Cognition And Perception Term paper
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In this Topic, we discuss the development of cognition and perception in the child. In the first section, we discuss perception, the ability to acquire information about the world. The child's ability to distinguish different visual and auditory stimuli, as well as stimuli in all the rest of the senses, develops rapidly over the course of the first two years. While some of this development is passive, the majority of it depends on the child's active exploration of an environment that provides opportunities for diverse kinds of experiences.
Although the meaning of "perception" is fairly well agreed-upon, "cognition" is a term that has been construed in a variety of ways. In modern psychology it is sometimes used to refer to any "information-processing" approach to the study of behavior. This definition is, however, a bit too broad. A clearer and more specific definition might go as follows: cognition is the structure of our representations of the world and the processes we use to manipulate that structure. The study of cognitive development is thus the study of how both our knowledge of the world and our ways of acquiring new knowledge grow over time. Language is obviously an important part of this growth process--so important, in fact, that it is here covered in a separate Topic. While reading this Topic, keep in mind the role language might play in influencing and enabling other cognitive abilities.
In the second section, we discuss one of the most influential theoretical models of cognitive development. Jean Piaget's model of the stages of cognition, and the observations upon which he founded his model, make him far and away the most important cognitive developmentalist in the history of the field. Piaget distinguished between four stages of development: the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the concrete-operational stage, and the formal-operational stage. He postulated two processes that drove the child's development: assimilation and accommodation.
In the third section, we discuss some of the criticisms that have been brought against Piaget's model and some of the alternatives that have been offered--specifically, information-processing and social accounts of cognitive development.
Finally, we discuss an area of cognitive development that has become an increasingly popular subject of study over the past twenty years: theory of mind. Theory of mind straddles the divide between cognitive and socioemotional development. It is concerned with the development of a child's recognition of his or her mind and the minds of others, including the child's ability to understand the existence of false beliefs, the use of deception, and the way that beliefs, desires, and actions are related.
Terms
Altricial - The term "altricial" refers to species in which infants are born unable to fend for themselves. It is contrasted with "precocial," which refers to species, such as horses and other hoofed animals, in which the newborn is immediately able to find food, run from predators, etc.
Autism - A developmental disorder characterized by mental retardation, impairments in language, changes in sensory function, repetitive or ritualized motions, and marked deficits in theory of mind.
Accommodation - Accommodation is a process of changing one's representation of the world to fit the existing evidence. According to Piaget, it is one of the two "functional invariants" that drive development.
Assimilation - Assimilation is the process of changing one's interpretation of the world to fit one's representation of it. According to Piaget, it is one of the two "functional invariants" that drive development.
Concrete-Operational Stage - The concrete-operational stage is one of the four stages in Piaget's developmental theory. It lasts from ages seven to eleven and is characterized by an ability to mentally manipulate representations of real-world ("concrete") objects.
Formal-Operational Stage - The formal-operational stage is one of the four stages in Piaget's developmental theory. It starts around age eleven and lasts through adulthood. It is characterized by an ability to mentally manipulate symbols, such as mathematical equations or linguistic sentences, that are not connected to real-world objects.
Metacognition - Thinking about one's own thought processes.
Object Permanence - Object permanence is the concept that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen. The acknowledgment of object permanence starts, according to Piaget, during the preoperational stage.
Preoperational Stage - The preoperational stage is one of the four stages in Piaget's developmental theory. This stage lasts from ages two to seven. It is characterized by a growing ability to verbalize and symbolize concrete objects, but an inability to perform "operations"--mental manipulations or logical transformations--on them.
Sensorimotor Stage - The sensorimotor stage is one of the four stages in Piaget's developmental theory. It lasts from birth to age two. It is characterized by the development of internalized representations of concrete objects that grow out of the child's perceptions of and actions on those objects.
Visual Acuity - Visual acuity refers to the "spatial resolution" of a person's vision: a person with high visual acuity can distinguish between narrower stripes of different intensities than a person with low visual acuity.
Human beings, unlike many animals, are altricial: they are born with an impoverished set of perceptual and motor skills that make parental care during the first few years of life--and sometimes much longer--essential. Infants are obviously limited in their ability to move in and manipulate their environments, but they also show marked impairments in perception. In this section we will discuss the development of adult-like visual capabilities and the environmental factors that are necessary for it.
1.1 Visual Acuity
At birth, the child is fairly limited in his or her ability to distinguish the combinations of colors and lines that make up the visual world. At a distance of one foot, the infant can distinguish between a gray patch and a striped patch only when the stripes are at least one tenth of any inch thick. (The infant's acuity is determined using the looking-time measure: if a child looks longer at one of the patches than the other, the child is judged able to distinguish between them.) Over the course of the year, the child's acuity improves to one eightieth of an inch; much better, but still nowhere as good people who are six years old or older, who generally can distinguish stripes that are one three-hundredth of an inch thick at a distance of one foot.
1.2 What Drives Perceptual Development
What is responsible for this improvement in vision? One answer is that the cones and rods in the retina, the cells that transduce light into neural signals, mature over the course of the first few years. Another, perhaps more important reason is that the brain itself is rapidly developing during that period. As ever- improving visual signals arrive at the primary visual cortex, the cortex itself adapts in order to sensitively and reliably detect differences in those signals. The importance of brain plasticity in the development of visual acuity can be seen in animals that have been deprived of particular types of visual stimulation. Cats, for instance, that have not been exposed to vertical edges during the first few months of life (this can be done by raising them in special environments or with striped blinders) cannot distinguish such edges when they are later exposed to them. Monkeys that have been deprived of vision in one eye during the first few months of life, through the use of sutures or eye patches, fail to develop another important perceptual skill: binocular vision, the ability to perceive depth through the slight differences in retinal stimulation between the two eyes. Perceptual development is obviously largely dependent on the biology of sensory systems, but these examples show that environment has a crucial role to play as well.
Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist who began his research in the 1920s and continued through the 1970s, had an enormous impact on the field of cognitive development. Piaget's theory of development was based on his astute observations of young children in Geneva. Although Piaget's writings were complex, his conclusions about the nature of development can be summarized in two parts: a set of fixed stages, and a pair of processes that led the child from one stage to the next.
2.1 The Stages
2.1.1 The Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 years)
The sensorimotor stage lasts from birth until about two years of age. During this stage, the child thinks about the world solely by interacting with it. The bundle of reflexes and needs with which the child is born drive it to interact with the world in particular ways and for particular purposes, but the child has little or no independent representations of the world. The child performs what Piaget called "circular reactions": actions that produce pleasing consequences on the infant's own body or on aspects of the environment are repeated. These circular reactions form the basis of the child's later concepts of the world: eventually, the reactions become completely internalized so that the child no longer acts to produce a consequence but simply imagines it instead. The child begins to experiment actively with the world, trying out various reactions to stimuli in systematic and exploratory ways. By the end of the sensorimotor period, the child has a set of basic concepts about time, space, causality, objects, and so forth--the basic building blocks of reality.
2.1.2 The Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
The preoperational stage lasts roughly from age two to age seven. During this stage, the child acquires a number of abilities that were absent during the sensorimotor stage. Language is, of course, one of them. Another important advance is the recognition of object permanence, the fact that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight. This is one of the most striking failures of cognition during the sensorimotor period; children at that stage seem to believe that an object that has disappeared behind a screen, for instance, no longer exists. During the preoperational stage, however, children are increasingly able to maintain in mind representations of hidden objects. However, although children have mastered this basic task, they still fail on a variety of tasks that test their ability to apply operations on their representations of the world--thus they are "preoperational." For instance, children fail to understand that the mass of an object...
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