Cognitive development
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Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, and other topics in cognitive psychology. A large portion of research has gone into understanding how a child conceptualizes the world. Jean Piaget was a major force in the founding of this field, forming his "theory of cognitive development". Many of his claims have since fallen out of favor.
A major topic in cognitive development is nativism versus empiricism. Another is the question of convergance or homology with animals when humans have similar cognition. These two debates are present in nearly every smaller part of the field.
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[edit] Core systems of cognition
Nativists theorize that children are born with many innate cognitive systems designed to tackle problems that the human species have faced over a very long evolutionary time. Empiricists study how these skills may be learned in such a short time. The debate is over whether these systems are learned by general-purpose learning devices, or domain-specific cognition.
[edit] Number
Infants appear to have two systems for dealing with numbers. One deals with small numbers, often called subitizing. Another deals with larger numbers in an approximate fashion.[1]
[edit] Navigation
Very young children appear to have some skill in dead reckoning. This basic "sense of direction" does not change very much through development.
Later in life, adults can use natural language to store additional navigational information. Making them use their language skills for something else makes them perform like children or rats.
[edit] Visual perception
One of the original nativist versus empiricist debates was over depth perception. There is some evidence that children less than 72 hours old can perceive such complex things as biological motion.[2]
[edit] Essentialism
Young children seem to be predisposed to think of things in an essentialistic way.[3]
[edit] Language acquisition
A major, well-studied feat of cognitive development is language acquisition. The modern consensus is that this draws on many innate systems.
[edit] Creation of new representational resources
Of course, the human mind expands far beyond these simple forms of cognition. For example, children are not born knowing what force is, but they are capable of eventually learning.
[edit] Whorf's hypothesis
Whorf believed that a person cannot think what they cannot say in language.
[edit] Quine's bootstrapping hypothesis
Quine suggests that words are commonly used to help create new thoughts.
[edit] Piaget's theory
Jean Piaget believed that people move through stages of development that allow them to think in new, more complex ways.
Many of his claims have fallen out of favor. For example, he claimed that young children cannot conserve number. However, further experiments show that children did not really understand what was being asked of them. When the experiment is done with candies, and the children are asked which set they want rather than tell an adult which is more, they show no confusion about which group has more items.
[edit] Neuroscience
During development, especially the first few years of life, children show interesting patterns of neural development and a high degree of neuroplasticity.
[edit] References
- ^ Feigenson, L., Dehaene, S., Spelke, E. (2004). Core Systems of Number. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8. 307-314.
- ^ Simion, F., Regolin, L. & Bulf, H. (2008). A predisposition for biological motion in the newborn baby. PNAS 105(2), 809-813.
- ^ Gelman, S. (2003). The Essential Child.
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