PLEASE READ ALL AND ANSWER IN DETAILS There\'s a lot here and it\'s fascinating.

Question

PLEASE READ ALL AND ANSWER IN DETAILS
There's a lot here and it's fascinating. I thought we'd try to look at specific people's theories to organize it all and help make sense of it. We’ll start with the giant of developmental psychology: Jean Piaget.

Piaget originally studied epistemology (the origins of knowledge) through intelligence tests. He saw that different aged children answered questions differently – he became especially interested in incorrect answers. He studied his own three children through the clinical method, a flexible, open-ended question-and-answer technique he used to discover how children of different ages solved various problems and thought about every-day issues.

Piaget recognized children are active explorers constantly challenged by novel stimuli and events, who try to make them fit what they already know. When the world fits what is inside a child’s mind, Piaget said that child was in a state of equilibrium, a balanced, harmonious relationship between the child’s thought processes and the environment. Now, sometimes it doesn’t fit, and it’s then, when that balance is threatened that children (and all of us) learn.

That’s because imbalances prompt us to make mental adjustments enabling us to cope with puzzling new experiences. Do you see this is an interactionist model? We actively construct understanding through interactions in the world. When we are in disequilibrium we have to make everything balance again somehow, so we either assimilate (make it fit our existing model somehow, as when a child might initially think any building is a house) or accommodate (modify existing structures to account for new experiences, as when the child comes to understand that a store is a special kind of building different from a house). So….

Suppose a child sees someone release a helium balloon for the first time, and stands there looking up in wonder. What's going on in the child’s mind according to Piaget in terms of assimilation and accommodation? What kinds of thoughts would point to one or the other? (For example, a girl might think a bird grabbed it by a long string and took it up into the sky.) What if the child says the sun is hiding because it’s angry? What’s happening? Give some examples of both assimilation and accommodation.

Review the discussion of object permanence. Object permanence was used to show babies have an understanding of basic physics -- In Luo, Kaufman and Baillargeon’s (2009) innovative research on infants’ understanding of physics, they engineered an impossible event where a baby saw a car move through a wall unharmed and was surprised. How might the baby have responded with accommodation? How about with assimilation?

Give examples of egocentrism in children and adults.

Explanation / Answer

Suppose a child sees someone release a helium balloon for the first time, and stands there looking up in wonder. What's going on in the child’s mind according to Piaget in terms of assimilation and accommodation? What kinds of thoughts would point to one or the other? (For example, a girl might think a bird grabbed it by a long string and took it up into the sky.) What if the child says the sun is hiding because it’s angry? What’s happening?

When the child is watching that there is a round shaped object going up in the air, they learn that this object is named as a balloon. Here, the child obtains a new information and this is the process of assimilation. As the child understands that a round object going up in air with a string is a balloon. Further, when the child observes different shapes of balloons, they accommodate the information in their mind, that balloons are not only round, but may be of different shapes such as heart shaped or shape of an animal in the form of a whale or a dog. Initially, the child might not be able to believe that there is a thing flying in the air on their own, and so she might think that it is taken up by a bird, since the child knows that birds can fly on their own. Further, when she learns that this object is not taken up by a bird and its the property of the object to fly, she would learn the dynamics of a new object, being named as a balloon. This process is called assimilation.

Baillargeon’s (2009) innovative research on infants’ understanding of physics, they engineered an impossible event where a baby saw a car move through a wall unharmed and was surprised. How might the baby have responded with accommodation? How about with assimilation?

Baillargeon’s (2009) innovative research on infants’ understanding of physics, the baby might have responded in surprise and shock, as this was a new phenomena and not seen by them before this time. The baby might have begun to think that the car that was riding on the road, still moves on the wall. With this experiment, the child begins to learn that this is not really present on the wall and that object permanence does not extend to each and every object.

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