cognitive development: Piagets thoery

what are Piagets assumptions? (4)

• intellectual development is a form of adaptation that involves assimilation (fitting in new information into your pre-existing schemas) and accomodation (altering existing schemas to fit new information)

• intelligence develops progressively in a series of stages linked to age.

• in order for the next stage to occur the last one has to be fully formed

• each stage is a better, more adapted version of mental structure

what are Piagets 4 stages

1. sensorimotor stage- 0-2 years old

2. pre-operational stage - 2-7

3. concrete operational stage - 7-12

4. formal operational stage- 12-20

what is the sensorimotor stage

• object permanence: children lack the ability to understand that an object still exists when it is outside their perceptual field

• egocentrism: children have the belief that the world revolves around then and are unable to understand others perspectives

what is the pre-operational stage?

• egocentrism still characterises thought

• centration: the tendency to focus all attention on one aspect of a situation and ignore the rest

• irreversibility: the inability to mentally reverse a sequence of events

• conservation: understanding that physically and object remains the same when its appearance changes

concrete operational stage

• major turning point in development

• logical thinking develops

• understanding of conservation

formal operational stage:

• abstract thinking

• symbolic thinking using hypothetical examples

• metacognition: thinking about thinking