He believed that the Id expresses desires through daydreams. He preferred to take a dreams at face value and also to study dream series rather as opposed to an individual dream.
WEBB & CARTWRIGHT p
Problem-solving theory of dreaming
They believe that dreams are a way of identifying and working through problems of the waking life. They do not believe that the true meanings of dreams are disguised and therefore do not distinguish between the latent and manifest content. However the use of metaphor is included in their theory.
4
Problem Solving theory cont.
A number of studies support this theory.
(cartwright,1978), presented people with common problems. Those who were allowed to sleep uninterrupted later made far more realistic suggestions towards a solution than those who had been deprived of REM sleep.
Hartman 1973, showed that people suffering from occupational or relationship problems enter REM sleep earlier and spend longer in it than less troubled subjects.
EVANS p
Reprogramming theory of dreaming
According To Evans during REM sleep the brain shuts off from the external world, isolating itself from sensory input. This time is spent sorting through new data and updating existing memory systems. A number of studies have shown that REM sleep increases following mental activities of a complex nature.
Herman & Roffwarg 1983, also supported Evan s theory. In their study participants wore distorting lenses during their waking day. These made everything appear upside down. This took a great deal of mental effort to adjust to.
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Sup. for Evan s theory cont.
Herman& Roffwang 1983 cont
Subsequent monitoring revealed an increase in periods of REM sleep.
Evan s theory has also been supported by the findings of older people spending shorter periods dreaming.
* * * * *
Neurobiological Approach
HOBSON & McCARLY 1977
Activation synthesis Theory of Dreams
They proposed that dreaming begins with the random firing of giant cells, located in the R.A.S. of the pons, which in turn activate adjacent nerve cells. These include those concerned with vision, motor activity and emotion. This activity also reduces the tone of major muscles, producing temporary paralysis. This prevents us acting out our dreams. Morrison 1983, found that cats with damage to the brain stem actually chased the subject of their dreams and ignored real mice.
Although the body is not moving, the cerebral cortex is still receiving information, originating from the giant cells, which suggests it is. In an attempt to make sense of the random activity it merges or synthesises it, using memory to create a dream. Activity of nerve cells involved in balance for example may evolve as dreams about falling.
6
Some have argued that if dreams were merely a meaningless bi-product of random firing of nerve cells they would not reflect our daily experiences, as they often do. Hobson and McCarley argued that the areas of the cortex that have been most recently stimulated during the day are also most likely to ??????? together with the brain persistently seeking to find meaning, even if there is none in the data.
The unusual intensity and chaos involved in this neural activity accounts for the sometimes erratic and strange content of dreams.
Hobson also agued that the periodic activation of the brain during sleep is due to the giant cells of the pons firing in an uncontrolled way. This continues until the supply of the neurotransmitter acetycholine ,which they are sensitive to, is depleted. This brings about the end of REM sleep, until acetycholine stores are replaced, and the nest period of REM sleep will begin.
CRICK & MITCHISON 1983 Nuero
Reverse Learning Theory of Dreams
They argued that we dream in order to forget. They view the random firing during REM as the brains method of destroying synaptic connections involved in storing useless information. The removal of worthless or parasitic information creates space for material of more use. They called this process reverse learning or unlearning.
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They point out that animals who do not have REM sleep, such as dolphins and spiny anteaters have abnormally large cortexes. This could be that they have developed in this way to house vast amounts of information. Alternatively, it could be that with the extra space they have no need to unlearn.
Winson suggested that a large cortex enables them to carry out unlearning while awake.
This theory would explain why we rarely remember our dreams. According to this model, to remember a dream means that we have re-stored the very info. We were trying to forget. This does not explain why some dreams are very coherent and significant. Connectionists theories suggest that we have no need to save space as we have vast potential for storage information.
Critics of neurobiological theories argue that if dreams were meaningless, history would not have provided us with so many examples of creations and inspirations that have manifested during them.
Neither the psychological or neurobiological theories of dreaming can account for the findings of activity very similar to REM sleep in foetuses. Jouvert suggests that the firing of nerve cells during REM activates information, concerning instinctual behaviour, that is stored in the genes. Once activated it is then programmed into the brain.
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Dreams are seen as meaningless or meaningful. At present we are not in a position to accept or reject either viewpoint.
PSYCHOLOGY
A LEVEL
- SLEEP
- DREAMING
a. General Info.
b. Stages of
- Theories of
Freud – wish fulfilment,
Jung,
Webb & Cartwright – problem solving,
Evans – reprogramming,
Hobson & McCarley – activation synthesis,
Crick & Mitchison s – reverse learning
- BIOLOGICAL RHYTHMS
* * * * *
- DEV. OF THINKING
2. DEV. OF MEASURED INTELLIGENCE
- DEV. OF MORAL UNDERSTANDING
* * * * *
1
Cognitive Psychology
Theories of cognitive development
JEAN PIAGET
Maturation Theory
Piaget was born in Switzerland became interested in genetic epistemology. He believed that there are qualitative differences between the thinking of a child and an adult. He believed that being biologically prepared is a vital requirement for change. In other words, biological structure, which is controlled by genetic systems, will dictate behaviour. He also believed that contact with the environment interacts with the biological structure. It is this interaction that leads to the dev. Of intellect.
He focuses on how thinking changes in age-related stages and on what is common to all individuals as they pass through each of them.
He became intrigued by the unexpected replies that children gave during his studies of intelligence and noted that there was a pattern to incorrect answers.
He wanted to discover the thought processes behind them, as he believed that it was incorrect answers that would be the best indicators of how they think.
Functional invariants are the aspects of the dev. Processes that remain constant and work in the same way throughout the stages.
These include; assimilation applying existing schema to fit environment.
Accommodation changing existing schema to fit the world. Brought about by a state of disequilibrium.
……………………… equilibration Mental Balance
achieved by matching
objects and schemas
The feature of development that does change is schemata. A schema can be thought of as the basic unit of intelligence. A baby s schema are of a reflex mature such as sucking, crying, rooting, gripping.
2
Schema cont.
It is a way of organizing our experience, an internal representation of a sequence of actions, making the world more predictable.
From birth existing schema are continuously used to interpret and cope with old and new situations. We try to make them fit. He called this assimilation. Inadequacies of existing schemas to deal with new situations force the change of one of more of them. He named this process accommodation. These two processes result in development. This can be expressed as the equation:
assimilation + accommodation = adaptation
Operation. This is a string of schema linked together, producing a more complex structure. This is acquired in middle to late childhood.
4 INVARIENT STAGES (continuous & universal)
SENSORYMOTOR (0 to 2)
A babys intelligence is displayed through the senses,(hearing, seeing, smelling) and through motor actions, (pulling grasping). The baby seeks and repeats satisfying events concerned with its body. This is known as primary circular reactions, and later, when incorporating objects, it is known as secondary circular reaction. It strives to master its co-ordination. It also thinks through acting upon or perceiving objects. Tertiary circular reactions are where the baby experiments to reproduce interesting outcomes. When the child has stopped, Piaget believed the object no longer exists according to the baby. This is a lack of Object Permanence. Piaget claimed that the ability to maintain a mental representation of objects out of sight develops at around 8 months onwards.
Bower believes that not demonstrating object permanence reflects difficulty with understanding concepts of location and movement, rather than immature object-concept.
3
Bower cont.
He demonstrated this in an experiment where a 5-6 month old baby was showed a toy. This was covered by a screen that was removed. The baby showed surprise that the toy was no longer there. He also demonstrated object permanence in babies as young as four months old when they visually searched for an object at the other side of a screen, when tracking it, expecting in to re- appear.
As they come out of the sensorymotor stage they start to internalise and symbolize, (produce mental images of) aspects of the environment. This is known as the General Symbolic Function. This is accompanied by deferred imitation and representational /make believe play. The former is the ability to imitate an action when the example is no longer present, and the latter is where on object is used as if it were another.
PRE- OPERATIONAL ( 2-7 yrs )
At this stage children turn their symbolic thoughts into language and imaginative play. The child is influenced by how things look rather than logical principals. Piaget divided this stage into pre-conceptual (2-4yrs) and intuitive (4-7yrs). At the former stage the child can only classify things on the basis of a single attribute. They will centre on what objects have in common and overlook the differences (centration). This can lead to Transductive reasoning (calling all men daddy).
The child has difficulty in conservation tasks because they tend to focus on one aspect of the problem. Piaget conducted conservation experiments with mass, volume, area, numbers. This involved changing, in view of the child, only the presentation and not the quantity of a substance. He found that children under 7 years could not conserve.
Donaldson, (1978) pointed out that the children were lead to believe there must be a second answer if there is a second question after the transformation.
4
Pre-Op cont.
Their understanding of mathematical language often impedes their performance. Conservation experiments that do not depend on language ability showed some awareness of number conservation in 3 and 4 year-olds.
Animism, or believing that objects/toys are alive is also present at this stage.
Egocentrism is present throughout the pre-operational period. This referrers to the inability of the child to see the world from another s point of view /perspective, to decentre. This inability limits moral thinking and is demonstrated in the cruelness of children. Egocentrism was demonstrated by Phillips 1969 with his brother question, and by Piaget and inhelder 1956 with the mountain model. This model has 3 mountains, each a different colour.
A doll was placed in the model and the children were asked to choose a picture that would resemble what the doll would see.
Four year olds chose pictures that matched their own perspective and at six years they attempted but often failed to match correctly.
Piagets experiments were criticised for being too complex.
Hughes modified the 3 mountains experiment and used two walls intersecting to form a cross. A boy doll and one or two policeman dolls were paced at various points. The child was asked to hide the boy doll where the policeman could not see him. This produced evidence de-centration by 90% of 4 year olds. According to Hughes the discrepancy in results occurred because the child understood what was being asked of him in policeman experiment but did not in the mountain experiment because it had no meaningful context. Many researchers have criticized Piaget for underestimating what a child can do at various ages.
5
Concrete Operational 6/7 - 11/12 years
During this stage the child becomes less egocentric and can see the world from anothers point if view. They are capable of logical thought processing by way of performing an action mentally (operation). They can also perform mental tasks in reverse, (reversibility), and are capable of sorting objects according to two or more features. The need to involve concrete objects when problem solving can be demonstrated by transitivity tasks such as, who is the tallest puzzle, where the child can only solve it if dolls are present. The concrete operational child is still concerned with manipulating the tangible rather than ideas.
Their ability to conserve may involve Horizontal Decalage, which refers to inconsistencies in a childs ability to conserve within the same kind of operation, or Vertical Decalage, in which they occur between different kinds of operations.
FORMAL OPPERATIONAL (11-12)
At this stage the child can reason solely on the basis of verbal statements. They are concerned with the form of and argument. They can think hypothetically about situations they have not yet experienced. Their ability to think in abstract terms is evidence of rurther de-centration.
Inhelder and Piaget (1958) demonstrated the approaches at various stages to problem solving by presenting children of different ages with colourless, odourless liquid, and asking them to find the combination that would produce a yellow liquid. They found that only the formal operational child searched systematically.
Dasen (1994) found that approximately only one third of adults attain formal reasoning.
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Piaget claimed that his theory was biological and therefore universal but he did not conduct many cross-cultural studies with culture-fair tests. However Cowen and Flavell both found the stages course and content to be the same as proposed by Piaget, in hundreds of other countries.
Piaget was criticized for underemphasizing the role of language and social interaction in cog. Dev.
He saw cog. Maturity as a prerequisite for linguistic development.
Piaget did later agree that environmental factors could influence the timing of the stages.
The individualized form of questioning results in an un-standardised method. This makes statistical analysis almost impossible.
Bryant and Trabasso 1971 trained children to use logical mental rules when given tasks. According to the concept of biological maturation in Piagets theory such concentrated period of practice would not
Improve performance. They found a distinct improvement. P.453
Impact Of the Theory & Practical Applications
The most salient point to come from the research of Piaget is that education must be flexible and meet the needs of the individual. Assessment of a childs current level of development and creating an environment that offers moderate challenges for each individual. The teacher should not impart knowledge but ask questions to cause disequilibrium. The notion of readiness and gradually adding to the childs existing mental framework, according to piaget, is the key to successful learning.
7
Children should not be viewed as miniature adults. Their language and thought is qualitatively different. Talking to children will help us to understand their perspective and level of understanding and is therefore most important. The curriculum must allow interaction with the environment and materials, with the teacher prompting the child to think by asking questions, thus allowing discovery to take place. This will result in a greater level of understanding. Piaget saw the acquisition of knowledge as a voyage of self discovery.
Flavel 1982 pointed out that considering that children gradually move through one stage to another, and can often straddle more than one, it is not a true stage theory.
Bernard 1978 commented that Piagts theory was an elaborate description with very little explanatory value.
It prompted a great deal of research and changed the way we view the childs mind and thought. It also lead to a change in the way education is delivered, with the emphasis being of learning through discovery. It has raised many questions about testing, such as does the 11+ give an advantage to the early developers?
Ideally education should include a combination of Piaget, Vygostky and behaviourists approaches.
8
VYGOTSKY 1896-1934 (Work published in 1962)
He believed that cognitive development arises from a social process involving interaction with others. Parents & teachers provide the framework or scaffolding that helps to support the child during development. He believed that cognitive skills remain social in two ways. Firstly, the scaffolding provided by others is internalised and secondly, the skills that are learned through our culture are developed most highly. He viewed learning as a collaboration with those who are more knowledgeable, rather than Piagets independent voyage of discovery.
He viewed the intellect has having elementary and higher mental functions. The innate elementary functions will develop though experience but without cultural interaction the mental functions cannot progress to the higher level.
At the age of two, the child starts to use external signals such as language to aid problem solving. Often the child will talk out loud until around 7 years-old when it becomes silent inner speech, internalized. The ability to use external symbols that converts elementary thought into higher thought.
The effects of culture on higher mental functions was recorded by Gredler 1992. He noted a limited ability in coping with mathematical calculations amongst children of Papua, New Guinea. This, he believed, was due to the system of counting they are taught, which ends at 29.
Vygotsky identified the Zone of Proximal/Potential Development. This is the distance between a childs current and potential abilities at any given time. He sees instruction by experts as wakening functions or abilities within the ZPD that may otherwise lay dormant. Without intervention the child will learn less. He claimed that,
What a child can do with assistance today he/she can do by him/herself tomorrow.
Peer tutoring was also seen by Vygotsky as an effective form of learning.
9
INFORMATION PROCESSING (Developmental Approach) Case 1974, suggested that the improved ability to process info. Occurs as children become able to use their mental space more efficiently. The M Space refers to the area of the brain where information is stored during processing.
All cognitive activity can be divided into Figurative schemes, (equivalent to Piagets schemas), Operative schemes,(equivalent to Piagets operations), and Executive schemes that organize the other two to achieve a goal.
Although there is a limit to how much info. the M space can hold, the amount the brain can process increases with age. This occurs because;
Changes in the myelin sheath of the brains nerves lead to faster transmission of impulses.
Strateges for info. Processing such a chunking become more automatic, freeing-up M space. Once schema are automatic children can think about an experience in more advanced ways and improve their problem solving techniques.
Metacognitive skills (thinking and learning about how to acquire knowledge) usually follows the automation of schema and are important in cog. Dev.
The effects of automation were demonstrated by Chi 1978. He found that children who were chess experts could recall more chess positions than non-expert adults.
