Cognitive Development: PIAGET

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Jean Piaget

• Piaget believed that cognitive development progressed through four sequential stages (

sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operations, and formal operations

) beginning at birth and culminating in adolescence.

• Progress through the early stages is driven primarily by physical maturation. Later stages increasingly arise from physical experience and interaction with others.

• Piaget believed that the stages of cognitive developmental were invariable and universal, completed in the same steps and sequence by all children in all cultures.

• • • •

Piaget

SENSORIMOTOR PERIOD

Birth to 2 years Three accomplishments of period:

Infants discover sensory information about environment. Also learn to integrate information from different senses. See and feel parent. Soon learn that sight of parent associated with warmth; being fed.

Goal directed behavior – Reflexes and random behavior gradually replaced by intentional behaviors which pay off. Child begins putting together several behaviors to accomplish simple goal – grasp puzzle piece and put it in slot.

• Discovery by surprise • Attempts at replication • Deliberate replication Object permanence – Child gains ability to form mental images of objects (representation). Gains understanding that object continues to exist even when out of sight.

Piaget

PREOPERATIONAL PERIOD

2 – 7 years

• The child is increasingly able to form mental images/representations of things and experiences gradually replacing sensorimotor behavior with thought and language.

• The child’s thought processes are ruled by perception, how things appear at the moment. The child is unable to envision things other than as they are.

• Thus the child’s thought processes are egocentric. He/she is unable to envision things from any perspective other than his/her own.

• The child tends to focus on one attribute of an object ( centration )

Piaget’s beaker test

PREOPERATIONAL PERIOD

Ages 2 to 7 Barriers to logical thinking; Piaget’s beaker test: Centration

: Child tends to focus on one element of object or situation and to ignore other aspects. In the example below, preoperational children focus on the container’s height rather than width. When liquid is poured from the short container into the tall one, the child believes the tall container holds more fluid.

Additional examples:

•Taller people are identified as older •Child thinks all persons with long hair are female

Piaget

PREOPERATIONAL PERIOD

Ages 2 to 7

• Barriers to logical thinking; Piaget’s mountain task: • Egocentrism: Preoperational child must gain awareness that other perspectives exist besides one’s own.

Child’s view Doll’s view Child asked to identify scene as viewed from doll’s perspective – child often picks picture of scene as seen by him/herself.

Piaget

PREOPERATIONAL PERIOD

Ages 2 to 7 Barriers to logical thinking: Conservation of number

:

Preoperational child is shown two equal rows of objects One row is lengthened, child believes longer row has more objects

.

Conservation of mass: Child is shown two balls of clay of equal size. One ball is flattened. Child believes the flattened ball contains more clay.

Piaget

PREOPERATIONAL PERIOD

Ages 2 to 7

• Developmental tasks of preoperational period • Gradual accomplishment extending into later stages • Classification – the ability to sort items or stimuli into various categories according to concrete attributes.

• Conservation – (opposite of centration) – Grasp idea that one aspect of an object (quantity or weight) remains the same while another aspect (shape or position) is changed.

• Seriation – The ability to arrange objects or stimuli in order according to tangible characteristics such as size, length, weight, volume.

Piaget

PERIOD OF CONCRETE OPERATIONS

Ages 7 to 11 Operations

– actions carried out by thinking them through rather than actually doing them • Child thinking still based on concrete objects, attributes

– thinking about things rather than thinking about ideas. Not yet capable of abstract logic.

• Child has begun to master: – Empathy – the ability to see things from other points

of view

– Centration – the ability to view situations and

objects in terms of many variables

– Able to conceptualize reversibility • Child becomes able to: – Classify using more abstract categories - can sort

animals by abstract, conceptualized categories categories (mammals, birds) instead of concrete attributes such as color, size.

– Conservation – able to understand that a tall glass

may have same volume as short one.

Piaget

PERIOD OF FORMAL OPERATIONS

Adolescence through adulthood

• Capacity for abstract thought, not only about how things are but how they might be and why things aren’t always as they should be. • Ability to weigh many variables and to view events from many perspectives.

• Ability to hypothesize – to think contrary to fact. “What if…?” • Ability to logically evaluate many possibilities in order to arrive at a conclusion. Deductive reasoning – if…then.

• Capacity varies among individuals. Some adults may not reach this thinking stage.

PIAGET

STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVGELOPMENT

SUMMARY APPROXIMATE AGE

Birth-2 years Ages 2-7

STAGE Sensorimotor Preoperational MAJOR DEVELOPMENTS

Discover sensory information Goal directed behavior Object permanence Ability to use language to represent things not visible Ages 7-11 Adolescence to adulthood

Concrete operations Formal operations

Beginning logical thought based on concrete objects, attributes Creative abstract thought, hypothetical thinking

PIAGET EVALUATING THEORIES

• Problems: • Piaget underestimates the cognitive ability of infants • Piaget underestimates the role of social interaction in cognitive development. Teaching/stimulation can speed development; their lack can retard it.

• Usefulness: • The concept of developmental readiness applied to learning.

THINK AND SHARE

Piaget’s experiments

• An infant who has not mastered object permanence will immediately lose interest in toy when it is hidden from view.

•Older infants will search for a hidden toy, realizing that it continues to exist even when out of sight. •Test an infant’s mastery of object permanence by playing a game of revealing and hiding a block or small toy. •How does the infant respond when the toy is out of sight?

• Try some of Piaget’s conservation experiments with an older child. Use pennies to create the conservation of number task or clay to evaluate conservation of mass. How does the child respond?