Module 3: Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

Continuity in Cognitive Development

• A steady increase in a child's proficiency with a particular ability as they increase in age.

  • Day by day, their skills improve in this domain, you see a pretty linear increase, or at least it's a smooth increase. It might pick up at some points or level off at some points, but it's continuously increasing.

  • Continuously grows over time.

Continuous Development: Assimilation

In which you incorporate new information into concepts you already have.

• e.g., Let's imagine children have a certain understanding of what it means to be a fish. The child's understanding at this point might be that fish swim underwater, they have fins, and they're pretty cute. All of a sudden, a child sees a dolphin for the very first time. A dolphin swims underwater, it has fins and it's pretty cute, so the child's conclusion is going to be, dolphins are fish.

• The child has this existing category, this thing that they use to understand the world called fish, they encounter this new thing they'd never seen before called a dolphin, and they assimilate that new thing into this category or this conceptual understanding of the world that they already have.

Continuous Development: Accommodation

When children adjust their understanding of the world in response to new information and experiences.

• e.g., We've already talked about fish, which children believe is anything that swims underwater, has fins or is cute. Now, suddenly an adult in their surroundings introduces them to a new thing to know about fish, which is that they breathe underwater. This poses a problem for our friend the dolphin, because dolphins do not breathe underwater.

• The conclusion the child might draw from this is, well, dolphins are not fish then.

• In this case, accommodation is the process by which the child adjusts their understanding of what makes something a fish in response to the new information they just learned.

Continuous Development: Equilibration

• For Piaget, a big part of children's learning about the world is balancing assimilating new things that you encounter into your old ideas, and then also updating and accommodating your old ideas in response to new information that you perceive in the world.

  • It's a mixture of fitting new things into your old ways of understanding and changing your old ways of understanding to meet the new things that you encounter. It's this balancing act.

  • The way Piaget described this, as the process of equilibration. This is balancing assimilation and accommodation to create a stable understanding of the world.

• e.g., This moment when the child realizes that the way they thought about the world was a little bit wrong, this is called disequilibrium.

  • The child then recognizes they need to update their old ideas and this is a massive motivator for their cognitive development.

Stage Theory of Development

Piaget argued that children at different stages don't just know less, they think in qualitatively different ways.

• They don't just know fewer things because they've had less experiences, they actually, just based on their staged development, are able to think about the world in totally different ways.

• e.g., A four-year-old, because of their age and their stage of development, they can only consider their own perspective. It's like a limitation of their stage of development. When you get to an eight-year-old, so you fast forward a few years, now the child is actually able to consider the perspectives of other people and to compare and contrast their perspective with that of others.

• The four stages include…

  • The sensory-motor stage, which goes from birth stage two.

  • The pre-operational stage, which goes from two to seven.

  • The concrete operational stage, which goes from seven to 12.

  • The formal operation stage, which kicks in around about 12 and extends all the way into your adulthood.

Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2 Years)

Infants understand the world through sensory experiences and motor actions.

• Early intelligence develops from reflexes that become increasingly coordinated and adaptive.

• Infants gradually develop object permanence, the understanding that objects continue to exist when out of sight.

• The A-not-B error reflects fragile early object representations.

• By the end of the stage, infants show deferred imitation, indicating enduring mental representations.

Preoperational Stage (Ages 2 to 7)

Children develop symbolic representation through language, imagery, and pretend play.

• Thinking is limited by egocentrism, which restricts perspective-taking.

• Centration causes children to focus on one salient feature while ignoring others.

• These limitations lead to failures on conservation tasks involving number, quantity, and volume.

Concrete Operational Stage (Ages 7 to 12)

• Children become capable of logical reasoning about concrete objects and events.

• Egocentrism and centration decline, allowing success on conservation tasks.

• Thinking remains limited to concrete situations and lacks systematic experimentation.

Formal Operational Stage (Age 12 and Beyond)

Adolescents develop abstract, hypothetical, and systematic thinking.

• Formal operational thinkers can design controlled experiments and test multiple variables.

• Not all individuals reach this stage, but those who do gain expanded intellectual possibilities.

Object Permanence

This is the idea that just because something is no longer in your field of view, you have the understanding that it still exists. You just can't see it.

• Piaget believed that an understanding of object permanence didn't develop until a roundabout eight months or so. It was at this stage that babies would start searching for objects that disappear from their view.

• Before that it seemed like more of an out of sight out of mind kind of thing. The baby did not have clear evidence or did not demonstrate clear evidence that they had an understanding of object permanence.

• There's some more recent compelling evidence that suggests Paget was actually wrong about this and that children might have an understanding of object permanence before eight months.

• Piaget did notice that even after developing object permanence, babies had strange and fascinating limitations in their understanding of exactly how object permanence works and what happens to an object or how to interact with an object after it no longer is visible to them.

“A Not B Error” Phenomenon

• An infant would be seated and a toy would be hidden by an experimenter in one of two locations. We'll call these two locations, location A and location B.

  • The baby would watch as the toy is repeatedly hidden in location A. The experimenter puts it there right in front of them, so there's nothing hidden from them. The baby is then allowed to search and find it. They would see this happen several times and each time they'd be allowed to search and find it.

  • In the test trial, the object will be hidden in location B as the baby watches.

  • One year old's behave exactly as you think they would behave. They search in location B. However, eight month olds still continue to look in location A.

• We call this a perseverative error because the child is looking in the exact same location they had looked on several preceding trials.

  • They're persevering or perseverating in looking in the same location, despite new information.

• What really is important about what this highlights is that obviously in this stage, children are still navigating and learning how to understand the relationship between themselves and the world around them.

  • The way that they interact with the world around them in the sensorimotor stage is qualitatively different from how we do in the later stages of development.

Symbolic Representation

A core component of language and also lots of different aspects of cognition. Simply put, it is using one thing to stand for another.

• This can happen when you're engaging in simple pretend play.

• e.g., Imagine you picked up a banana and you started using it like a cell phone. You can also use simple shapes to represent more complex objects when drawing, where one squiggly line might be the waves and the water.

• At this stage in development, children will be able to start representing these real world things, using these very simple rudimentary symbols.

• We also see a rapid expansion of vocabulary in this range, since human language is, at its core, symbolic.

Egocentrism

Preoperational children can typically only consider their own point of view.

• Piaget explored this idea using a context known as the Three Mountain Task.

  • He would take children and he would show them a cool, 3D, table-sized diagram.

  • He would allow children to look at the things on the diagram with a big mountain, right in the middle, from both sides. At first the child would be seated on one side, but they would also have the opportunity to go around, to see what was on the other side of the diagram.

  • On one side, we have a ski jump. On the other side, we have a little pond.

  • The child would sit in one location and the experimenter would sit across the table, on the other sides of the mountains. And they would ask the child questions about the perspective of what they could see on that side of the mountain.

  • Then the experimenter and the child might switch positions.

  • The experimenter would then ask the child what they can currently see from their perspective. But then the experimenter would say, “okay, what can I see?”.

  • We know the child has already seen all this stuff, because they were just sitting there previously. But it seems like the child would be unable to actually list what the other person could see from their perspective, despite already having seen it themselves.

• It seems like the child is egocentric. And that they can only consider, it can only respond to these questions from what they can see right now. They can't disentangle their own perspective from the other person's perspective.

  • The important thing to take away from here right now is that Piaget's interpretation of this was that children in the preoperational stage are egocentric and could only consider their own perspective.

  • The textbook also notes that this may account for why children sometimes struggle to really have a good back and forth, two-way conversation and seem to be more focused on their own thoughts and their own things that they are trying to get across, which is true.

Centration

This is the tendency to focus on only one prominent feature of an object or event. And that fixation on that one prominent feature kind of interrupts your ability to think about the other aspects of that object or event.

• He famously demonstrated this using quantities of liquid.

  • Children will be shown two glasses of an orange drink, identical cups with identical amounts. And there will also be a slightly taller, thinner glass off to the side.

  • At first, these two identical cups will be shown, and the child will be asked, “do they have the same amount of orange drink or a different amount?”. Now children would look at this and say, “of course, they have the same amount”.

  • In phase two, the experimenter would take one of those cups and pour it into the tall, thin cup. And say, “now, watch what I do”, as they poured the contents into that tall thin glass.

  • The child initially recognized that these were the same amount in these two. But now, when presented with these two different cups, one that's kind of short and wide, the other's tall and thin, despite having earlier said that it was the same amount, preoperational children will now say that the taller glass has more of the liquid.

• Piaget interpreted this as the child is centrating or focusing too prominently on the height of the glass and using that as their only indicator of which has more. When in reality, there's more than just the height to consider. You also have to consider the width and the depth of glass.

  • Children here are focusing only on one prominent feature and failing to consider the rest.

Piaget's Pendulum Problem

• Piaget devised an interesting paradigm for exploring how children in the concrete operational stage, and also those in the formal operational stage might think about a complex problem.

• What Piaget would do, he'd bring the children in and he'd give them a stand, kind of like a metal bar, little hook at the top so you could hang a piece of rope on it. He would give them looped ropes of different lengths, as well as a variety of weights of different weights.

  • He would tell the kids that their job is to figure out what factors are important in determining how long it takes the pendulum to swing through a complete arc.

  • You could hang the weight on the string and the string on the hook and then you could drop it and make it start swinging like a pendulum.

  • A certain factor is going to influence how fast or how quickly it takes for the weight to go through it in a complete arc (i.e., when you drop it from one position, how long it takes it to swing out and then back to its original position).

    • Your job is to figure out what factor it is that influences that.

  • Piaget wasn't actually super interested in whether or not the kids got it right or wrong. What he was really interested in is how children went about answering the question.

    • What plan did they make and what behaviors did they do to answer this pretty complex question?

• In the concrete operational stage, Piaget noted that children will actually just try a few combinations at random.

  • They'll take some weights and some lengths and they'll kind of just pair them up randomly, but not really consistently or systematically, make them swing, and they'll really fail to consider all the possibilities or exhaust all the possible combinations. They really were not thinking systematically.

  • As a result of this, they're probably going to draw faulty conclusions. They wouldn't really have created a very sophisticated experiment for actually landing on that conclusion.

Criticisms/Weaknesses of Piaget’s Research

• While his stage three describes child behavior in detail at each of these stages, it doesn't really explain why changes occur from stage to stage.

  • Piaget does a really good job, or generally does quite a good job at characterizing the kinds of patterns in children's thinking at each of these stages, but he doesn't always really get to the bottom of why it is at stage two or in for example, the pre-operational stage, why it is children are so egocentric.

  • He doesn't really do a good job of explaining the root cause or the root changes in these aspects of cognition, but he does a more thorough job of describing the changes themselves.

• He focuses a lot on children's individual explorations. In focusing so much on that idea, he overlooked the role of social learning and how much children can learn, not just from their individual explorations, like picking up a bottle and dropping down the ground, but also from learning from others.

  • e.g., Learning from demonstration, having knowledge transmitted to you from the other big people in your surroundings, etc.

• His descriptions of children's thinking at each stage aren't as consistent as he originally claimed.

  • If you read all of Piaget's writings and took them at face value, you'd think that all children from the ages of three to seven behave in exactly the same way, they have the exact same struggles, etc.

  • Of course there are lots of exceptions to his ideas. As impressive as some of his observations were, they weren't as consistent as he might have thought they were.

• And in general, one thing you could say is that Piaget underestimated children at all ages.

  • Part of this is again a limitation of the research methods that he had at his disposal in his time.

  • But we're learning a lot about how children are actually a lot more sophisticated in their thinking at earlier stages in development than he would've realized.