Course for international guest/part time students

Faculty

Bárczi Gusztáv Faculty of Special Needs Education

Organization

BGGyK Institute for the Psychology of Special Needs

Code

F-EN23-2025

Title

Cognitive development

Usual semester

Autumn

Published semester

2026/27/1

ECTS

5

Language

en

Learning outcomes

To provide a comprehensive (although brief) overview of the main topics in developmental psychology, and to look at some specific issued deeper (perceptual and conceptual development; the development of social understanding). Learning outcomes and competences: Participants of the course Knowledge: will learn about the current conceptual framework of cognitive development, namely core cognition, and later stages of cognitive development. Skills: will formulate relevant questions, ideas for research; reason about the topic, and summarize their ideas in written form. Attitude: will, hopefully, gain or deepen their interest in the discussed areas. Autonomy and responsibility: will (be encouraged to) actively participate in the course, contribute their questions, reflections, and summarize their own thoughts in a term paper.

Course content

Topics: (1) Perceptual development, Overview (2) Piaget’s view of cognitive development, and Vygotsky’s critique (3) The development of attention, memory, and problem solving (4) Language acquisition (5) Mentalization: early development of the self and social understanding (6) Foundational questions of conceptual development: concept learning; non-referring concepts (7) More on perceptual development, I: Sight restoration after early blindness (8) More on perceptual development II: The development of colour vision (9) Core cognition and numerical cognition (10) The development of introspection and privileged access

Assessment method

Term paper on a topic related to the course material.

Bibliography

Carey, S. (2009). The Origin of Concepts. Oxford University Press. Chs. 4, 8. Kovács, I. (ed.) (2004). Visual integration: development and impairments (pp. 59–84). Akadémiai Kiadó. Carruthers, P. (2011). The opacity of mind. Oxford University Press. Chs. 1–3. Sandhofer, C., M., Smith, L., B. (1999). Learning Color Words Involves Learning a System of Mappings, Developmental Psychology, 35(3), 668–679. Shaffer, D. R. (2009). Developmental Psychology: Childhood and Adolescence. Cengage Learning. Chapters to be specified later. Further required reading is part of every course syllabus.

Programmes of the course