Cognitive Development Theory

Cognitive Development Theory

• Cognition = how we organize experiences and make sense of them

• Knowing is an active process of finding and restoring balance or equilibrium

  • It develops through constant interaction between a person and their environment

Jean Piaget

• Focused on how children think, not just what they know, laying the foundation for his cognitive development theory

• His research transformed psychology and education

Key terms

• Schemes

• Organization

• Adaptation

• Stages of Development

Scheme

• Organized patterns of actions, ideas, or feelings that guide how people interact with the world, starting with simple actions in infancy and later becoming more complex

• Infants build schemes through repeated experiences (grasping, sucking, or greeting a parent), and these schemes grow and change through life

Organization

• Living beings have the innate ability to coordinate their systems, like bodily functions (breathing, digestion) or combining senses and actions (seeing and reaching)

• In thinking, this helps people group objects into categories, making it easier to understand and respond to information

Adaptation

• Experiences form and reshape schemes

• Assimilation = fitting new experiences into existing schemes

• Accommodation = modifying schemes when new information doesn’t fit

• People strive for equilibrium within their environment, gradually building more complex and logical ways of thinking across developmental stages

Stages of Cognitive Development

• Sensorimotor stage (birth - 18 months)

• Preoperational stage (18 months - 5/6 years)

• Concrete Operational stage (5/6 years - 11/12 years)

• Formal operational stage (11/12 and beyond)

Sensorimotor stage

• Sensory and motor adaptation - infants adjust their senses and movements through experience, learning how their actions (like reaching and grasping) affect the world around them

• Causal reasoning - They begin to understand cause-and-effect, realizing that one action can make something else happen

  • e.g., shaking a rattle makes noise

• Understanding of objects - infants develop object permanence (knowing objects exist even when out of sight) and start grouping objects into categories based on shared features

Preoperational stage

• Loose, egocentric logic - children reason in ways that make sense to them but are often self-centered and not yet logical by adult standards

• Representation through symbols - they begin using symbols and signs to stand for actions or ideas

  • e.g., Stick as a sword

• Growth of symbolic activities - language, pretend play, imitation, and drawing become key ways for children to express and explore their world

Concrete operational stage

• Mental operations - children can mentally represent objects and understand relationships between them

  • a child solving 3 + 5 = 8 understands that 8 - 3 = 5.

• Logical thinking - Children use new thinking skills like identity, reversibility, & reciprocity, to understand that objects keep their mass, number, weight, or volume even if their appearance changes.

  • e.g., Conservation task (Siegler et al., 2024)

• Classification skills - they can organize objects into categories, understanding how categories relate to one another

  • A child can sort animals into groups like dogs, cats, and birds, and also understand that all of them belong to the bigger group “animals.”

Formal operational stage

• Advanced mental operations - adolescents can think logically about both real and hypothetical situations

• Complex reasoning - Children can think about many factors at once, consider possibilities, and reflect on their own thinking.

  • e.g., Adolescents can think about how their own decisions might affect the future

Adolescent Egocentrism (Elkind, 1967)

• Adolescents can think about their own thoughts and understand that others have thoughts too, but they often overestimate how much others are focused on them

• They assume everyone notices and cares about their behavior and appearance as much as they do