Unit 3: Cognitive Development

Piaget’s Cognitive-Developmental Theory

According to Piaget, human infants do not start out as cognitive beings. Instead,
out of their perceptual and motor activities, they build and refine psychological
structures—organized ways of making sense of experience that permit them to
adapt more effectively to the environment. Because Piaget viewed children as
discovering, or constructing, virtually all knowledge about their world through
their own activity, his theory is described as a constructivist approach to
cognitive development. Piaget believed that children move through four stages
—sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational—
during which infants’ exploratory behaviours transform into the abstract, logical
intelligence of adolescence and adulthood. Piaget’s stage sequence has three
important characteristics:
 The stages provide a general theory of development, in which all aspects
of cognition change in an integrated fashion, following a similar course.
 The stages are invariant; they always occur in a fixed order, and no stage
can be skipped.
 The stages are universal; they are assumed to characterize children
everywhere.
According to Piaget, specific psychological structures called schemes—
organized ways of making sense of experience—change with age. For Piaget,
this change marks the transition from a sensorimotor approach to the world to a
cognitive approach based on mental representations— internal depictions of
information that the mind can manipulate. Our most powerful mental
representations are images—mental pictures of objects, people, and spaces—
and concepts, categories in which similar objects or events are grouped
together.
In Piaget’s theory, two processes account for this change from sensorimotor to
representational schemes and for further changes in representational schemes
from childhood to adulthood: adaptation and organization.

Adaptation- Adaptation involves building schemes through direct interaction

with the environment. It consists of two complementary activities: assimilation
and accommodation. During assimilation, we use our current schemes to
interpret the external world. In accommodation, we create new schemes or
adjust old ones after noticing that our current way of thinking does not capture
the environment completely.
According to Piaget, the balance between assimilation and accommodation
varies over time. When children are not changing much, they assimilate more
than they accommodate— a steady, comfortable state that Piaget called
cognitive equilibrium. During times of rapid cognitive change, children are in a
state of disequilibrium, or cognitive discomfort. Realizing that new information
does not match their current schemes, they shift from assimilation to
accommodation. After modifying their schemes, they move back toward
assimilation, exercising their newly changed structures until they are ready to
be modified again. Piaget’s term for this back-and-forth movement between
equilibrium and disequilibrium is equilibration. Each time equilibration occurs,
more effective schemes are produced.
Organization- Schemes also change through organization, a process that
occurs internally, apart from direct contact with the environment. Once children
form new schemes, they rearrange them, linking them with other schemes to
create a strongly interconnected cognitive system. For example, eventually the
baby relates “dropping” to “throwing” and to his developing understanding of
“nearness” and “farness.”

The Sensorimotor Stage: Birth to 2 Years

The sensorimotor stage spans the first two years of life. Its name reflects
Piaget’s belief that infants and toddlers “think” with their eyes, ears, hands, and
other sensorimotor equipment. They cannot yet carry out many activities
mentally. According to Piaget, at birth infants know so little that they cannot
explore purposefully. The circular reaction provides a special means of
adapting their first schemes. It involves stumbling onto a new experience
caused by the baby’s own motor activity. The reaction is “circular” because, as
the infant tries to repeat the event again and again, a sensorimotor response that
originally occurred by chance strengthens into a new scheme.
Sensorimotor Development- Piaget saw newborn reflexes as the building
blocks of sensorimotor intelligence.
 In Substage 1, babies suck, grasp, and look in much the same way, no
matter what experiences they encounter.
 Around 1 month, as babies enter Substage 2, they start to gain voluntary
control over their actions through the primary circular reaction, by
repeating chance behaviours largely motivated by basic needs. This leads
to some simple motor habits, such as sucking the fist or thumb. Babies in
this substage also begin to vary their behaviour in response to
environmental demands.
 During Substage 3, from 4 to 8 months, infants sit up and become skilled
at reaching for and manipulating objects—motor achievements that
strengthen the secondary circular reaction, through which they try to
repeat interesting events in the surrounding environment that are caused
by their own actions.
 In Substage 4, 8- to 12- month- old combine schemes into new, more
complex action sequences. 8- to 12- month- old can engage in
intentional, or goal-directed, behaviour, coordinating schemes
deliberately to solve simple problems. The clearest example comes from
Piaget’s famous object-hiding task, in which he shows the baby an
attractive toy and then hides it behind his hand or under a cover. Infants in
this substage can find the object by coordinating two schemes—
“pushing” aside the obstacle and “grasping” the toy. Piaget regarded these
means–end action sequences as the foundation for all problem solving.
To discover what infants know about hidden objects and other aspects of
physical reality, researchers often use the violation-of-expectation
method. They may habituate babies to a physical event (expose them to
the event until their looking declines) to familiarize them with a situation
in which their knowledge will be tested. Or they may simply show babies
an expected event (one that follows physical laws) and an unexpected
event (a variation of the first event that violates physical laws).
Heightened attention to the unexpected event suggests that the infant is
“surprised” by a deviation from physical reality—and, therefore, is aware
of that aspect of the physical world.
Retrieving hidden objects is evidence that infants have begun to master
object permanence, the understanding that objects con- tinue to exist
 when they are out of sight. But this awareness is not yet complete. Babies
still make the A-not-B search error: If they reach several times for an
object at one hiding place (A), then see it moved to another (B), they still
search for it in the first hiding place (A). Piaget concluded that the babies
do not yet have a clear.
By 10 to 12 months, infants can engage in analogical problem solving—
applying a solution strategy from one problem to other relevant problems.
 Substage 5, the tertiary circular reaction, in which toddlers repeat
behaviours with variation, emerges. For example, they can figure out
how to fit a shape through a hole in a container by turning and twisting it,
and they can use a stick to obtain a toy that is out of reach. According to
Piaget, this capacity to experiment leads to a more advanced
understanding of object permanence. Toddlers look for a hidden toy in
more than one location, displaying an accurate A–B search.
 In Substage 6, sensorimotor development culminates in mental
representation. Representation also enables older toddlers to solve
advanced object- permanence problems involving invisible displacement
—finding a toy moved while out of sight, such as into a small box while
under a cover. Second, it permits deferred imitation —the ability to
remember and copy the behaviour of models who are not present. And it
makes possible make-believe play, in which children act out everyday
and imaginary activities.

The Pre-operational Stage: 2 to 7 Years

As children move from the sensorimotor to the pre-operational stage, which
spans the years 2 to 7, the most obvious change is an extraordinary increase in
representational, or symbolic, activity.
Make-Believe Play- Make-believe is another excellent example of the
development of representation in early childhood. Piaget believed that through
pretending, children practice and strengthen newly acquired representational
schemes. Drawing on his ideas, researchers have traced changes in make-
believe play during the preschool years.
 Play detaches from the real-life conditions associated with it. In early
pretending, toddlers use only realistic objects—a toy telephone to talk
into or a cup to drink from. Children younger than age 2, for example,
will pretend to drink from a cup but refuse to pretend a cup is a hat. They
have trouble using an object (cup) that already has an obvious use as a
symbol for another object (hat).
 Play becomes less self-centred. At first, make-believe is directed toward
the self; for example, children pretend to feed only themselves. Soon,
children direct pretend actions toward other people or objects, pouring tea
for a parent or feeding a doll. Make-believe becomes less self-centred as
 children realize that agents and recipients of pretend actions can be
independent of themselves.
 Play includes more complex combinations of schemes. Children combine
pretend schemes with those of peers in sociodramatic play, the make-
believe with others that is under way by the end of the second year and
increases rapidly in complexity during early childhood. By age 4 to 5,
children build on one another’s play ideas, create and coordinate several
roles, and have a sophisticated under- standing of story lines.
Benefits of Make-Believe- Play not only reflect but also contributes to
children’s cognitive and social skills. Sociodramatic play has been studied most
thoroughly. Compared with social nonpretend activities (such as drawing or
putting puzzles together), during sociodramatic play preschoolers’ interactions
last longer, show more involvement, draw more children into the activity, and
are more cooperative.
Drawings- When given crayon and paper, even toddlers scribble in imitation of
others. Drawing progresses through the following sequence:
 Scribbles. At first, children’s intended representation is contained in their
gestures rather than in the resulting marks on the page. For example, one
18-month-old made her crayon hop around the page and, as it produced a
series of dots, explained, “Rabbit goes hop-hop.”
 First representational forms. Around age 3, children’s scribbles start to
become pictures, although few 3-year old spontaneously draw so others
can tell what their picture represents. Often children make a gesture with
the crayon, notice that they have drawn a recognizable shape, and then
label it.
A major milestone in drawing occurs when children use lines to represent
the boundaries of objects. This enables 3- and 4- year-old to draw their
first picture of a person. Fine-motor and cognitive limitations lead the
preschooler to reduce the figure to the simplest form that still looks
human—the universal “tadpole” image, a circular shape with lines
attached.
 More realistic drawings. Greater realism in drawings develops gradually,
as perception, language (ability to describe visual details), memory, and
fine-motor capacities improve. Five- and 6- year- old create more
complex drawings containing more conventional human and animal
figures, with the head and body differentiated. Older preschoolers’
drawings still contain perceptual distortions because they have just begun
to represent depth. Use of depth cues, such as over-lapping objects,
smaller size for distant than for near objects, diagonal placement, and
converging lines, increases during middle childhood.
Symbol–Real-World Relations- To make believe and draw—and to understand
other forms of representation, such as photographs, models, and maps—
preschoolers must realize that each symbol corresponds to something specific in
everyday life. Grasping this correspondence grants children a powerful
cognitive tool for finding out about objects and places they have not
experienced directly. 21⁄2 -year-old had trouble with dual representation —
viewing a symbolic object as both an object in its own right and a symbol.
Similarly, when presented with objects disguised in various ways and asked
what each “looks like” and what each “is really and truly,” preschoolers have
difficulty.
In sum, exposing young children to diverse symbols—picture books, photos,
drawings, models, make-believe, and maps—helps them appreciate that one
object can stand for another. With age, children come to understand a wide
range of symbols that have little physical similarity to what they represent.

Limitations of Pre-operational Thought:

 According to Piaget, young children are not capable of operations—
mental representations of actions that obey logical rules. Rather, their
thinking is rigid, limited to one aspect of a situation at a time, and
strongly influenced by the way things appear at the moment.
 For Piaget, the most fundamental deficiency of pre-operational thinking is
egocentrism—failure to distinguish others’ symbolic viewpoints from
one’s own. Piaget’s most convincing demonstration of egocentrism
involves his three-mountains problem. He also regarded egocentrism as
responsible for pre-operational children’s animistic thinking—the belief
that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities, such as thoughts, wishes,
feelings, and intentions.
 Piaget’s famous conservation tasks reveal several deficiencies of pre-
operational thinking. Conservation refers to the idea that certain physical
characteristics of objects remain the same, even when their outward
appearance changes. The inability to conserve highlights several related
aspects of pre-operational children’s thinking. First, their understanding is
centred, or characterized by centration. They focus on one aspect of a
situation, neglecting other important features.
The most important illogical feature of pre-operational thought is
irreversibility. Reversibility—the ability to go through a series of steps
in a problem and then mentally reverse direction, returning to the starting
point—is part of every logical operation.
 Pre-operational children have difficulty with hierarchical classification
—the organization of objects into classes and subclasses on the basis of
similarities and differences.

The Concrete Operational Stage: 7 to 11 Years

According to Piaget, the concrete operational stage, extending from about 7 to
11 years, marks a major turning point in cognitive development. Thought
becomes far more logical, flexible, and organized, more closely resembling the
reasoning of adults than that of younger children.
Concrete Operational Thought-
 Conservation- The ability to pass conservation tasks provides clear
evidence of operations— mental actions that obey logical rules. Now the
child is capable of decentration, focusing on several aspects of a problem
and relating them, rather than centering on only one. This explanation
also illustrates reversibility—the capacity to imagine the water being
returned to the original container as proof of conservation.
 Classification- Between ages 7 and 10, children pass Piaget’s class
inclusion problem. This indicates that they are more aware of
classification hierarchies and can focus on relations between a general
and two specific categories at the same time. Collections—stamps, coins,
rocks, bottle caps—become common in middle childhood.
 Seriation The ability to order items along a quantitative dimension, such
as length or weight, is called seriation. The concrete operational child can
also seriate mentally, an ability called transitive inference. For eg- From
observing that stick A is longer than stick B and that stick B is longer than
stick C, children must infer that A is longer than C.
 Spatial Reasoning- Children’s concept of cognitive maps—mental
representations of familiar large-scale spaces, such as their
neighbourhood or school. Preschoolers and young school-age children
include landmarks on the maps they draw, but their arrangement is not
always accurate. They do better when asked to place stickers showing the
location of desks and people on a map of their classroom. Pointing out the
pattern helps children reason by analogy from the rotated map to
corresponding locations in the room.
Around age 8 to 10, children’s maps become better organized, showing
landmarks along an organized route of travel. At the same time, children
are able to give clear, well-organized directions for getting from place to
place by using a “mental walk” strategy— imagining a person’s
movements along a route. By the end of middle childhood, children
combine landmarks and routes into an overall view of a large-scale space.
Ten- to 12- year- old also comprehend scale—the proportional relation
between a space and its representation on a map.

Limitations of Concrete Operational Thought-

 Children think in an organized, logical fashion only when dealing with
concrete information they can perceive directly. Their mental operations
work poorly with abstract ideas—ones not apparent in the real world.
  Continuum of acquisition (or gradual mastery) of logical concepts is
another indication of the limitations of concrete operational thinking.

The Formal Operational Stage: 11 Years and Older

According to Piaget, around age 11 young people enter the formal operational
stage, in which they develop the capacity for abstract, systematic, scientific
thinking. Whereas concrete operational children can “operate on reality,” formal
operational adolescents can “operate on operations.” They no longer require
concrete things or events as objects of thought. Instead, they can come up with
new, more general logical rules through internal reflection. Two major features
of the formal operational stage are-
 Hypothetico- Deductive Reasoning- Piaget believed that at adolescence,
young people become capable of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. When
faced with a problem, they start with a hypothesis, or prediction about
variables that might affect an outcome, from which they deduce logical,
testable inferences. Then they systematically isolate and combine
variables to see which of these inferences are confirmed in the real world.
 Propositional Thought- A second important characteristic of Piaget’s
formal operational stage is propositional thought—adolescents’ ability to
evaluate the logic of propositions (verbal statements) without referring to
real-world circumstances. In contrast, children can evaluate the logic of
statements only by considering them against concrete evidence in the real
world.

Piaget and Education-

Three educational principles derived from Piaget’s theory continue to influence
teacher training and classroom practices, especially during early childhood:
 Discovery learning- In a Piagetian classroom, children are encouraged to
discover for themselves through spontaneous interaction with the
environment. Instead of presenting ready-made knowledge verbally,
teachers provide a rich variety of activities designed to promote
exploration and discovery, including art, puzzles, table games, dress-up
clothing, building blocks, books, measuring tools, natural science tasks,
and musical instruments.
 Sensitivity to children’s readiness to learn- In a Piagetian classroom,
teachers introduce activities that build on children’s current thinking,
challenging their incorrect ways of viewing the world. But they do not try
to speed up development by imposing new skills before children indicate
they are interested and ready.
 Acceptance of individual differences- Piaget’s theory assumes that all
children go through the same sequence of development, but at different
rates. Therefore, teachers must plan activities for individual children and
 small groups, not just for the whole class. In addition, teachers evaluate
educational progress in relation to the child’s previous development,
rather than on the basis of normative standards, or average performance
of same-age peers.

Criticisms-
 Concept of equilibration is given by Piaget is vague. Piaget was not
explicit about how the diverse achievements of each stage are bound
together by a single, underlying form of thought. On a variety of tasks,
infants and young children appear more competent, and adolescents and
adults less competent, than Piaget assumed. Today, researchers agree that
the child’s efforts to assimilate, accommodate, and reorganize structures
cannot adequately explain these patterns of change.
 Piaget’s belief that infants and young children must act on the
environment to revise their thinking is too narrow a notion of how
learning takes place. As early as 2 to 3 months, babies group objects into
categories and have some awareness of hidden objects.
 Some theorists agree with Piaget that development is a general process,
following a similar course across the diverse cognitive domains of
physical, numerical, and social knowledge. But they reject the existence
of stages, believing instead that thought processes are alike at all ages—
just present to a greater or lesser extent—and that variations in children’s
knowledge and experience largely account for uneven performance across
domains.
Researchers continue to draw inspiration from Piaget’s vision of the child as an
active, constructive learner and his lifelong quest to understand how children
acquire new capacities. Piaget’s findings have served as the starting point for
virtually every major contemporary line of research on cognitive development.

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

Piaget’s theory and the core knowledge perspective emphasize the biological
side of cognitive development. Vygotsky emphasized the profound effects of
rich social and cultural contexts on their thinking. According to Vygotsky,
infants are endowed with basic perceptual, attention, and memory capacities
that they share with other animals. These develop during the first two years
through direct contact with the environment. Then rapid growth of language
leads to a profound change in thinking. It broadens preschoolers’ participation
in social dialogues with more knowledgeable individuals, who encourage them
to master culturally important tasks. Soon young children start to communicate
with themselves much as they converse with others. As a result, basic mental
capacities are transformed into uniquely human, higher cognitive processes.
Children’s Private Speech-
 Piaget (1923/1926) called these utterances egocentric speech, reflecting
his belief that young children have difficulty taking the perspectives of
others. Piaget believed that cognitive development and a certain social
experiences eventually bring an end to egocentric speech. Specifically,
through disagreements with peers, children see that others hold
viewpoints different from their own. As a result, egocentric speech
declines in favour of social speech, in which children adapt what they say
to their listeners.
 Vygotsky (1934/1986) disagreed strongly with Piaget’s conclusion. In
Vygotsky’s view, children speak to themselves for self-guidance. As they
get older and find tasks easier, their self-directed speech is internalized as
silent, inner speech—the internal verbal dialogues we carry on while
thinking and acting in everyday situations. Children’s self-directed speech
is now called private speech instead of egocentric speech.
 With age, as Vygotsky predicted, private speech goes underground,
changing into whispers and silent lip movements. Furthermore, children
who freely use self-guiding private speech during a challenging activity
are more attentive and involved and show better task handful of bubbles.
As Vygotsky performance than their less talkative age-mates.

Social Origins of Cognitive Development-

 Vygotsky (1930–1935/1978) believed that children’s learning takes place
within the zone of proximal development—a range of tasks too difficult
for the child to do alone but possible with the help of adults and more
skilled peers.
 To promote cognitive development, social interaction must have certain
features. One is intersubjectivity, the process whereby two participants
who begin a task with different understandings arrive at a shared
understanding. Intersubjectivity creates a common ground for
communication, as each partner adjusts to the other’s perspective.
 A second important feature of social interaction is scaffolding—
adjusting the support offered during a teaching session to fit the child’s
current level of performance. Scaffolding captures the form of teaching
interaction that occurs as children work on school or school-like tasks,
such as puzzles, model building, picture matching, and (later) academic
assignments. Rogoff (1998, 2003) suggests the term guided
participation, a broader concept than scaffolding. It refers to shared
endeavours between more expert and less expert participants, without
specifying the precise features of communication. Consequently, it allows
for variations across situations and cultures.
Vygotsky’s View of Make-Believe Play-
 In Vygotsky’s theory, make-believe is the central source of development during
the preschool years, leading development forward in two ways.
 First, as children create imaginary situations, they learn to act in accord
with internal ideas, not just in response to external stimuli. Gradually they
realize that thinking (or the meaning of words) is separate from objects
and that ideas can be used to guide behaviour.
 The rule-based nature of make-believe strengthens children’s capacity to
think before they act. Pretend play, Vygotsky pointed out, constantly
demands that children act against their impulses because they must follow
the rules of the play scene.

Vygotsky and Education-

Vygotsky’s theory offers new visions of teaching and learning—ones that
emphasize the importance of social context and collaboration. There are two
Vygotsky- based educational innovations, each of which incorporates assisted
discovery and peer collaboration, these are-
 Reciprocal Teaching- In reciprocal teaching, a teacher and two to four
students form a collaborative group and take turns leading dialogues on
the content of a text passage. Within the dialogues, group members apply
four cognitive strategies: questioning, summarizing, clarifying, and
predicting. The dialogue leader (at first a teacher, later a student) begins
by asking questions about the content of the text passage. Students offer
answers, raise additional questions, and, in case of disagreement, reread
the original text. Next, the leader summarizes the passage, and children
discuss the summary and clarify unfamiliar ideas. Finally, the leader
encourages students to predict upcoming content based on clues in the
passage.
 Cooperative Learning- Cooperative learning, in which small groups of
classmates work toward common goals. Conflict and disagreement seem
less important than the extent to which peers achieve intersubjectivity—
by resolving differences of opinion, sharing responsibilities, and
providing one another with sufficient explanations to correct
misunderstandings.
Cooperative learning results in higher-level explanations, greater
enjoyment of learning, and achievement gains across a wide range of
school subjects. It also enhances peer relationships generally, leading
students to cooperate more in future group activities within and outside
the classroom.

Criticisms-
 Vygotsky’s (1934/1986) theory underscores the vital role of teaching in
cognitive development. According to Vygotsky, from communicating with
 more expert partners, children engage in “verbalized self-observation,”
reflecting on, revising, and controlling their own thought processes. In
this way, parents’ and teachers’ engagement with children prompts
profound advances in the complexity of children’s thinking.
 Vygotsky’s theory has not gone unchallenged. Although he acknowledged
the role of diverse symbol systems (such as pictures, maps, and
mathematical expressions) in the development of higher cognitive
processes, he elevated language to highest importance. But in some
cultures, verbal dialogues are not the only—or even the most important—
means through which children learn.
 In focusing on social and cultural influences, Vygotsky said little about
biological contributions to children’s cognition. His theory does not
address how basic motor, perceptual, memory, and problem-solving
capacities spark changes in children’s social experiences, from which
more advanced cognition springs. Nor does it tell us just how children
internalize social experiences to advance their mental functioning.
 Vygotsky’s theory is vague in its explanation of cognitive change. It is
intriguing to imagine the broader theory that might exist today had Piaget
and Vygotsky—the two twentieth-century giants of cognitive
development—had a chance to weave together their extraordinary
accomplishments.