We were talking yesterday about our capacity for remembering
things, and grouping them up in order to remember more. This we
decided was a form of abstraction. I was just thinking, you could say
that in their development, children actually do the complete opposite
by means of assimilation and accomodation. For example, a child may
categorize a dog as being anything with 4 legs and a tail. When they
see a horse for the first time, they have to not only create a
completely new category for horses, but they have to redefine the
criteria which determine a dog, and this is accomodation. I know it's
probably irrelevant to what we were doing in the session, but I just
found it quite an interesting concept that in cognitive development,
children use the complete opposite of abstraction in order to
recognise more objects in the world around them, yet as they grow
older, they actually simplify the categories in order to remember
more. Sam
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