Cognitive Development 8
Cognitive Development (DEP 4163)
Summer, 2011
Instructor: Dr. David F. Bjorklund TA: Virginia Periss
Department of Psychology Office: Behavioral Sciences 110
Office: Behavioral Sciences 112 Telephone: 297-3374
Telephone: 297-3367 E-Mail:
E-Mail:
WWW: < http://psy.fau.edu/~bjorklund/dfb/personal_home_page.html
Office hours: TuTh: 8:30-9:15; 2:00-3:00
or by appointment
Text: Bjorklund, D. F. (2012). Children's thinking: Cognitive development and individual differences (5th edition). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Course Objectives: The major aims of this course are to acquaint the student with various approaches to the study of cognitive development and to familiarize the student with normal patterns of children's thinking from infancy through adolescence. Individual differences in children's thinking will also be investigated. Student's abilities to apply developmental concepts and their knowledge of normal cognitive development and individual differences in children's thinking will be evaluated via two objective and essay exams and by completing four small "studies." Writing assignments can be substituted for the small “studies.” The exams will constitute 75% of the final grade, and the small studies will constitute 25% of the grade (5% each).
Make-up policy: Students who miss the first exam will be given an all-essay make-up exam, scheduled at the class period following the exam. There is no make-up for the final exam.
Tentative Exam Schedule: First Exam: Thursday, July 14, 2011
Final Exam: Thursday, August 4, 2011
Each exam will cover approximately one-third of the course material (they will not be comprehensive) and will be equally weighted. Dates for make-up exams for the first and second exams will be arranged the class day following the exam. All make-up exams are essays. There will be no make-up for the third exam.
Tentative Dates for Short Studies: Assignment #1: Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Assignment #2: Thursday, July 14, 2011
Assignment #3: Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Assignment #4: Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Tentative Course Outline
I. Introduction to Cognitive Development, Chapter 1.
A. Basic concepts in cognitive development
B. Issues in cognitive development
II. Biological Bases of Cognitive Development, Chapter 2.
A. Evolution and cognitive development
B. Models of gene-environment interaction
C. Neurological basis of cognitive development
III. Sociocultural Perspectives of Cognitive Development, Chapter 3.
IV. Infant Perception and Cognition, Chapter 4
A. Development of visual and auditory perception
B. Intermodal integration
C. Development of core knowledge
D. Category representation
V. Thinking in Symbols: The Development of Representation, Chapter 5
A. Learning to use symbols
B. Piaget’s theory
C. Everyday Expressions of the symbolic function
D. Fuzzy-Trace Theory
VI. The Development of “Folk” Knowledge, Chapter 6
A. Theory theories of cognitive development
B. Folk psychology: Developing a theory of mind
C. Folk biology: Understanding the biological world
D. Folk physics: Understanding the physical world
VII. Learning to Think on Their Own: Executive Function, Strategies, and Problem Solving,
Chapter 7
A. Assumptions of information-processing approaches
B. The development of executive function
C. The development of strategies
D. The development of problem solving
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- Mid-term Exam, Thursday, July 14, 2011
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VIII. Memory Development, Chapter 8
A. Representation of knowledge
B. Memory development in infancy
C. Infantile amnesia
D. Implicit memory
E. The development of event memory
F. Children as eyewitnesses
G. Remembering to remember
IX. Language Development, Chapter 9
A. Describing children’s language
B. Some theoretical perspectives of language development
C. Bilingualism
D. Gender differences in language acquisition
E. Language and thought
X. Social Cognition, Chapter 10
A. Social learning
B. Social cognitive theory and social information processing
C. The development of a concept of self
D. The cognitive bases of gender identification
XI. Schooling and Cognition, Chapter 11
A. The development of reading skills
B. Children's number and arithmetic concepts
C. Schooling and cognitive development
D. Evolutionary educational psychology
XII. Individual Differences in Intelligence, Chapters 12 & 13
A. Approaches to the study of intelligence
B. A transactional approach to the study of intelligence
B. Behavioral genetics and the heritability of intelligence
C. Experience and intelligence
D. The stability of intelligence over infancy and childhood
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Final Exam, Thursday, August 4, 2011
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DEP 4163: Cognitive Development Summer, 2011
Dr. David F. Bjorklund
Study Questions for First Exam
1. What does it mean to say that something is “innate”? Discuss representational, architectural, and chronotopic innateness, providing examples of each.
2. Discuss the developmental systems approach and Scarr and McCartney’s genotype à environment theory as they relate to the interaction of biological and environmental factors on development.
3. What are the basic principles of an evolutionary approach to human cognitive development?
4. How do infant brains get “hooked up”?
5. Discuss the plasticity of the brain and its relation to cognitive development.
6. Discuss the concepts of the zone of proximal development and apprenticeship in thinking as they relate to cognitive development. How can a sociocultural perspective of cognitive development interface with a biological perspective of cognitive development?
7. How can we know what babies perceive and what they are thinking about? What are some of the more frequently used methods to assess infant perception and cognition?
8. What are the basic visual and auditory abilities in newborns? How do these abilities develop over infancy?
9. What visual and auditory preferences, or perceptual biases, have been found in infancy? How are these preferences explained from an evolutionary perspective?
10. What are the major milestones in the development of face processing and speech perception? What do the development of these abilities have in common, if anything?
11. How do infants categorize things in the world?
12. What is meant by the core-knowledge approach to infant cognition? What are the main findings regarding infants’ understanding of objects and quantitative relations?
13. Discuss the development of representational skills in early childhood. What is meant by representational insight?
14. Discuss the basic principles and assumptions of Piaget's theory.
15. Contrast children's "thinking" at the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational periods of cognitive development.
16. Discuss the basic tenets of fuzzy-trace theory as they relate to cognitive development.
17. Discuss the development of symbolic play and the ability to distinguish between real and imaginary characters. To what extent is it correct to state that “the belief in fantasy characters represents immature cognition”?
18. What is meant by a "theory of mind"? Discuss children's development of a theory of mind beginning in infancy through the preschool years.
19. What do young children know and don’t know about biology and how does their knowledge of the biological world develop?
20. Discuss the development of spatial cognition.
21. Discuss the development of tool use in children?
22. What is meant by “executive function” and what are the specific cognitive skills that comprise it?
23. What are cognitive strategies, why are they important for development, and how do they generally change over childhood? What does Siegler’s adaptive strategy choice model add to psychologists’ understanding of strategy development?
24. Discuss the development of children’s problem-solving strategies.
Provide empirical and/or theoretical evidence to support your arguments for all questions.
Small Studies
Students will complete and write-up four small studies by the dates listed below. Each write-up for each study will consist of an introduction based on material from your textbook or from lectures, a brief description of the procedures used, a summary of the results, and a brief discussion of the results. Each write-up should be between 3 and 5 pages in length (typed, double spaced).
Other projects, based upon research described in the textbook (e.g., working memory, selective attention, object permanence, formal reasoning), can be substituted, with permission of the instructor, for the studies listed below.
Assignment #1, False Beliefs: Date Due: Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Interview one or more children between the ages of 3 and 4 years of age. Show the child a box of M & Ms, or other distinctive box that a child would recognize (e.g., juice box, small cereal box). Ask the child what he or she thinks is in that box. They should say M & Ms or "juice." Then, open the box and reveal that it actually contains something else (e.g., pencils, ribbons). Then, place the pencils back in the box and ask the child what another person (a friend, sibling, etc.), who is not in the room, would think is in the box. Then ask the child what he or she thought was in the box originally ("What did you think was in the box the first time I showed it to you?"). To learn more about this task, read pp. 203-209.
Assignment #2, Location memory: Date Due: Thursday, July 14, 2011
Interview at least three males and three females at each of three different ages (one age can be adults). Make copies of the two figures of objects shown on page 232 of your text book. Tell the participants that you wish to test their memories. You will show them a picture with many objects in it, and you wish them to study it for 30 seconds. Remove the picture after 30 seconds and engage the participant in conversation for about 1 minute. Then, give them a pen or pencil, show them the second picture (on page 232 of your text), and ask them to circle only the objects in the second picture that were also in the first picture. Give them 1 minute to do this. To score their performance, count the number of items they circled that were correct (hits), and the number of items that they circled that were incorrect (false alarms). Look for age and sex differences in performance.
Assignment #3, Young Children's Addition Strategies: Date due: Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Interview two or more children between the ages of 4 and 7 years. Play a board game with children, such as "Chutes and Ladders" or "Monopoly Junior" in which moves are computed by throwing two dice. Record the manner in which children figure their moves from the dice (e.g., counting all the numbers on both dice, counting only the numbers on one die, fact retrieval, see pages 271 and 272 of your text). Present age differences and variability in children's arithmetic strategies.
Assignment #4, Conservation of number: Date due: Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Try this with children between the ages of 4 and 7 years of age (preferably at least two children). Take five marbles (or buttons, or crackers, etc.) and place them in a row in front of the child. From a set of marbles, ask the child to make another row of marbles that match up with the row that you made, as below:
X X X X X
O O O O O
Ask the child if he or she believes that there are the same number of marbles in each row. After an affirmative response, move the marbles in one row, as the child watches, so the rows now look like this:
X X X X X
O O O O O
Now ask the child if the rows still have the same number of marbles in them, and why he/she thinks they do or do not. To learn about conservation of number, read pp. 460-461.
Name:______
Grading Sheet for Assignment 1: False-belief
Scores in all 3 areas are totaled to give a final score from 1-10
I. Content
· 1 or more children interviewed, ages 3 or 7
· Description of false-belief task and procedure
· Presentation of data for false belief and representational insight
· Introduction of experiment
· Interpretation of findings
1 2 3 4 5 6
II. Organization
· clear, specific introduction that explains the purpose of the paper
· thoughtful conclusion that goes beyond repetition of main points
· effective topic sentences
· fully developed, unified paragraphs
1 2
III. Grammar and Mechanics
· consistent/appropriate use of present and past tenses
· avoidance of sentence fragments and run-on sentences
· proper subject-verb agreement
· correct punctuation
· correct spelling
· appropriate integration of quotations
1 2
Total Score =
Outline for answer to a potential exam question:
What does it mean to say that something is “innate”? Discuss representational, architectural, and chronotopic innateness, providing examples of each.
(pp. 8-10 of text and Powerpoint Slides #8-16).
Definition of “innate” as used by developmental psychologists – Some genetically based “constraints” on behavior or development (expand some). Three types of innateness (or constraints) (Elman et al.):
Representational constraints (or representational innateness)
Representations that are hardwired into the brain so that some types of “knowledge” are innate.
Knowledge of objects (e.g., from core-knowledge perspective of Spelke)
Universal grammar (Chomsky; Pinker)
Architectural constraints (or architectural innateness)
Ways in which the architecture of the brain is organized at birth, thus limiting the way information can be processed and understood.
Inhibitory versus excitatory neurons
Global organization (what’s connected to what)
e.g., Face processing in 6- and 9-month olds of monkey vs. human faces
Chronotopic constraints (or chronotopic innateness)
Limitations on the developmental timing of events, affecting what can be acquired when.
Critical (sensitive) periods (e.g., language; aspects of perceptual development)