Cognition and development — AQA A-Level Psychology
Test yourself on Cognition and development with AQA A-Level practice questions.
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Cognition and development explained
A schema is a mental packet of knowledge.
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Piaget argued children build them: experience fitting an existing schema is assimilated, clashing experience creates disequilibrium requiring accommodation, and equilibration drives the return to balance. Four stages of intellectual development follow: sensorimotor (object permanence at eight months), pre-operational (egocentrism, failure of conservation, failure of class inclusion), concrete operational, and formal operational. Evaluation is key: Hughes (1975) found 90% of young children could hide a doll from policemen, and McGarrigle and Donaldson (1974) raised conservation success from 16% to 62.5% when a naughty teddy made the change look accidental, showing Piaget understated early abilities.
Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development, including the zone of proximal development and scaffolding.
Vygotsky argued cognitive development is social before it is individual: a child meets a skill with another person first and internalises it afterwards, with culture and language supplying the tools. The zone of proximal development is the gap between what a child manages alone and what they manage alongside a more knowledgeable other, measuring potential. Scaffolding is how the gap is crossed. Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) listed recruiting interest, simplifying the task, keeping the child on target, marking critical features and demonstrating, with help withdrawn as competence grows. Roazzi and Bryant (1998) found four-year-olds estimating sweets in a jar succeeded far more often when an older child gave prompts than when working alone.
Baillargeon’s explanation of early infant abilities, including knowledge of the physical world; violation of expectation research.
Baillargeon’s explanation of early infant abilities argues Piaget measured motor skill rather than knowledge of the physical world: an infant who does not reach for a hidden toy may know it is there but be unable to act. Violation of expectation research tests looking instead. Infants are habituated to an event, then shown a possible and an impossible version. Looking longer at the impossible event implies an expectation was broken. In the tall carrot study (Baillargeon and DeVos, 1991), infants looked at the impossible event for 33.07 seconds against 25.11 for the possible one. She infers a physical reasoning system that is innate and primitive, present long before the eight months Piaget allowed for object permanence, and refined by experience rather than assembled from nothing.
The development of social cognition: Selman’s levels of perspective-taking; theory of mind; the Sally-Anne study. The role of the mirror neuron system in social cognition.
Social cognition involves understanding others' thoughts and feelings. Selman proposed five levels of perspective-taking, from undifferentiated (egocentric) to societal, where children gradually learn to simultaneously consider multiple viewpoints. Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others. This is classically tested using the Sally-Anne false belief task, where children must recognise that Sally will look for her marble where she falsely believes it is, not where Anne moved it. Biologically, the mirror neuron system (MNS) supports social cognition. These neurons fire both when an individual performs an action and when they observe someone else performing it, providing a neural mechanism for empathy.
Your focus
- Describe assimilation, accommodation and equilibration as the process by which a schema is built and changed.
- Describe Piaget's four stages of intellectual development in order with rough ages and the characteristic achievement or limitation of each.
- Apply conservation, egocentrism and class inclusion to predict how a five-year-old answers each classic task.
Show all 15 objectives
- Evaluate Piaget using Hughes and the naughty teddy study, where easier task demands raised young children's success.
- Explain the zone of proximal development as the gap between unaided performance and performance with a more knowledgeable other.
- Describe the scaffolding strategies of Wood, Bruner and Ross and how help is withdrawn as competence grows.
- Apply scaffolding to plan the graded help a teacher would give a named child on a specific task.
- Evaluate Vygotsky's theory of cognitive development against Piaget on readiness, and note the difficulty of measuring a zone directly.
- Describe the violation of expectation procedure from habituation to possible and impossible events, with looking time as the measure.
- Explain the inference chain from longer looking to surprise to knowledge of the physical world.
- Apply the competence and performance distinction to explain why an infant may know a toy exists yet not reach for it.
- Evaluate Baillargeon's explanation of early infant abilities using the argument that longer looking may show perceptual novelty rather than understanding.
- Outline Selman's five levels of perspective-taking.
- Explain how the Sally-Anne study assesses Theory of Mind.
- Describe the function of the mirror neuron system in social cognition.
Cognition and development exam tips
Marking Points
- Schema defined as a mental framework or packet of knowledge used to organise and interpret experience, constructed by the child rather than taught.
- Assimilation: new information is taken into an existing schema, which does not have to change.
- Accommodation: information that will not fit produces disequilibrium, so a schema is altered or a new one formed; equilibration is the return to a balanced state and is the motor of development.
- The stages of intellectual development named in the right order with rough ages: sensorimotor (birth to about two), pre-operational (two to seven), concrete operational (seven to eleven), formal operational (about eleven onwards).
- Characteristics tied to the correct stage: object permanence in the sensorimotor stage; egocentrism, failure of conservation and failure of class inclusion in the pre-operational stage; logical operations on concrete material next; abstract and hypothetical reasoning last.
- Named evidence: the blanket and hidden toy, the three mountains task, the counters and beakers conservation tasks, and the dogs-and-animals class inclusion question.
- AO3 credit for the task demands criticism (Hughes 1975; McGarrigle and Donaldson 1974; Samuel and Bryant 1984), for Vygotsky as a competing social account, and for the application to discovery learning in primary classrooms.
- Development is social and cultural in origin: knowledge is co-constructed with others and then internalised, moving from between people to within the child.
- The zone of proximal development defined as the distance between current unaided performance and what can be achieved with expert guidance.
- The implication for teaching: instruction is pitched ahead of present ability, inside the zone, rather than waiting for readiness.
- Scaffolding defined as temporary, graded help from a more knowledgeable other that is reduced and finally removed as the learner takes over.
- Named scaffolding strategies from Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976), or levels of help ranging from general encouragement to specific demonstration.
- Supporting evidence: Roazzi and Bryant (1998) on prompted estimation, and McNaughton and Leyland (1990) on mothers adjusting help to task difficulty.
- AO3 credit for the educational applications (peer tutoring, group work), for the contrast with Piaget on readiness, for cultural variation in whether scaffolding is used at all, and for the difficulty of measuring a zone directly.
- The criticism of Piaget stated as a competence and performance distinction: failing a search task involves motor coordination, memory and interest, so it understates knowledge of the physical world.
- The violation of expectation procedure: habituation to an event, then test trials in which one version is physically possible and the other impossible, with looking time as the dependent variable.
- The inference made explicit: longer looking indicates surprise, surprise indicates a violated expectation, and an expectation requires knowledge of the hidden object.
- A named study with its findings: Baillargeon and DeVos (1991) on the tall and short carrots, with looking times of 33.07 against 25.11 seconds, or the drawbridge study of Baillargeon, Spelke and Wasserman (1985).
- The physical reasoning system: an innate awareness that objects persist, plus event categories whose variables are learned with experience, explaining why physical understanding is universal and early.
- AO3 credit for the control the method gives over confounding demands, for the criticism that looking time may reflect perceptual novelty rather than understanding, for the difficulty of falsifying an innate claim, and for the contrast with Piaget on the age of the competence.
- Outline Selman's five levels of perspective-taking (0-4) and how they reflect a developmental decrease in egocentrism.
- Explain Theory of Mind as the cognitive ability to understand that others have different beliefs, desires, and intentions.
- Describe the Sally-Anne study as a false belief task used to assess ToM, noting that children typically pass this around age four.
- Explain the role of the mirror neuron system in simulating others' actions and emotions, facilitating empathy and observational learning.
Examiner Tips
- 💡When writing an extended essay, describe two or three stage features precisely and then spend most of the answer on the counter-evidence and on Vygotsky to ensure sufficient evaluation.
- 💡In a scenario question, name the stage and quote the behaviour in the stem that shows it; the application mark is for the link, not for the label.
- 💡If the question says outline, give the mechanism and no evaluation; if it says apply, every point must be anchored to the child described.
- 💡Quote the finding, not just the researcher: the percentage from Hughes or from the naughty teddy study is what turns a vague criticism into a credited one.
- 💡When a stem describes a teacher, parent or older sibling helping, name the more knowledgeable other, the zone and the scaffolding behaviour separately and quote the stem for each.
- 💡An educational application only earns AO3 if you say what actually changes in the classroom and what evidence backs it.
- 💡Discuss means both sides and a judgement; end by saying which account the evidence favours and for which kind of learning.
- 💡Vygotsky is the ready-made evaluation point in a Piaget essay and Piaget is the evaluation point here, so learn the comparison once and use it both ways.
- 💡Structure an explanation as habituation, then test events, then looking time, then the conclusion drawn; examiners credit the logic of the inference, not the apparatus.
- 💡Use Baillargeon as evaluation in a Piaget essay and Piaget as evaluation here, but make the comparison explicit or it reads as description.
- 💡When asked to outline and evaluate, ensure the evaluation outweighs the description; two crisp descriptive paragraphs are enough before the criticism starts.
- 💡If asked to apply the method to a new scenario, say precisely which event would be impossible and what looking pattern would count as support.
- 💡Use the Sally-Anne study to explicitly demonstrate how false belief tasks operationalise Theory of Mind in experimental conditions.
- 💡When evaluating Selman's theory, use correlational evidence linking perspective-taking skills to social competence and peer relations.
- 💡Link the mirror neuron system to specific social deficits, such as those seen in autism spectrum disorder, to provide biological evaluation.
Common Mistakes
- Swapping assimilation and accommodation, or calling any new learning accommodation when nothing about the schema actually changed.
- Attaching a characteristic to the wrong stage, most often putting object permanence in the pre-operational stage or conservation in the sensorimotor stage.
- Explaining egocentrism as selfishness rather than an inability to represent another person’s viewpoint.
- Listing the four stages with ages and stopping there, which caps an essay at the descriptive marks and throws away the larger evaluation allocation.
- Saying the studies "prove Piaget wrong" when what they show is that his tasks made the competence look later than it is.
- Treating the zone of proximal development as a fixed stage or simply as work that is hard, instead of a gap specific to one child on one task at one time.
- Describing scaffolding as doing the task for the child, or leaving out the withdrawal of support, which is the part that makes it scaffolding.
- Crediting the word scaffolding to Vygotsky; he wrote about the zone, and the term comes from Wood, Bruner and Ross.
- Listing differences from Piaget without drawing an implication, which reads as description and picks up no evaluation marks.
- Writing that the research proves infants understand physics; looking time is only evidence of an expectation, and that inference is exactly what critics attack.
- Leaving out the habituation phase, which makes the impossible event sound merely more interesting than the possible one.
- Describing the study with no ages and no figures, so the answer says only that infants looked longer.
- Claiming Baillargeon disproves Piaget outright instead of showing that his tasks placed the same ability far too late.
- Treating an infant sample as if it were a straightforward self-report, and ignoring that the whole finding rests on how an adult codes gaze.
- Confusing Selman's perspective-taking with Piaget's egocentrism; correct this by noting Selman focuses specifically on understanding interpersonal relationships and multiple viewpoints, not just physical perspectives.
- Stating that failing the Sally-Anne task means a child has autism; correct this by explaining that while ToM deficits are linked to autism, failing the task is also typical for neurotypical children under four years old.
- Describing mirror neurons as only firing during observation; correct this by emphasising they fire both when performing an action and when observing the same action.