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Introduction to Cognitive Development
- Problem-solving
- Reasoning
- Creating
- Conceptualizing
- Categorizing
- Remembering
- Planning
However, thinking also involves other mental processes that seem more basic and at which even toddlers are skilled, such as perceiving objects and events in the environment, acting skillfully on objects to obtain goals, and understanding and producing language. Yet other areas of human development that involve thinking are not usually associated with cognitive development, because thinking isn’t a prominent feature of them, such as personality and temperament.
As the name suggests, cognitive development is about change. Children’s thinking changes in dramatic and surprising ways. Consider DeVries’s (1969) study of whether young children understand the difference between appearance and reality. To find out, she brought an unusually even-tempered cat named Maynard to a psychology laboratory and allowed the 3- to 6-year-old participants in the study to pet and play with him. DeVries then put a mask of a fierce dog on Maynard’s head, and asked the children what Maynard was. Despite all of the children having identified Maynard previously as a cat, now most 3-year-olds said that he was a dog and claimed that he had a dog’s bones and a dog’s stomach. In contrast, the 6-year-olds weren’t fooled; they had no doubt that Maynard remained a cat. Understanding how children’s thinking changes so dramatically in just a few years is one of the fascinating challenges in studying cognitive development. (51)
In this module, we will focus upon Piaget’s classical theory of cognitive development and language development. However, we will also examine information processing, intelligence, and the school environment. (1)
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
Piaget did not believe that children think less than adults; instead, children simply think differently. He believed that between birth and adolescence, children move through four stages of cognitive development. Each stage is qualitatively different from each other, meaning that the characteristics of thought are different in quality. Piaget’s theory did not allot for the skipping of a stage; however, children do move through the stages at their own pace – some faster and some slower. Piaget also posited that not all individuals reach the later stages of cognitive development. For example, an individual with a developmental disability may forever stay in the first stage of cognitive development. Over the next few pages, we shall explore Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development:
- Sensorimotor
- Preoperational
- Concrete operational
- Formal operational (1)
Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage
Piaget describes intelligence in infancy as sensorimotor or based on direct, physical contact. Infants taste, feel, pound, push, hear, and move in order to experience the world. The sensorimotor stage has six sub-stages. Let’s explore the transition infants make from responding to the exte