Cognitive Development: The

Theory of Jean Piaget

What is Cognition?
• The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and
understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.
• Cognition refers to thinking and memory processes, and cognitive
development refers to long-term changes in these processes.
• Metacognition, on the other hand, is the awareness and
understanding of one's own thought processes.
• Some of the many different cognitive processes include thinking,
knowing, remembering, judging, and problem-solving.
Types of Cognitive Processes
• Attention: Attention is a cognitive process that allows people to focus on a specific
stimulus in the environment.
• Language: Language and language development are cognitive processes that involve
the ability to understand and express thoughts through spoken and written words.
This allows us to communicate with others and plays an important role in thought.
• Learning: Learning requires cognitive processes involved in taking in new things,
synthesizing information, and integrating it with prior knowledge.
• Memory: Memory is an important cognitive process that allows people to encode,
store, and retrieve information. It is a critical component in the learning process and
allows people to retain knowledge about the world and their personal histories.
• Perception: Perception is a cognitive process that allows people to take in
information through their senses, then utilize this information to respond and
interact with the world.
• Thought: Thought is an essential part of every cognitive process. It allows people to
engage in decision-making, problem-solving, and higher reasoning.
Paiget’s Conceptualization
• Piaget believed that learning takes place through an interplay of
assimilation (adjusting new experiences to fit prior concepts) and
accommodation (adjusting concepts to fit new experiences).
• It leads not only to short-term learning, but also to long-term
developmental changes.
• Piaget proposed that cognition develops through four distinct stages
from birth through the end of adolescence.
The Four Stages
• Sensorimotor intelligence
• Preoperational thinking
• Concrete operational thinking
• Formal operational thinking
• These four stages have the following key features:
• The stages always happen in the same order.
• No stage is ever skipped.
• Each stage is a significant transformation of the stage before it.
• Each later stage incorporated the earlier stages into itself.
The Sensorimotor Stage
• This stage starts at birth and lasts till the Age of 2.
• It is a period when infants “think” by means of their senses and motor
actions.
• Infants continually touch, manipulate, look, listen to, and even bite and
chew objects.
• According to Piaget, these actions allow children to learn about the
world and are crucial to their early cognitive development.
• The infant’s actions allow the child to construct simple concepts of
objects and events such as object permanence and temporal and
spatial awareness.
• Initial sensorimotor development takes place without the support of
language. It might therefore seem hard to know what infants are
thinking.
• Piaget devised several simple, but clever, experiments to get around
their lack of language, and these experiments suggest that infants do
indeed represent objects even without being able to talk.
• In one experiment, for example, he hid an object under a blanket. He
found that doing so consistently prompts older infants (18-24
months) to search for the object, but fails to prompt younger infants
(less than six months) to do so.
The Preoperational Stage
• This stage starts at the age of 2 and lasts till the age of 7.
• At this stage, children use their new ability to represent objects in a
wide variety of activities, but they do not yet do it in ways that are
organized or fully logical.
• For example, children engaged in imaginative activities are thinking
on two levels at once—one imaginative and the other realistic.
• This dual processing of experience constitute an early example
of metacognition, or reflecting on and the monitoring of thinking
itself.
• The children at this stage start analyzing and evaluating.
The Concrete Operational Stage
• This stage starts at the age of 7 and lasts till the age of 11.
• As children continue into elementary school, they become able to
represent ideas and events more flexibly and logically.
• Their thinking allows them to solve problems more systematically than
before, and therefore to be successful with many academic tasks.
• For example, a child may unconsciously follow the rule: “If nothing is
added or taken away, then the amount of something stays the same.”
• This simple principle helps children understand certain arithmetic tasks
(such as adding or subtracting zero from a number) as well as perform
certain classroom science experiments (such as ones that involve
calculating the combined volume of two separate liquids)
• Concrete operational thinking differs from preoperational thinking in
two ways, each of which renders children more skilled as students.
• One difference is reversibility, or the ability to think about the steps of
a process in any order.
• Only the concrete operational child can recall them in any order (e.g.,
chronological, reverse chronological, etc).
• The other new feature of thinking is the child’s ability to decenter, or
focus on more than one feature of a problem at a time.
The Formal Operational Stage
• This stage starts from 11 onward.
• At this stage, the child becomes able to reason not only about
tangible objects and events, but also about hypothetical or abstract
ones.
• At this level, the teacher can pose hypothetical (or contrary-to-fact)
problems to the students: “What if the world had never discovered
oil?”
• To answer such questions, students need to use hypothetical
reasoning, meaning that they must manipulate ideas that vary in
several ways at once, and do so entirely in their minds.
• In one problem, for example, a young person is presented with a simple
pendulum, to which different amounts of weight can be hung (Inhelder &
Piaget, 1958).
• The experimenter asks: “What determines how fast the pendulum swings:
the length of the string holding it, the weight attached to it, or the distance
that it is pulled to the side?”
• The fourth stage in Piaget’s theory is only about a particular kind of formal
thinking: the kind needed to solve scientific problems and devise scientific
experiments.
• Piaget’s theory does not focus on other types of development—ones that
focus more directly on the social and interpersonal issues of childhood and
adolescence.