Cognitive Development: The Theory of Jean Piaget

Cognition
Cognition refers to thinking and memory processes, and cognitive development refers to
long-term changes in these processes. One of the most widely known perspectives about
cognitive development is the cognitive stage theory of a Swiss psychologist named Jean
Piaget. Piaget created and studied an account of how children and youth gradually become
able to think logically and scientifically.

Cognitive Development
Cognitive development means how children think, explore and figure things out. It is the
development of knowledge, skills, problem solving and dispositions, which help children to
think about and understand the world around them. Brain development is part of cognitive
development.

The Sensorimotor Stage: Birth to 2 Year

During this earliest stage of cognitive development, infants and toddlers acquire
knowledge through sensory experiences and manipulating objects. A child's entire
experience at the earliest period of this stage occurs through basic reflexes, senses, and
motor responses.
Major characteristics and developmental changes during this stage:

 Know the world through movements and sensations

 Learn about the world through basic actions such as sucking, grasping, looking, and
listening
 Learn that things continue to exist even when they cannot be seen (object
permanence)
 Realize that they are separate beings from the people and objects around them
 Realize that their actions can cause things to happen in the world around them
During the sensorimotor stage, children go through a period of dramatic growth and
learning. As kids interact with their environment, they continually make new discoveries
about how the world works.
The cognitive development that occurs during this period takes place over a relatively short
time and involves a great deal of growth. Children not only learn how to perform physical
actions such as crawling and walking; they also learn a great deal about language from the
people with whom they interact. Piaget also broke this stage down into sub stages. Early
representational thought emerges during the final part of the sensorimotor stage.
Piaget believed that developing object permanence or object constancy, the understanding
that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, was an important element at
this point of development.
By learning that objects are separate and distinct entities and that they have an existence of
their own outside of individual perception, children are then able to begin to attach names
and words to objects.

Substage 1: Reflexes.

Newborns learn about their world through the use of their reflexes, such as when sucking,
reaching, and grasping. Eventually the use of these reflexes becomes more deliberate and
purposeful.

Substage 2: Primary Circular Reactions.

During these next 3 months, the infant begins to actively involve his or her own body in
some form of repeated activity. An infant may accidentally engage in a behavior and find it
interesting such as making a vocalization. This interest motivates trying to do it again and
helps the infant learn a new behavior that originally occurred by chance. The behavior is
identified as circular and primary because it centers on the infant’s own body.

Substage 3: Secondary Circular Reactions.

The infant begins to interact with objects in the environment. At first the infant interacts
with objects (e.g., a crib mobile) accidentally, but then these contacts with the objects are
deliberate and become a repeated activity. The infant becomes more and more actively
engaged in the outside world and takes delight in being able to make things happen.
Repeated motion brings particular interest as, for example, the infant is able to bang two
lids together from the cupboard when seated on the kitchen floor.

Substage 4: Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions.

The infant combines these basic reflexes and uses planning and coordination to achieve a
specific goal. Now the infant can engage in behaviors that others perform and anticipate
upcoming events. Perhaps because of continued maturation of the prefrontal cortex, the
infant become capable of having a thought and carrying out a planned, goal-directed
activity. For example, an infant sees a toy car under the kitchen table and then crawls,
reaches, and grabs the toy. The infant is coordinating both internal and external activities to
achieve a planned goal.

Substage 5: Tertiary Circular Reactions.

The toddler is considered a “little scientist” and begins exploring the world in a trial-and-
error manner, using both motor skills and planning abilities. For example, the child might
throw her ball down the stairs to see what happens. The toddler’s active engagement in
experimentation helps them learn about their world.

Substage 6: Beginning of Representational Thought.

The sensorimotor period ends with the appearance of symbolic or representational thought.
The toddler now has a basic understanding that objects can be used as symbols.
Additionally, the child is able to solve problems using mental strategies, to remember
something heard days before and repeat it, and to engage in pretend play. This initial
movement from a “hands-on” approach to knowing about the world to the more mental
world of substage six marks the transition to preoperational thought.

Object Permanence
According to Piaget, developing object permanence is one of the most
important accomplishments at the sensorimotor stage of development.
Object permanence is a child's understanding that objects continue to exist even though
they cannot be seen or heard.
The Preoperational Stage
Ages: 2 - 7 Years

The pre-operational stage is one of Piaget's intellectual development stages. It takes place
between 2 and 7 years. At the beginning of this stage the child does not use operations, so
the thinking is influenced by the way things appear rather than logical reasoning.

A child cannot conserve which means that the child does not understand that quantity
remains the same even if the appearance changes.

Furthermore, the child is egocentric; he assumes that other people see the world as he
does. This has been shown in the three mountains study.

Major Characteristics and Developmental Changes:

 Toddlers and young children acquire the ability to internally represent the world
through language and mental imagery.
 During this stage, young children can think about things symbolically. This is the
ability to make one thing, such as a word or an object, stand for something other
than itself.
 A child’s thinking is dominated by how the world looks, not how the world is. It is not
yet capable of logical (problem solving) type of thought.
 Moreover, the child has difficulties with class inclusion; he can classify objects but
cannot include objects in sub-sets, which involves classify objects as belonging to
two or more categories simultaneously
 Infants at this stage also demonstrate animism. This is the tendency for the child to
think that non-living objects (such as toys) have life and feelings like a person’s.
 By 2 years, children have made some progress towards detaching their thought from
physical world. However have not yet developed logical (or 'operational') thought
characteristic of later stages.
 Thinking is still intuitive (based on subjective judgements about situations) and
egocentric (centred on the child's own view of the world).

The key features of the preoperational stage

Irreversibility

Irreversibility is a stage in early child development in which a child falsely believes that
actions cannot be reversed or undone. For example, if a three-year-old boy sees someone
flatten a ball of play dough, he will not understand that the dough can easily be reformed
into a ball. Children typically develop past this stage by age 7.

Centration

Centration is the tendency to focus on only one aspect of a situation at one time. When a
child can focus on more than one aspect of a situation at the same time they have the ability
to decenter. During this stage children have difficulties thinking about more than one aspect
of any situation at the same time; and they have trouble decentering in social situation just
as they do in non-social contexts.

Egocentrism
Egocentrism refers to the child's inability to see a situation from another person's point of
view. The egocentric child assumes that other people see, hear, and feel exactly the same as
the child does. In the developmental theory of Jean Piaget, this is a feature of the
preoperational child. Childrens' thoughts and communications are typically egocentric (i.e.
about themselves).

Symbolic Representation
Children demonstrate the understanding of concepts, experiences, and ideas through
symbolic representation. Children learn about objects, actions, and people through
observations, interaction, and exploration. They take information in through all of their
senses to build a basic understanding of the world around them. True symbolic thought
emerges around 18 months of age with children’s ability to think in images and
symbols.1 Children represent concrete objects by using images, words, gestures, or play. For
example, children may use a wooden block as a phone during play. Or, they may pretend to
cook food in the toy kitchen. Play becomes increasingly symbolic, as children use pretend
play to make sense of the world. By 36 months, children can use symbolic play to problem-
solve, sort out feelings, and explore roles and relationships.

Animism
The belief that natural phenomena or inanimate objects are alive or possess lifelike
characteristics, such as intentions, desires, and feelings. A well-known and often cited
phenomenon in precausal thinking, animism was considered by Jean Piaget to be
characteristic of the thought of children in the preoperational stage, later fading out and
being replaced by the strong belief in the universal nature of physical causality.

Animism is the belief that objects that are inanimate (not living) have feelings, thoughts,
and have the mental characteristics and qualities of living things. Animistic thinking is very
common (if not ubiquitous) in young children and Piaget noted that this is a characteristic of
the pre-operational stage of childhood development. Children frequently believe that their
toys have feelings. For example, a child wouldn't want to leave their teddy bear outside for
fear that it might get cold at night and be lonely without them. They are attaching human
qualities and feelings to an inanimate object.

Artificialism
Artificialism is a term coined by Jean Piaget that refers to the religiously-oriented
perspective that all things were created by an intelligent entity that has complete control
over their qualities, movements, and behaviors. Piaget contrasted this artificialistic
perspective to animism, a view that embraces a greater self-determinism. Piaget's
examination of these points of view were part of his description of the preoperational stage
in children's development. He proposed that small children are actually capable of points of
view such as artificialism and animism.

Conservation
Conservation is one of Piaget's developmental accomplishments, in which the child
understands that changing the form of a substance or object does not change its amount,
overall volume, or mass. This accomplishment occurs during the operational stage of
development between ages 7 and 11. You can often see the lack of conservation in children
when there are, for example, several different sizes of juice on a table, and they choose the
glass that is the tallest because they perceive the taller glass as having more juice inside of it
(even though the tallest glass may also be the thinnest). All the glasses may have the same
amount of juice in them, but children who haven't accomplished conservation will perceive
the tall glass as being mostly full.

For example, a young child clamoring for two cookies will be just as happy with one cookie
split into two pieces. The type of reasoning that allows the child to see the difference
between two cookies and one cookie split in two starts to develop around the age of 6 or 7
years.

Concrete operational period

The concrete operational period usually lasts from about age 7 to age 11. Piaget called
this stage concrete operational because children can perform operations only on images of
tangible objects and actual events. Among the operations that children master during this
stage are reversibility and decentration. Reversibility permits a child to mentally undo an
action. Decentration allows the child to focus on more than one feature of a problem
simultaneously. The newfound ability to coordinate several aspects of a problem helps the
child appreciate that there are several ways to look at things. This ability in turn leads to a
decline in egocentrism and to a gradual mastery of conservation, as it applies to liquid,
mass, number, volume, area, and length. As children master concrete operations, they
develop a variety of new problem solving capacities. Let’s examine another problem studied
by Piaget. Give a preoperational child seven carnations and three daisies. Tell the child the
names for the two types of flowers. Then ask the child to sort them into carnations and
daisies. That should be no problem. Now ask the child whether there are more carnations or
more daisies. Most children will correctly respond that there are more carnations. Now ask
the child whether there are more carnations or more flowers. At this point, most
preoperational children will stumble and respond incorrectly that there are more carnations
than flowers. Generally, preoperational children can’t handle hierarchical classification
problems that require them to focus simultaneously on two levels of classification.
However, the child who has advanced to the concrete operational stage is not as limited by
centration and can work
successfully with hierarchical classification problems.
The concrete operational stage is the third stage in Piaget's theory of cognitive
development. This period lasts around seven to eleven years of age, and is characterized by
the development of organized and rational thinking.
Piaget (1954a) considered the concrete stage a major turning point in the child's cognitive
development, because it marks the beginning of logical or operational thought. The child is
now mature enough to use logical thought or operations (i.e. rules) but can only apply logic
to physical objects (hence concrete operational).
Children gain the abilities of conservation (number, area, volume, orientation), reversibility,
seriation, transitivity and class inclusion. However, although children can solve problems in a
logical fashion, they are typically not able to think abstractly or hypothetically.
The child can use logic to solve problems tied to their own direct experience, but has
trouble solving hypothetical problems or considering more abstract problems. The child
uses Inductive Reasoning, which is a logical process in which multiple premises believed to
be true are combined to obtain a specific conclusion. For example, a child has one friend
who is rude, another friend who is also rude, and the same is true for a third friend. The
child may conclude that friends are rude. We will see that this way of thinking tends to
change during adolescence being replaced with deductive reasoning. The concrete
operational child is able to make use of logical principles in solving problems involving the
physical world. For example, the child can understand principles of cause and effect, size,
and distance.

Key features Of The Concrete –Operational stage

Classification:
As children’s experiences and vocabularies grow, they build schemata and are able to
organize objects in many different ways. They also understand classification hierarchies and
can arrange objects into a variety of classes and subclasses.

Identity:
One feature of concrete operational thought is the understanding that objects have
qualities that do not change even if the object is altered in some way. For instance, mass of
an object does not change by rearranging it. A piece of chalk is still chalk even when the
piece is broken in two.
Conservation:
Remember the example in our last chapter of preoperational children thinking that a tall
beaker filled with 8 ounces of water was “more” than a short, wide bowl filled with 8 ounces
of water? Concrete operational children can understand the concept of conservation which
means that changing one quality (in this example, height or water level) can be
compensated for by changes in another quality (width). Consequently, there is the same
amount of water in each container, although one is taller and narrower and the other is
shorter and wider.

Decentration
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. When children
are asked to compare the volume of juice in two glasses, it is their ability to decentrate that
enables them to flexibly consider both the height and the width of the glasses in arriving at
their decision. Younger children tend to get fixed on only one dimension or attribute of a
situation, such as the height of a container, and to make their judgment of how much stuff
can be fit into that container based on that single dimension. Other dimensions simply are
not attended to. Through the development of decentration skills, older children start to be
able to pay attention to more than one thing at time.

Reversibility
in Piagetian theory, a mental operation that reverses a sequence of events or restores a
changed state of affairs to the original condition. It is exemplified by the ability to realize
that a glass of milk poured into a bottle can be poured back into the glass and remain
unchanged.

Seriation
The cognitive operation of seriation (logical order) involves the ability to mentally arrange
items along a quantifiable dimension, such as height or weight. the child shows increased
use of logic or reasoning. One of the important processes that develops is that of Seriation,
which refers to the ability to sort objects or situations according to any characteristic, such
as size, color, shape, or type. For example, the child would be able to look at his plate of
mixed vegetables and eat everything except the brussels sprouts.

Transitivity
Transitivity, which refers to the ability to recognize relationships among various things in a
serial order. For example, when you told a child to put away his books according to height,
the child recognizes that he starts with placing the tallest one on one end of the bookshelf
and the shortest one ends up at the other end.
Characteristics of Concrete Operational Stage of Cognitive Development
The characteristics of the concrete operational stage are as follows:
 In this stage, the child starts learning about conservation which means that the
quantity of a thing remains the same even when you change its shape or size.
 Children also develop decentration during this stage which means the ability to pay
attention to more than one aspect of a situation or a thing.
 Children also learn reversibility which means that something can be restored to its
original state.
 Children start developing the ability to perform mental operations and start solving
problems in their mind.
 During the concrete operational stage, children’s operations are limited to real
events and tangible objects.
 The child develops the ability to use logical thought but they can only apply it to
physical objects.
  In this stage, children also develop problems solving skills, and other skills such as
transitivity, seriation, and class inclusion.

Formal Operational Stag

The final stage in Piaget’s theory is the formal operational period, which is supposed to
begin around 11 years of age. In this stage, children begin to apply their operations to
abstract concepts in addition to concrete objects. Indeed, during this stage, youngsters
come to enjoy the contemplation of abstract concepts. Many adolescents spend hours
mulling over hypothetical possibilities related to abstractions, such as justice, love, and free
will. Thought processes in the formal operational period can be characterized as relatively
systematic, logical, and reflective. According to Piaget, youngsters graduate to relatively
adult modes of thinking in the formal operations stage. He did not mean to suggest that no
further cognitive development occurs once children reach this stage. However, he believed
that after children achieve formal operations, further developments in thinking are changes
in degree rather than fundamental changes in the nature of thinking. Adolescents in the
formal operational period become more systematic in their problem-solving efforts.
Children in earlier developmental stages tend to attack problems quickly, with a trial-and-
error approach. In contrast, children who have achieved formal operations are more likely
to think things through. They envision possible courses of action and try to use logic to
reason out the likely consequences of each possible solution before they act. Thus, thought
processes in the formal operational period can be characterized as increasingly abstract,
systematic, logical, and reflective. At this point in development, thinking becomes much
more sophisticated and advanced. Kids can think about abstract and theoretical concepts
and use logic to come up with creative solutions to problems. Skills such as logical thought,
deductive reasoning, and systematic planning also emerge during this stage.

Important Achievements In formal operational stage

ABSTRACT THINKING

An abstract idea or way of thinking is based on general ideas rather than on real things
and events. Abstract reasoning is a cognitive mechanism for reaching logical conclusions in
the absence of physical data, concrete phenomena, or specific instances. Abstract reasoning
is essentially a generalization about relationships and attributes as opposed to concrete
objects. Abstract thinking is when someone can think about things that aren't physically in
front of them. You can think of an object that you just saw, think philosophically, keep a set
of principles in your head, and so on. Abstract thinking is the ability to understand concepts
that are real, such as freedom or vulnerability, but which are not directly tied to concrete
physical objects and experiences. “Abstract thinking is the ability to absorb information
from our senses and make connections to the wider world.” From age 7 until around 11,
kids develop logical reasoning, but their thinking remains largely concrete — tied to what
they directly observe. Sometime around age 12 and continuing into adulthood, most people
build on their concrete reasoning and expand into abstract thinking.

For example, "This person needs help!" says Tamara into a long box she is using as a walkie-
talkie. Sonja replies, "I'll be right there!" into her hand "phone" as she mimes jumping into
her ambulance and driving to the scene.

logical thinking

“Is also known as Hypothetico deductive reasoning

Logical thinking requires the use of reasoning skills to study a problem critically, which
will enable you to draw a reasoned decision on how to proceed.It involves thinking in
steps and using what you know to draw conclusions. Is the process of evaluating a
problem and coming up with a logical solution. Examples of logical thinking are:

 The Rubik cube

 Mathematical puzzles and riddles

Hypothetico deductive reasoning

Hypothetico deductive reasoning is the ability to think scientifically through generating
predictions, or hypotheses, about the world to answer questions.The individual will
approach problems in a systematic and organized manner, rather than through trial-and-
error.

Systems thinking
Systems thinking is understanding how different parts of a system can influence one
another within a whole. Systemic thinking, or systems thinking, is a comprehensive
analytical approach to understanding how different elements interact within a system or
structure. Piaget concluded that the systematic approach indicated the children were
thinking logically, in the abstract, and could see the relationships between things.
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