Academic literature on the topic 'Cognitive Microgenesis'

Although children are born in a world of already established cultural practices and social representations, the appropriation and internalization of culture are not tasks of reproduction but of imaginative construction. The cultural development of the child offers an empirical opportunity to examine the role of the imagination in the practices by which human children enter culture. This chapter focuses on three such practices—care, play, and storytelling—to observe the imagination at work. By imagining the world both as what it is and as different from the way it is, the authors show that chil

Cognitive variability ultimately depends on people’s constructing novel ways of thinking even when we already possess reasonable alternatives. If we did not supplement existing approaches with new ones, there would be no variation in the approaches we use to solve a single problem, nor any need to choose adaptively among the alternatives. But how do we generate new approaches, and what leads us to do so when existing approaches already are adequate? This is the focus of the present chapter. Despite the obvious importance of constructing new ways of thinking, we know little about how the process occurs. For every study focusing on how children generate new approaches, there must be a hundred that focus on how the thinking of different-age children differs. Both conceptual and methodological considerations have contributed to this imbalance. Conceptually, the staircase approaches that have been dominant for the last 30 years have depicted generation of new ways of thinking as a rare event, too rare to be studied systematically. The outcomes of the generative process could be observed, as in the studies of age-related differences in reasoning, but not the generative process itself. Methodologically, standard developmental approaches, whether cross-sectional or longitudinal, are not well suited to studying the process of change. Developmental psychologists’ reliance on such approaches in part reflects the conceptual blinders imposed by the staircase conceptions of development. If generation of new approaches is a rare event, then these methods might be the best possible. Expedience also plays a role; cross-sectional methods in particular are cheaper and easier to use than methods more specifically designed to get at the process of change. Habit also plays a role; the standard methods are so prevalent, and have been for so long, that they almost inevitably are the first methods that come to mind when thinking about how to study a developmental issue. However, they are not the only methods for studying development, nor the ones best suited to studying change processes. An alternative approach that seems especially promising for studying change is the microgenetic method.