心理学导论transcript05.docx

1、心理学导论transcript05Introduction to Psychology: Lecture 5 TranscriptJanuary 31, 2007 backProfessor Paul Bloom: So, most of what we do these days “ our methods, our theories, our ideas “ are shaped, to some extent, by Piagets influence. And so, what I want to do is begin this class thats going to talk a

2、bout cognitive development by talking about his ideas. His idea was that children are active thinkers; theyre trying to figure out the world. He often described them as little scientists. And incidentally, to know where hes coming from on this, he had a very dramatic and ambitious goal. He didnt sta

3、rt off because he was interested in children. He started off because he was interested in the emergence of knowledge in general. It was a discipline he described as genetic epistemology “ the origins of knowledge. But he studied development of the individual child because he was convinced that this

4、development will tell him about the development of knowledge more generally. Theres a very snooty phrase that-I dont know if you ever heard it before. Its a great phrase. Its Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. And the idea of this-What that means is that development of an individual mimics or repeats

5、 development of the species. Now, its entirely not true, but its a beautiful phrase and Piaget was committed to this. He was very interested in saying, Look. Well figure how a kid develops and that will tell us about the development of knowledge more generally.So, Piaget viewed the child as a scient

6、ist who developed this understanding, these schemas, these little, miniature theories of the world. And they did this through two sorts of mechanisms: assimilation and accommodation. So, assimilation would be the act of expanding the range of things that you respond to. Piagets example would be a ba

7、by whos used to sucking on a breast might come to suck on a bottle or on a rattle. Thats changing the scope of things that you respond to. Accommodation is changing how you do it. A baby will form his mouth differently depending on what hes sucking on. And so, these processes where you take in-Im gi

8、ving this in a very physical way, but in a more psychological sense you have a way of looking at the world. You could expand it to encompass new things, assimilation. But you could also change your system of knowledge itself “ accommodation. And Piaget argued that these two mechanisms of learning dr

9、ove the child through different stages. And he had a stage theory, which was quite different from the Freudian stage theory that we have been introduced to. So his methods were to ask children to solve problems and to ask them questions. And his discoveries that-they did them in different ways at di

10、fferent ages led to the emergence of the Stage Theory.So, for Piaget, the first stage is the sensorimotor stage or the sensorimotor period. For here the child is purely a physical creature. The child has no understanding in any real way of the external world. Theres no understanding of the past, no

11、understanding of the future, no stability, no differentiation. The child just touches and sees, but doesnt yet reason. And its through this stage that a child gradually comes to acquire object permanence.Object permanence is the understanding that things exist when you no longer see them. So those o

12、f you in front, youre looking at me and I go ducks behind lectern. It occurred to me itd be a great magic trick if I then appeared in back. But no, Im just here. Thats object permanence. If I went under here and then the people said, Where the hell did he go? Class is over, that would show a lack of

13、 object permanence. So, adults have object permanence. Piagets very interesting claim is that kids dont. Before six-month-olds, Piaget observed, you take an object the kid likes like a rattle, you hide it, you put it behind something, its like its gone. And he claimed the child really thinks its jus

14、t gone. Things dont continue to exist when Im not looking at them anymore. And so he noticed they-theyre surprised by peek-a-boo. And Piagets claim was one reason why theyre surprised at peek-a-boo is you go-you look at a kid, the kids smiling and go, Oh, peek-a-boo, and you close-and you cover your

15、 face and the kid says, Hes gone. Peek-a-boo. Oh, there he is. Hes gone. And you really-Thats the claim.Piaget also discovered that older children fail at a task thats known as the A-not-B task. And Peter Gray in his psychology textbook refers to it as the changing hiding places problem, which is pr

16、obably a better name for it. And heres the idea. You take a nine-month-old and for Piaget a nine-month-old is just starting to make sense of objects and their permanence. You take an object and you put it here in a cup where the kid cant see it, but its in the cup. So the kid, if you were the kid, w

17、ill reach for it. You do it again, reach for it. You do it again, reach for it. Thats point A. Then you take-you move it over here. Piaget observed kids would still reach for this. Its like theyre not smart enough to figure out that its not there anymore, even if they see it move. And this was more

18、evidence that they just dont understand objects, and that this thing takes a lot of time and learning to develop.The next stage is the preoperational stage. The child starts off grasping the world only in a physical way, in a sensorimotor way, but when he gets to the preoperational period the capaci

19、ty to represent the world, to have the world inside your head, comes into being. But its limited and its limited in a couple of striking ways. One way in which its limited is that children are egocentric. Now, egocentrism has a meaning in common English which means to be selfish. Piaget meant it in

20、a more technical way. He claimed that children at this age literally cant understand that others can see the world differently from them. So, one of his demonstrations was the three mountains task. We have three mountains over there. You put a child on one side of the mountains and you ask him to dr

21、aw it, and a four- or five-year-old can do it easily, but then you ask him to draw it as it would appear from the other side and children find this extraordinarily difficult. They find it very difficult to grasp the world as another person might see it.Another significant finding Piaget had about th

22、is phase of development concerns whats called conservation. The notion of conservation is that theres ways to transform things such that some aspects of them change but others remain the same. So, for instance, if you take a glass of water and you pour it into another glass thats shallow or tall, it

23、 wont change the amount of water you have. If you take a bunch of pennies and you spread them out, you dont get more pennies. But kids, according to Piaget, dont know that and this is one of the real cool demonstrations. Any of you who have access to a four- or five-year-old, laughter a sibling or s

24、omething-Do not take one without permission, but if you have access to a four- or five-year-old you can do this yourself. This is what it looks like. The first one has no sound. The second one is going to be sound thats going to come on at the end plays video. But theres two rows of checkers. She as

25、ks the kid which one has more. The kid says theyre the same. Then she says-Now she asks him which one has more, that or that. So thats really stupid. And its an amazing finding kids will do that and its a robust finding.Heres another example. So, theyre the same tape playing. So, its a cool finding

26、of that stage, suggesting a limitation in how you deal and make sense of the world. The next phase, concrete operations, from seven to twelve, you can solve the conservation problem, but still youre limited to the extent youre capable of abstract reasoning. So the mathematical notions of infinity or

27、 logical notions like logical entailment are beyond a child of this age. The child is able to do a lot, but still its to some extent stuck in the concrete world. And then finally, at around age twelve, you could get abstract and scientific reasoning. And this is the Piagetian theory in very brief fo

28、rm.Now, Piaget fared a lot better than did Freud or Skinner for several reasons. One reason is these are interesting and falsifiable claims about child development. So claims that-about the failure of conservation in children at different ages could be easily tested and systematically tested, and in

29、 fact, theres a lot of support for them. Piaget had a rich theoretical framework, pulling together all sorts of observations in different ways, wrote many, many books and articles and articulated his theory very richly. And most of all, I think, he had some really striking findings. Before Piaget, n

30、obody noticed these conservation findings. Before Piaget, nobody noticed that babies had this problem tracking and understanding objects.At the same time, however, there are limitations in Piagets theory. Some of these limitations are theoretical. Its an interesting question as to whether he really

31、explains how a child goes from a concrete thinker to an abstract thinker, or how he goes from not having object permanence to understanding object permanence. Theres methodological limitations. Piaget was really big into question and answer, but one problem with this is that children arent very good

32、 with language, and this might lead you to underestimate how much they know. And this is particularly a problem the younger you get.Methodology is going to loom heavy in the discussion of any science and that includes psychology. Often 90% of the game is discovering a clever method through which to test your hypotheses. Were going to talk a little bit about that regarding babies. Ill give you another example from a very different domain. There was a set of scientists interested in studying tickling. So, when you tickle somebody, under wha