Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget(1896 - 1980)

 Piaget’s Theory of
Cognitive Development
Piaget theorized that there were four stages of
development in the thought processes of people.
These stages were the Sensorimotor period, the
preoperational period, the concrete operational
period and the formal operational period.
Piaget's Key Ideas

Adaptation
What it says: adapting to the
world through assimilation
and accommodation
 Assimilation
• The process by which a person takes
material into their mind from the
environment, which may mean changing
the evidence of their senses to make it fit.
• Is the tendency to understand new
experiences in terms of existing
knowledge
Assimilation
 Accommodation
• The difference made to one's mind
or concepts by the process of
assimilation.
Note that assimilation and
accommodation go together: you
can't have one without the other.
• The process by which people adapt
current knowledge structures in
response to new experiences.
Accommodation
• The ability to group
objects together on the
basis of common
features.
• The understanding, more advanced than
simple classification, that some classes
or sets of objects are also sub-sets of a
larger class.
• E.g. there is a class of objects called dogs.
There is also a class called animals. But
all dogs are also animals, so the class of
animals includes that of dogs.
The ability to move away from one
system of classification to
another one as appropriate.
Decentration involves the ability to pay
attention to multiple attributes of an object
or situation rather than being locked into
attending to only a single attribute.
 Egocentrism
 The belief that you are the centre of
the universe and everything revolves
around you: the corresponding
inability to see the world as
someone else does and adapt to it.
 Not moral "selfishness",
 Just an early stage of
psychological development.
Is the tendency to perceive the world
solely from one’s own point of view
 Operation

The process of working something out in

child’s head.
• Young children (in the Sensorimotor and
pre-operational stages) have to act, and
try things out in the real world, to work
things out (like count on fingers)
• Older children and adults can do more
in their heads.
The representation in the
mind of a set of
perceptions, ideas,
and/or actions, which go
together
• The basic building block of intelligent
behavior – a way of organizing
knowledge.
• So, it is useful to think of schemas are
“units” of knowledge, each relating to one
aspect of the world, including objects,
actions and abstract (i.e. theoretical)
concepts.
A period in a child's
development in which he
or she is capable of
understanding some
things but not others
. The Sensorimotor period prevails
from birth to two years of age and
is divided into six substages.
Learning takes place through
adaption.
Piaget believed that adaption had
two aspects, assimilation and
accommodation
 Children enter the world
equipped with a set of
inherited action patterns and
reflexes through which they
experience their environment.
 The intellectual development of the
child begins through these actions as
this is how the child acquires
knowledge about its surroundings;
this knowledge forms the basis for
more complex developments further
down the track.
 Infantsare restricted in what they
can know as their behaviors and
schemata are limited.
 Adaption to their surroundings
through assimilation and
accommodation begins in this
stage.
 In the second substage of Piaget’s
theory, the knowledge and intelligence
of the infant now extends beyond the
innate behaviors they were born with
but these new acquisitions have only
come about through the
accommodation of schemata
 The infants show one of the first signs
learning which is modifying their
reflexes as a result of their
environment.
 These acquisitions come about by a
circular means.
 Actions that are at first random and
activate a reflex are attempted again
to try and induce the experience
again.
 The signs of intentionality have
appeared. These patterns of learning
have been labelled primary circular
reactions.

 This is also the substage in which

object permanence begins to develop.
Knowledge that an object continues to exist
independent of our seeing, hearing,
touching, tasting or smelling it!
Objects are tied to infant’s awareness of them
◦ “out of sight, out of mind”
 Hidden toy experiment
◦ 4 months: no attempt to search for hidden object
◦ 4-8 months: visual search for object( Search for
objects that have dropped from view or a partially
hidden)
◦ 9 months: search for and retrieve hidden object
 Infant does
not track the
movement of
the train in the
tunnel, is
happy to see
the train
again, but is
not surprised
Lack of that it is now a
different color
Representation or shape.
 Secondary circular reactions are the first
acquired adaptions of behaviors that are not
reflexive, as opposed to the primary circular
reactions which are reflex based.
 An infant in this stage may accidentally cause
something interesting to happen and then
seek to re-create the happy event.
 The interesting events in this case are
located in the external world,
 In primary circular reactions the
interesting events are occurring within
the body.
 A child in this substage, however, does
still not understand the aspects of
cause and effect .
 so⇒ will sift through the many
behaviors it was indulging in when the
event occurred and narrow it down to
the particular action without really
understanding the underlying concepts
of why the event recurs.
 The actions of the previous stage flourish in
this stage and continue to develop, the
difference is that the need now precedes the
act.
 Intentionality occurs in interactions with the
environment and the infant is moving
towards goal directed behavior.
 An understanding of cause and effect
relationships has come into being in the
child's world.
 As with stage four, this stage is
characterized by a means/ends
differentiation.
 The infants are no longer restricted to
the application of previously
established schemata to obtain a goal.
 They can make the necessary
alterations to their schemata to
solve problems; this reflects a
process of active experimentation.
 These differences in cognition
coincide with improved
locomotive abilities; the children
have become more physically
active.
 The earlier stages of the Sensorimotor period
appear to be set on a continuum but the
transition from the fifth to the sixth stage is
more of a disjointed transition.
 Symbolic function and mental representation
first appear during this stage, this runs
parallel with the development of language.
 Language is an expression of
symbolic function and mental
representation and it is at this stage
that the children begin to string
words together in pairs, the origins of
sentences.
 The preoperational period has
been divided into two stages:
◦ The preconceptual stage and
◦ The intuitive stage.
 In the preconceptual stage of thinking,
children have a certain understanding of class
membership, and can divide their internal
representations into classes.
 However, they cannot differentiate between
members of the class, so if they see two
different members of a class at different
times, they believe them to be the same
object.
 In
this stage children think
Transductively (Can think about
something without the object being
present by use of language). "If A
causes B today, then A always
causes B."
 Transduction, in simpler terms, is
the "reasoning" (making sense) of
a stimulus.
 Inthis stage children think
Transductively as opposed to
either deductively or inductively.
The latter two refer to making
generalizations from particulars
and particulars from
generalizations.
 Intuitive thinking is a concept applicable to
the last half of the preoperational stage, from
4 – 7 years.
 In this stage children are thinking more
logically than they were before hand although
the logic they follow is a little faulty.
 Children in this stage want to know the
answers to all kinds of questions, for
instance, "Why?", "Where?", and "How come?"
for everything that happens.
 The way in which children base
their knowledge on what they feel
or sense to be true, yet they
cannot explain the underlying
principles behind what they feel
or sense.
 A good example of this is that the
children in this period of development
cannot yet conserve
 (Conservation is the realization that
quantity or amount does not change
when nothing has been added or
taken away from an object or a
collection of objects, despite changes
in form or spatial arrangement)
Procedures Used to Test Conservation
 One of the major achievements of the
preoperational child is the use of
symbols and language.
 The achievement of representation
can be seen in
Deferred imitation( Evidence of
Recall)
Symbolic play and
Spoken language.
 Language helps the children to
internalize their behaviors
through representation which
accelerates experiences as actions
do not need to be physically
performed.
 Children can imagine the
outcomes of their actions.
 There are several outstanding
characteristics of the preoperational
period:
a) Egocentrism,
b) Centration,
c) Reversibility and
d) Transformation
An egocentric child cannot stand
in other person's shoes and see
the world as they do, they are
unable to take the view point of
others and believe that everybody
else thinks in the same ways they
do.
Is the tendency to perceive the world solely
from one’s own point of view
 In Centration, a child only pays
attention to a small range of
aspects when observing a
stimuli's.
 They may only pay attention to
the height of the object rather
than it's mass.
 They may only pay attention to the
height of the object rather than it's
mass.
Have you ever been in a situation
where your child throws a tantrum
because they believe they have less
juice than their sibling? When in
actuality they have the same
amount, but different size cups.
This illustrates the concept of
Centration
 Reversibility refers to the fact that reversible
thoughts can follow their line of reasoning
back to its starting point.
 Children of this age cannot think back to the
initial stage of an action to answer a question
pertaining to it.
So: “They cannot think in reverse.
 Preoperational children are more focused on
states as opposed to the transformations
between states.
 When children in this stage are asked to
arrange sticks depicting a falling motion,
most have trouble filling in the steps between
the initial and the final states.
 All
of these above
characteristics are evident in
the preoperational child's
inability to solve conservation
problems.
The realization that objects or
sets of objects stay the same
even when they are changed
about or made to look different.
 Conservation cannot be taught, it
must be learnt through the child's
experiences and interactions.
There are three main tests of
conservation used in experiments,
conservation of number, area and
liquid.
Procedures Used to Test Conservation
Children in this stage can think
much more systematically and
quantitatively.
The child's reasoning processes
become logical and they acquire
Operation ; "systems of internal
mental actions that underlie logical
thinking" .
The children can now conserve and
classify, they are no longer bound by
egocentrism or perceptual
Centration and can follow the
successive movements of a
transformation.
The concrete operational
child can conserve in all
forms, number, area and
liquid.
Not only can the children answer the
conservation question correctly, they
can give sound logical reasoning as
to why the amounts of liquid are the
same in the beakers, such as that it is
higher in one glass because that one
is thin whereas the other is wide.
 Multiple classifications are mastered
by children in the concrete operational
stage.
 This is when children have the ability
to classify objects on more than one
dimension such as color and size.
 Class inclusion is also another
classification system that is
understood by children in this stage.
The child has developed the
ability to separate herself
from particular aspects of a
stimulus and can study the
entire field of perception. This
can be seen in an everyday
example such as judging the age
of a person
 Concrete operational children
understand that many features come
together when age is being judged and
identified.
 This ability is the Decentration of the
child's perception of the world. She no
longer focuses on one aspect.
 Understanding transformations is a
development, which takes place in
the concrete operations stage.
 The child can now produce
replications of the transitions
between initial and final states
of things such as a stick falling
over.
 They can also order objects in
hierarchical structures called
seriation.
 She can rank objects in terms of
dimensions such as height.
 This helps them to deal with
numbers and mathematical
problems
 The stage of formal operations is
quite different from concrete
operations.
 While both are logical and systematic
thought functions, people in the
formal operations stage can apply
these processes to more abstract
problems and hypotheses.
 This is Piaget’s last stage of cognitive
development, after this he proposed

“No further structural

improvements in the
quality of reasoning”.
 Unfortunately

 It
is believed that not all adults
arrive at formal operations
although most have reached their
full potential by about 14 - 15
years of age.
There are several structures that are
developed in this stage:
Hypothetical-deductive reasoning
(from general to specific)
Scientific-inductive reasoning, and
Reflective abstraction.
Piaget (1981) described the capacity
for hypothetical-deductive reasoning
as the ability to be able to deal with
not only objects and experiences but
with hypotheses as well, with "the
possible as well as the real".
 Conclusions can now be deduced from
hypotheses rather than just physical
facts.
 This highlights the persons ability to
make conclusions by going from
general to specific (deductive
reasoning).
 Scientific-inductive reasoning is the ability to
think like a scientist, to make conclusions by
going from specific observations to
generalizations.
 When people in this stage have
been confronted by a problem
they can think about it abstractly
and can think over each of the
different variables and how they
or combinations of them would
affect the situation while
systematically testing for these.
Acommon problem used to study
this type of reasoning is the
pendulum problem in which
young people are given strings of
different lengths that can be
attached to a pole, they are also
given objects of various weights
to hang from the string and make
pendulums.
 Formal operational children will
systematically test all possibilities before
arriving at a conclusion
 Example: Pendulum problem

How fast?
 The underlying problem is to find out what it
is that makes the pendulum swing faster, the
length of string, the weight of the pendulum,
the height from which the weight is dropped
or the force exerted on the weight when it is
dropped.
 It is not till children reach the formal
operational stage that they can systematically
go about solving this problem and arrive at
the correct and logical conclusion.
 Another structure that has
developed over this period is
reflective abstraction, a
mechanism by which
knowledge (such as logical-
mathematical) can be gained..
 Analogies provide a good
example in which to study
reflective abstraction.
 Analogies are about constructing
relationships between objects,
and these relationships can only
come about through reflective
abstraction.
 Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
Typical Age Description Developmental
Range of Stage Phenomena
Birth to nearly 2 years Sensorimotor •Object permanence
Experiencing the world through •Stranger anxiety
senses and actions (looking,
touching, mouthing)
About 2 to 6 years Preoperational •Pretend play
Representing things •Egocentrism
with words and images •Language development
but lacking logical reasoning
About 7 to 11 years Concrete operational •Conservation
Thinking logically about concrete •Mathematical
events; grasping concrete analogies transformations
and performing arithmetical operations
About 12 through Formal operational •Abstract logic
adulthood Abstract reasoning •Potential for
moral reasoning