Cognitive Development in Infancy and Toddlerhood Notes

Cognitive Development in Infancy and Toddlerhood

• This chapter examines cognitive development in infancy and toddlerhood from three perspectives: Piaget's cognitive-developmental theory, information processing, and Vygotsky's sociocultural theory. It also considers infant and toddler intellectual progress measurements and the start of language.

Piaget's Cognitive-Developmental Theory

• Swiss theorist Jean Piaget viewed children as active, motivated explorers, whose thinking develops as they act directly on the environment.
• Piaget was influenced by his background in biology, leading him to believe that the child's mind forms and modifies psychological structures to achieve a better fit with external reality.
• Piaget theorized that children move through four stages between infancy and adolescence. During these stages, all aspects of cognition develop in an integrated fashion, changing in a similar way at about the same time.
• The sensorimotor stage, spanning the first two years of life, is when infants and toddlers