Piaget and Cognitive Development

Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

  • Children actively construct their own cognitive worlds.
  • They build mental structures to adapt to the world.
  • Piaget sought to understand how children at different developmental stages think and how their thinking changes systematically.
  • Schemes: Actions or mental representations that organize knowledge.
    • Babies' schemes are structured by simple actions.
    • Older children's schemes include strategies and plans for problem-solving.
  • Assimilation: Using existing schemes to incorporate new information.
  • Accommodation: Adjusting schemes to fit new information and experiences.
  • Organization: Grouping isolated behaviors and thoughts into a higher-order, smoothly functioning cognitive system; continual refinement is part of development.
  • Equilibration: Shifting from one stage of thought to the next.

Piaget’s Four Stages of Cognitive Development

  • Sensorimotor Stage:
    • Age: Birth to 2 years.
    • Infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences with physical actions.
    • Progression from reflexive, instinctual action at birth to symbolic thought toward the end of the stage.
  • Preoperational Stage:
    • Age: 2 to 7 years.
    • Children begin to represent the world with words and images.
    • Reflects increased symbolic thinking, moving beyond sensory information and physical action.
  • Concrete Operational Stage:
    • Age: 7–11 years.
    • Children can reason logically about concrete events and classify objects into different sets.
  • Formal Operational Stage:
    • Age: 11 years through adulthood.
    • Adolescents reason in more abstract, idealistic, and logical ways.

Sensorimotor Stage Details

  • Lasts from birth to about 2 years.
  • Infants understand the world through sensory experiences (seeing, hearing) and physical actions.
Six Substages:
  1. Simple Reflexes:
    • First month after birth.
    • Sensation and action are coordinated through reflexive behaviors like rooting and sucking.
    • Infants begin to produce behaviors resembling reflexes in the absence of the usual stimulus.
  2. First Habits and Primary Circular Reactions:
    • Develops between 1 and 4 months.
    • Primary circular reaction: Scheme based on an attempt to reproduce an event that initially occurred by chance.
    • Habits and circular reactions are stereotyped, repeating the same way each time.
  3. Secondary Circular Reactions:
    • Develops between 4 and 8 months.
    • Infants become more object-oriented, moving beyond self-preoccupation.
    • Actions are repeated because of their consequences.
    • Infants imitate some simple actions and physical gestures.
  4. Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions:
    • Develops between 8 and 12 months.
    • Infants coordinate vision and touch, hand and eye.
    • Actions become more outwardly directed.
    • Infants combine previously learned schemes in a coordinated way.
    • Presence of intentionality (e.g., knocking over one block to reach another).
  5. Tertiary Circular Reactions, Novelty, and Curiosity:
    • Develops between 12 and 18 months.
    • Tertiary circular reactions are schemes in which infants purposely explore new possibilities with objects, continually doing new things to them and exploring the results.
  6. Internalization of Schemes:
    • Develops between 18 and 24 months.
    • Infants develop the ability to use primitive symbols.
    • Symbol: Internalized sensory image or word that represents an event.

Object Permanence

  • Understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched.
  • Important accomplishment during the first year.
  • Children are like little scientists, examining the world to see how it works.

Evaluating the Sensorimotor Stage

  • Data do not always support Piaget’s claim that certain processes are crucial in transitions from one stage to the next.
  • A-not-B error: Infants select a familiar hiding place (A) rather than a new one (B), particularly in substage 4.
    • Older infants are less likely to make this error because their concept of object permanence is more complete.
  • Infants' perceptual abilities are highly developed early in life.
    • Cognitive abilities appear earlier than Piaget predicted.
    • Infants see objects as bounded, unitary, solid, and separate from their background, possibly at birth or shortly thereafter (definitely by 3-4 months).

Nature-Nurture Issue

  • Core knowledge approach: Infants are born with domain-specific innate knowledge systems (e.g., space, number sense, object permanence, language).
    • Influenced by evolution; infants are prewired to make sense of their world.
    • Preverbal infants may have a built-in sense of morality.
    • Critics argue nativists neglect social immersion and focus on the infant’s head apart from the environment; morality may emerge through early interactions.

Preoperational Stage Details

  • Children represent the world with words, images, and drawings.
  • Lasts from approximately 2–7 years.
  • Form stable concepts and begin to reason.
  • Two substages: symbolic function substage and intuitive thought substage.
  • Children do not yet perform operations: Reversible mental actions that allow children to do mentally what they previously only did physically.
Symbolic Function Substage
  • Child gains the ability to mentally represent an object that is not present.
  • Between ages 2 and 4, children scribble designs representing things, use language, and engage in pretend play.
  • Egocentrism: Inability to distinguish between one’s own perspective and someone else’s perspective.
  • Animism: Belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of action.
Intuitive Thought Substage
  • Child uses primitive reasoning and wants to know the answers to all sorts of questions.
  • Second substage of preoperational thought.
  • Between ages 4 and 7 years old.