Big questions about development

Morality, continuity, knowledge (empiricism: based on experience, nativism: innate rather than acquired by learning, contructivism: construct knowledge rather than just passively take in information)

Jean Piaget

Theory of cognitive devleopment: children are active thinkers, constantly trying to construct more advanced understandings of the world.

Schemas/schemata, frameworkd that devleop to help organize knowledge

Assimiliation: the process of taking new information or a new experience and fitting it into an existing schema.

Accommodation: the process by which schemas are changed or created in order to fit nw information.

Stage Theory:

Stage 1: sensorimotor, age 0-2

• Information is gained through the senses and motor actions
• The child perceives and manipulates but does not reason
• Object permanence is acquired (The understanding that objects exist independent of one’s actions or perceptions of them)

Stage 2: preoperational, age 2-7

• Emergence of symbolic thought
• Reasoning develops, but not high level
• Egocentrism
• Lack of the concept of conservation (a careful preservation and protection of something)

Stage 3: concrete operational, age 7-12

• Understanding of mental operations leading to increasingly logical thought
• Less egocentric
• Inability to reason abstractly or hypothetically

Stage 4: formal operational, age 12- adult

• Abstract and scientific reasoning

Methods for studying infants

Brain scans, sucking, looking

Are zebras white animals with black stripes or they black animals with white stripes?

Everything is the way it is because it got that way. - Darcy Thompson, biologist

(credit to Coursera)