Article ‘Culture and Cognitive Development’

Culture may have a big effect in children’s cognitive milestones. In the article, Culture and Cognitive Development, it states that “the culture context is not just a facilitator or motivator for cognitive development, but rather a unique “ontogenetic niche” that actually structures human cognition in the fundamentals ways.” Children learn words in situations that they find hard to distinguish in an adult’s communicative intentions, from playing the “finding game”. The “finding game” isn’t just searching for objects but it is a behavior connection between a child and adult in which the child is trying to make sense of the adult’s behavior and connect it to a word to its intended referent. The article also states, “An organism can engage in cultural learning of this type only when it understands others intentional agents like the self who have a perspective on the world that can be entered into, direct, and shared.” The only way children can understand is if they can understand their communicative partner first.

In Chapter 4, it states that “retrieving hidden objects is evidence that infants have begun to master object permanence, the understanding that objects continue to exist when they are out of sight.” Babies still make an error when in search for hidden objects because their awareness is not complete yet. When they are in search of an object hiding in one spot and they see it moved to another, they still search for the object where it was first hidden. In the book it also states that, “Piaget concluded that the babies do not yet have a clear image of the object as persisting when hidden from view.”

In Chapter 6, it states that, “the ability to order items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight, is called seriation.” Piaget tested children to arrange sticks of different lengths from shortest to longest. Older infants were able to put the sticks in a row, but it was messy, and they made a lot of errors. Children that are 6- to 7-year-olds can put the sticks in row easily and in an orderly sequence. As well in chapter 6, when adolescences who are faced with a problem, they begin with a prediction about variables that may affect an outcome which then makes them work out a testable reason, are capable of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. In the chapter it states that, “then they systematically isolate and combine variables to see which of these inferences are confirmed in the real world.” The problem solving begins with possibility then proceeds to reality. Adolescences start with reality with obvious predictions about a situation and when the predictions are not confirmed, they tend to fail to solve the problem.

Emotional intelligence to me is the awareness of emotions in ourselves and others, uses reason to understand and deal with the emotions. One parenting factor that would contribute to greater development of EQ is examining how our actions will affect others. Another parenting factor is self-regulation, the ability to control our emotions and lastly self-awareness. We need to understand our emotions, so we don’t let our emotions get out of control. 

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