journal

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT in INFANCY and TODDLERHOOD

Jean Piaget and Cognitive Development

Swiss

Psychologist

(1896-1980)

PIAGET’S COGNITIVE-DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY

• Piaget believed children move through four stages of development between infancy and adolescence

PIAGET’S COGNITIVE-DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY

– The Sensorimotor stage of Cognitive Development is Piaget’s first stage.

– During the sensorimotor stage, infants and toddlers “think”

with their eyes, ears, hands, and other sensorimotor equipment.

– What Changes With Development

• Piaget believed a child’s schemes (organized ways of making sense of experience) change with age.

• At first, schemes are motor action patterns and later

move to a mental level.

How Cognitive Change Takes Place for Infants – Adapting to a New Environment

– Adaptation is the process of building schemes through direct interaction with the environment.

– Assimilation is a part of adaptation in which the external world is

interpreted through existing schemes. – Accommodation is the part of adaptation in which new schemes

are created or old ones adjusted to produce a better fit with the environment.

How Cognitive Change Takes Place

– State of Equilibrium exists when children are not changing very much and they are in a steady, comfortable cognitive state; assimilation is used more than accommodation.

– State of Disequilibrium is the state of cognitive discomfort

which occurs during times of rapid change; accommodation is used more than assimilation.

– Back-and-forth movement between equilibrium and

disequilibrium leads to the development of more effective schemes.

How Cognitive Change Takes Place

• Organization is an internal process of rearranging and linking together schemes to form an interconnected cognitive system.

• Schemes reach a true state of equilibrium when they become part of a broad network of structures that can be jointly applied to the surrounding world.

The Sensorimotor Stage Circular reactions are the means by which infants explore the

environment and build schemes by trying to repeat chance events caused by their own motor activity.

Reflexes • Piaget regarded newborn reflexes as the building blocks of

sensorimotor intelligence.

• At first, babies suck, grasp, and look in much the same way, no matter what the circumstances.

The Sensorimotor Stage

The First Learned Adaptations (1 to 4 Months)

• Infants develop simple motor skills and change their behavior in response to environmental demands.

• The first circular reactions are centered on the infant’s own

body and motivated by basic needs.

• Subsequently, they change to manipulating objects and then to producing novel effects in the environment.

The Sensorimotor Stage

Making Interesting Sights Last (4 to 8 Months)

• Infants can repeat actions that affect the environment. • Infants can imitate actions that they have practiced many times

The Sensorimotor

Stage

• Intentional, or goal-directed, behavior is the combination of schemes to solve problems.

• Object permanence is the understanding that objects

continue to exist when they are out of sight • A-not-B search errors are committed by infants. Infants 8- to

12-months-old only look for an object in hiding place A after the object is moved from A to hiding place B.

The concept of object permanence – objects continue to exist even though we can’t see them.. The child does not look for the

object when the object is out of sight.

The Sensorimotor Stage

Discovering New Means Through Active Experimentation

(12 to 18 Months)

• The infant repeats actions with variation–exploring

the environment and bringing about new outcomes.

• Experimentation leads to a more advanced

understanding of object permanence. Toddlers no longer make the AB search error.

The Sensorimotor Stage Mental Representation-Inventing New Means Through Mental

Combinations (18 Months to 2 Years)

• Mental representations are internal images of absent objects and past events.

• The toddler can now solve problems symbolically instead of through

trial-and-error • Functional play is motor activity with or without objects during the

first year and a half in which sensorimotor schemes are practiced. • At the end of the second year, representation permits toddlers to

engage in make-believe play.

Play is important for Cognitive Development

Evaluation of the Sensorimotor Stage

Object Permanence - Some capacities, such as understanding of object properties, emerge much earlier than Piaget believed.

Berk, L. E., (2016). Infants, Children, and Adolescents.

Boston, MA: Pearson. EIGHTH EDITION