Psychology of Learning
Theories of Learning
Assist. Prof. Dr. Parisa G. Khoshkar
Fall 2024
Slide 3
1. Cognitive theory
Cognitive theory
• Cognitive theories are characterized by their focus on the idea that
how and what people think leads to the arousal of emotions and
that certain thoughts and beliefs lead to disturbed emotions and
behaviors and others lead to healthy emotions and adaptive
behavior.
Cognitive theory attempts to explain human behavior by
studying the mental processes involved when trying learn
and understand.
• Cognitive theorists began by comparing the human brain to a
powerful computer in order to understand its information processing
capabilities.
Today, cognitive theory has applications in:
• cognitive science
• cognitive sociology
• cognitive psychology
• cognitive learning
Three elements of cognitive theory
• The three main elements of cognitive theory are:
1. perception
2. attention
3. memory
➢The process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting stimuli
creates a person's perception.
➢The way they process the information in their environment is
known as their attention,
➢and the process of gathering, storing, and recalling information
creates memory.
• Computers are not alone in being equipped with powerful
processors.
• The human brain is capable of making more than one billion
calculations per second, based on the information it gathers
through perception, judgment, reasoning, and recognition in order
to constantly create and adjust concepts of itself and the external
world.
• This produces lead to a sense of ''knowing'' or understanding
within the individual.
• The mind also gathers
information through
experiencing, sensing, &
thinking.
• This state of calculating
and information
processing is known
as cognition.
• A healthy human brain
possesses more than 100
billion nerve cells (each of
which might possess up to
10,000 connections with
other neurons) dedicated to
cognition alone.
• Cognition exists in several Some examples of
different domains in the brain, executive functions:
and it is responsible for many
separate functions that regulate ❑ Working memory
our behavior. ❑ Planning
❑ Time management
❑ Emotional control
• Cognitive processes determine ❑ Cognitive flexibility
people's attention, executive ❑ Inhibitory control
functions, memory, emotion ❑ Task initiation
recognition, and emotional ❑ Organization
biases.
• The cognitive theory
definition asserts that
the way people behave is
a product of the
information they gather
externally and the way
they interpret that
information internally.
• There are two main approaches to understand the cognitive
processes:
1.
• The first one’s information-processing approach, the
computational-representational theory of thought (or CRTT).
• This approach seeks to understand the way the human mind
works by comparing it to a supercomputer.
• American psychologists Robert Sternberg and Hermon A. Simon
have both worked to prove this theory. Sternberg looked at the
way people who take intelligence tests process information, and
Simon has attempted to program computers to mimic human
thought process (cognition).
2.
• The second approach to cognitive theory was developed by Swiss
psychologist Jean Piaget, who was the first to systematically study
cognitive development. Piaget's goal was to observe and explain the
processes used by infants and children to become individuals
capable of reasoning and thinking.
• Piaget concluded that people use mental frameworks called
schemas to build their internal senses of reality. According to
Piaget, schemas are tied together with a core meaning.
• As people continue to exist in the world, they will gather and process
more stimuli, or external information.
• Piaget framed cognitive processing in terms of assimilation
and accommodation.
• When people use an existing schema to make sense of
environmental stimuli, they are assimilating that experience.
Assimilation is how someone interprets their life
experiences.
• The way someone adjusts their internal models after
interpreting (assimilating) is known as the accommodation
process of cognitive theory.
Examples of assimilation & accommodation
Assimilation:
❑ when a parent reads to a child about dogs, the child constructs a
schema about dogs.
❑When the child encounters a horse, they might assimilate this
information and immediately call the animal a dog.
Accommodation:
❑The process of accommodation then allows the child to adapt the
existing schema to incorporate the knowledge that some four-legged
animals are horses.
Assimilation Process
Schema Processing (i)
Schema Processing (ii)
Schema Processing (iii)
Schema Processing (iv)
Schema Processing (v)
Schema Processing (vi)
Schema Processing (vii)
Schema Processing (viii)
Schema Processing (ix)
Schema Processing (x)
Schema Processing (x)
Accommodation Process
Accommodation Process (i)
Accommodation Process (ii)
Accommodation Process (iii)
Accommodation Process (vi)
Accommodation Process (v)
Accommodation Process (vi)
• Both assimilation and accommodation are essential to
how organisms build schemas about the world.
• While assimilation deals with keeping existing
knowledge and schemas intact and finding a new
place to store information, accommodation involves
actually changing one’s existing knowledge of a topic
(Tan et al., 2017).
• If assimilation alone were involved in child development, there
would be no variations in the child’s cognitive structures.
• This would mean that the child would not be able to acquire
new content and thus would not be able to develop further.
• Assimilation is essential for maintaining the continuity of these
structures and that new elements can be integrated into these
structures.
• Accommodation, however, facilitates the adaptation of these
existing structures to individual circumstances.
Equilibration
• Piaget also believed that as children learn, they strike a
balance between the use of assimilation and
accommodation.
• This process, known as equilibration, allows children to find a
balance between applying their existing knowledge and
adapting their behavior to new information.
Representation
• The term representation here follows the usage of Piaget, not the meaning
that is common in information-processing models.
• Piaget hypothesized that late in the second year children develop
representation, which is the capacity to think about things that are not
present in their immediate experience, such as an object that has
disappeared.
• He suggested that, starting with these initial representations, children show
a gradual increase in the complexity of representations throughout the
preschool years, culminating in a new stage of equilibrium called
''concrete operations'' beginning at age 6 or 7.
• Children acquire the ability to perform many tasks that involve
coordinating two or more ideas.
• For example, they can do elementary perspective-taking, in which
they relate a representation of someone else's perceptual
viewpoint with a representation of their own.
• Similarly, they can relate two social categories, e.g., understanding
how a doctor relates to a patient or how a mother relates to a
father.
Piaget’s Cognitive development
theory
• According to Piaget, people undergo four stages of cognitive
development from infancy through childhood.
Piaget described ccognitive stages in development as:
Sequential periods in the growth or maturing of an individual’s
ability to think / to gain knowledge, self-awareness, and
awareness of the environment.
• The first stage is called the sensorimotor stage. During this stage, babies and
toddlers develop object permanence—knowing that something continues to
exist even if it's not immediately visible to the naked eye. This could explain
why toddlers begin to outgrow games like ''Peekaboo.'' Sensorimotor is the
first stage because developing object permanence requires the presence of a
schema.
• After acquiring sensorimotor skills, children from ages 2-7 develop the ability
to make one thing stand for another by thinking symbolically. This is known as
the preoperational stage. During this stage, a child might pick up a stick and
use it as a sword (while understanding that the stick is still a stick), or they
might want to participate in role play games like house or school.
• The 3rd is concrete operational thinking, and the 4th formal operational
thinking.
Piaget on Learning
• According to Piaget, the learning process involves the following:
• Assimilation: Attempting to interpret new information within the framework of
existing knowledge
• Accommodation: Making small changes to that knowledge to cope with things
that don't fit those existing frameworks
• Equilibration: Eventually adjusting existing schemas or forming new ones to
adjust to a new understanding
• Assimilation and accommodation are complementary learning processes that
play a role at each stage of cognitive development.
• During the sensorimotor stage, for example, some information is assimilated,
while some experiences must be accommodated.
• It is through these processes that infants, children, and adolescents gain new
knowledge and progress through the stages of development.
• Assimilation helps us adapt to the world around us.
• It enhances our knowledge by using past experiences to interpret
new information.
• Assimilation also works in tandem with accommodation, giving us a
more complete and factual picture when new data is received.
• Understanding assimilation also helps us understand how we learn
and process information.
• It also makes it easier to see how judgment errors can sometimes be
made based on existing schemas.
Some Key Points
• In Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, humans progress through four
developmental stages: the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, and the
formal operational stage. These stages are facilitated by processes such as
accommodation.
• According to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, organisms gain intelligence
through their interactions with objects and are in a continuous process of constructing
mental models (schemas) of how the world works from the ever-evolving nature of
these interactions.
• The process of accommodation, according to Piaget’s theory, involves altering one’s
existing ideas (schemas) about how the world operates in response to new
information and experiences. This process of accommodation is universal, applying to
children as well as adults.
• The process of accommodation is in tension with that of assimilation. While
accommodation seeks to create new schemas, assimilation seeks to relate new
information to old cognitive structures (schemas). In order to develop intelligence,
organisms must balance accommodation with assimilation.
Supplementary Links to watch
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRF27F2bn-A
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnArvcWaH6I
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxUxgPwpfgk
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