Human Cognitive Development
Siegler Article Summary
The article starts out saying that cognitive development is not that easy to observe. It goes on to present the theory of children’s thinking at a certain age and how people think that development is the same all across the board. However, Siegler disagrees with this theory. He introduces the theory of information processing. It is through theory that he proves that children’s thinking is not so confined as many psychologists think it may be.
With the idea of information processing, Siegler believes that children’s thinking varies. He says that children use more than one concrete way to solve a problem. He believes that these different ways to answer a problem is the key to answering one of the main questions in psychology “How does change occur?” His studies about how a child’s thinking varies is what he thinks is key to understanding cognitive growth.
Siegler breaks down thinking and the way it varies in three different categories. The first one is a person solving problems. The second one is a person solving that same problem twice. The last one is a person solving the problem with only one trial. He shows us how in each case a child’s thinking varies with different tasks they perform.
So when it comes to what he calls “Variability within an individual solving related problems”, there were a set of different tasks done to show how their thinking varies. When it comes to language, children between the ages of 2 ½ and 5 say more than one version of a word wrong before they eventually get it right. For example children may say “I ate it”, “I eated it”, “I ated it”. Next when we look at number conservation, Siegler saw that children look at more than one way to solve this problem than what Piaget suggested. Some kids look at length, others may look at how it transformed, some count it, and others look at in pairs.
The last two concepts are simply easy. “Variability within an...