COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Development

It refers to certain changes that occur in human beings (or animals) between conception and death. These changes are those who appear in orderly ways and remain for a reasonably long period of time.

It can also be divided into different categories such as the physical, cognitive, social and personal aspect.

Maturation

refers to changes that occur naturally and spontaneously and that are, to a large extent, genetically programmed. Such changes emerge over time and are relatively unaffected by environment, except in cases of malnutrition or severe illness.

It is a biological growth processes that happen naturally over time, enabling physical or behavioral changes such as walking, talking, or puberty. These changes occur according to an individual’s genetic timetable, not primarily through learning or experience.

Example: A baby learning to walk

Continuous Development

It refers to the view that development is a gradual, ongoing process without sudden changes. Skills and abilities build upon one another slowly and steadily over time.

Example:
A child’s vocabulary increasing little by little as they grow older shows continuous development.

Discontinuous Development

It suggests that development occurs in distinct and separate stages, with qualitative changes between them. Each stage brings new ways of understanding or interacting with the world.

Example:
According to Piaget, children move from the preoperational stage (thinking symbolically) to the concrete operational stage (logical thinking)—a clear shift in how they think.

Sensitive Period

It refers to a specific time in development when an individual is especially responsive to certain experiences or learning opportunities. Although the skill can still develop later, it may be more difficult.

Example:
Children are especially receptive to learning language during early childhood; it’s a sensitive period for language development.

Critical Period

a limited and specific window in development during which certain experiences must occur for normal development to take place. If the experience is missed, development may be permanently affected.

Example:
If a baby’s eyes are not exposed to visual stimuli early in life, normal vision may never fully develop—this shows a critical period for visual development.

Synaptic Plasticity

It refers to the ability of the connections between neurons (synapses) to change in strength or efficiency over time in response to experience, activity, or learning.

It is our brain’s way to adapts, learns, and stores information by strengthening or weakening neural pathways.

Plasticity

It refers to the brain’s constant capacity to change its structure and function such as the neurons, synapses, and activity in response to experience, learning, or injury.

Neurogenesis

it refers to the formation of new neurons that continues even into adulthood.

Experience-Expectant Development

It a process of brain development that relies on typical, universal experiences (like touch, sound, and visual stimulation) to form basic neural connections during early development. Without expected stimulation (e.g., if a child is born deaf or blind), those brain areas reorganize for other senses.

Example: If a child is born deaf or blind, the brain areas that normally process sound or visual input do not receive the expected stimulation. As a result, those regions reorganize and adapt to process information from other senses — for instance, the visual cortex in a blind person may become more active in processing touch or sound.

Experience-Dependent Development

It refers a process of brain development where brain’s growth and change occurs in response to individual, unique experiences that are NOT UNIVERSAL—they depend on a person’s specific environment, culture, and learning opportunities.

Example: Learning an Instrument – If a child practices the piano every day after school. As he memorizes notes and coordinates his hands, his brain strengthens the neural pathways responsible for auditory processing and motor control.

Cognitive Developmental Theory

According to Jean Piaget this theory states that that children go through four stages of cognitive development and each stage represents a qualitatively different way of thinking — meaning, a child’s ability to reason or solve problems evolves naturally as they mature. Thus, cognitive development has to come before learning, their learning and understanding depend on the stage of cognitive maturity a child has reached.

This theory also emphasizes that children active construct knowledge and learn through organization, adaption, and equilibrium.

Focus: How thinking and reasoning change as a person grows.

Collective Monologue

According to Piaget this is refers to a type of speech observed among young children where children appear to be having a conversation, but they are not actually communicating meaningfully with one another. Each child talks about their own thoughts, ideas, or activities without truly listening or responding to what others are saying.

This behavior reflects egocentric speech, meaning that children are still focused on their own perspective and have not yet developed the ability to fully consider others’ viewpoints.

Example:

Two children are playing side by side with building blocks.

Child A: “I’m making a big tower for my cars!”

Child B: “My mommy bought me ice cream yesterday!”

Scheme

It refers to the basic building blocks of thinking developed through direct experience and interaction with their environment. These are mental structure or framework that contains organized systems of actions or thought that allow us to mentally represent or “think about” the objects and events in our world.

Organization

the tendency to create categories, by observing the characteristics that individual members of a category have in common.

It also involves combining, arranging, recombining, and rearranging of behaviors and thoughts into coherent systems

Adaptation

it is the inherit tendency of an individual  to adapt to their environment that involves two basic processes including assimilation and accommodation.

This is also the way of developing a scheme through direct experience and interaction with their environment.

Assimilation

It is the process of  of using existing mental schemes to understand new information or experiences. This means fitting new experiences into what an individual already know, without changing their original understanding.

Example: A child knows that a dog has four legs and fur. When they see a cow for the first time, they might call it a “dog” because it also has four legs and fur. The child is fitting the new experience (seeing a cow) into their existing “dog” scheme.

Accommodation

It is the process of changing or modifying existing mental schemes (schemas) to fit new information or experiences that don’t match what a person already knows.

Example:
A child first calls a cow a “dog” because both have four legs and fur (assimilation). When someone explains that a cow is different, it moos, is bigger, and gives milk, the child changes their original “dog” scheme and forms a new “cow” scheme.

Equilibration

It is the process of balancing assimilation and accommodation to create a stable understanding of the world. This is how we restore balance in our thinking when new information challenges what we believe

The process of of balancing works like this: If we apply a particular scheme to an event or situation and the scheme works, then equilibrium exists. If the scheme does not produce a satisfying result, then disequilibrium exists, and we become uncomfortable. This motivates us to keep searching for a solution through assimilation and accommodation, and thus our thinking changes and moves ahead.

Sociocultural Theory

According Lev Vygotsky  emphasized that learning and development happen within cultural and social contexts  people grow through their interactions with others. He argued that our thinking processes are shaped and created through social interactions, not just influenced by them. Over time, these shared social activities become internalized as our own thoughts and mental processes.

This theory also emphasizes that every function in the child's cultural development appears twice:

1. Between People (Interpsychological)

2. Inside the child (Intrapsychological)

Example: Cultures that value cooperation teach children to share and work together, while cultures that value competition encourage independence and competitiveness

Social Interaction

According to Vygotsky this is where all higher mental functions first developed before becoming internalized as part of the child’s own thinking.

He explained that every mental process appears twice:

1. Socially (interpersonal level): between the child and others (like parents or teachers).

2. Individually (intrapersonal level): within the child, after they internalize what they learned from others.

This means learning begins with collaboration through shared activities, communication, and guided help from  more capable others (adults or advanced peers) which then becomes independent thinking.

Private Speech

According to Vygotsky it is the self-directed talk that children use to guide, plan, and control their own behavior and thinking while performing tasks or solving problems. t

This speech helps children develop self-regulation — the ability to plan, monitor, and guide their actions independently.

Stages of Development (According to Vygotsky):

1. External Regulation by Others:
   Adults control the child’s behavior through language.
   → Example: A parent says, “No, don’t touch the candle!”

2. Regulation of Others:
   The child begins using language to control others’ behavior.
   → Example: The child says “No!” to another kid who tries to take their toy.

3. Self-Regulation Through Private Speech:
   The child uses spoken language to guide their own actions.
   → Example: While building blocks, the child says, “No, this one doesn’t fit. Try again.”

4. Inner Speech (Silent Thought):
   Over time, private speech becomes internalized — turning into silent inner speech or “verbal thinking.”
   → Example: By around age 7 and beyond, children begin thinking silently to plan and solve problems.

Zone of Proximal Development

It is the area between the child’s current performance (the problems the child can solve independently without any support) and the level of performance that the child could achieve with adult guidance or by working with “a more fully developed child.

It is also called as “magic middle”, somewhere between what the student already knows and what the student isn’t ready to understand or learn yet

Scaffolding

It refers to the teaching and learning process in which a more knowledgeable person provides temporary support and guidance to help a learner accomplish a task or understand a concept that they cannot yet do alone.

In this, the adult continually adjusts the level of his or her help in response to the learner's level of performance.

Social Cognitive Theory

It is previously called Social Learning Theory (SLT) in the 1960s by Albert Bandura, where initially it focuses on how people learn by observing others. However, this theory expanded and emphasizes that learning is not just social — it also involves cognitive (mental) and emotional processes.

It introduces the concept of Reciprocal Determinism where learning occurs in a social context through a continuous, dynamic, and reciprocal interaction among three factors:

1. Personal factors – thoughts, emotions, beliefs, biological events

2. Behavior – actions or responses of the individual

3. Environment – external social and physical surroundings

Example:

A student’s confidence (personal) affects how actively they participate in class (behavior), which then affects how the teacher responds (environment) — and the teacher’s response can again shape the student’s confidence.

Observational Learning (Modeling)

Learning occurs by watching others and then imitating or avoiding their behavior, depending on the observed consequences.

For learning to occur, it involves the following process:

1. Model – the person being observed.

2. Attention: noticing the model’s behavior

3. Retention: remembering what was observed

4. Reproduction: being able to perform the behavior

5. Motivation: wanting to imitate the behavior because of expected rewards or outcomes

Self-Efficacy

refers to an individual's belief in his or her capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance attainments. It influence people's choice and beliefs in themselves, including the goals they choose to pursue and the effort they put into them, and the outcomes they expect.

Cognitive Learning

It is the ability of the brain’s mental processes to absorb and retain information through experience, senses, and thought which is known as cognition.

Cognitive Learning Theory

This theory states that learning occurs through internal mental processes or cognition such as thinking, understanding, remembering, and problem-solving.

It focuses on how people process and organize information in their minds, rather than simply reacting to external stimuli or rewards.

It uses metacognition—“thinking about thinking”—to understand how thought processes influence learning. It explains how internal and external factors influence an individual’s mental processes to supplement learning

Delays and difficulties in learning are seen when cognitive processes are not working regularly. These processes are such as attention, observation, retrieval from long-term memory, and categorization.

Perception

It is a component of cognitive learning that refers to noticing and interpreting information.

Comprehension

It is a component of cognitive learning that involves understanding the meaning, purpose, and relevance of what is being learned for it to be efficient and beneficial.

It involves making sense of what is learned.

Memory

It is a component of cognitive learning that refers to the ability to retain and recall information through meaningful connections, not rote memorization. 

It involves storing and retrieving information when needed.

Cognitive learning discourages cramming because short-term memorization fades quickly. Instead, it promotes deep learning — relating new ideas to what you already know. This process, called assimilation, helps store information in long-term memory and strengthens understanding.

Application

It is a component of cognitive learning that  involves  using what you’ve learned to solve problems or deal with real-life situations.

This component shows that learning isn’t complete until knowledge is put into action. Applying learned concepts helps develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills, allowing learners to adapt and use their knowledge flexibly.

Cognitive Behavioral Theory

This theory developed by Aaron Beck states that how a person’s thoughts (cognitions), feelings (emotions), and behaviors are interconnected. It suggests that how we think about a situation strongly influences how we feel and act not the situation itself.

It is based on the idea that maladaptive (unhelpful) behaviors and thoughts are learned and can be unlearned or replaced through awareness and healthier thinking patterns. This means that by changing our thought patterns, we can change our emotions and behaviors in positive ways.