism of “nativist”cognition, the belief that we have capabilities baked in, to explain higher-order functionality

infants are not born as blank slates but possess what are called evolved cognitive mechanisms, which are domain-specific cognitive modules shaped by natural selection to solve recurrent adaptive problems associated with reproduction and survival our ancestors faced in their environment. Bjorklund’s main argument is that the surprising plasticity that leads to adaptation in development requires an amendment of the notion of evolved cognitive mechanism that would make this type of mechanism far more flexible than initially assumed, hence the notion of evolved probabilistic cognitive mechanisms. As the evolved cognitive mechanisms, they are information-processing mechanisms that have evolved to solve recurrent problems faced by our ancestors, but they are expressed in a probabilistic way, depending on the interactions between the organism and its environment at all the levels of their relationships, from the genetic to the cultural. -> Lines up nicely with Vygotsky’s “functional systems"

Executive function research has surpassed Piaget’s stage theory. “there is strong em- pirical evidence that executive functions play a determinant role in this developmental change and are recruited in the construction of the vitalist theory.” Thus suggesting plasticity in the rate of development. 

Whereas the seminal investigations of the under- standing by children of false beliefs led to the conclusion that there were developmental changes with strong discontinuities lending support to both a constructivist scenario (Wimmer & Perner, 1983) and the involvement of executive functions in this process (Carlson & Moses, 2001), subsequent studies considerably obscured this picture. Not only successes on implicit false-belief tasks have been re- ported in toddlers and infants (Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005), but also the relationships between executive functions and theory of mind have been the object of controversy in the literature.      -> “strong discontinuities” would point to constructivism, as the possibility of reforming your cognitive toolkit in a way not strongly dependent on developmental processes. For example, overhearing a comment that sticks with you and changes your thinking deeply. Grokking something. 

Intelligence, construction of reality => stage theory, constructivism      Newer research suggests these are separate processes; construction of reality does not follow directly from intelligence. 

Piaget’s reflexive abstraction: extracting properties of our actions on objects, not objects themselves.  Zelazo “reflective abstraction” is active metacognition

Fuzzy Trace theory:      We remember in terms of verbatim (surface details) and gist (meanings)      We rely more on gist as we age (bad news for science!)

According to Rochat “human consciousness consists in poly-awareness”, all the levels of awareness being simultaneously present and active with various weights that change all the time, our conscious experience consisting of constantly navigating through the dif- ferent layers. This attempt to capture the “polyphonic phenomenal nature of human awareness” is enthralling as it offers a way to understand this part of infants’ and children’s development that goes above and beyond the emergence of a rational mind and eventually sheds light on one’s experience of the conscious life.