Moderator:

Presentator:
UNIT I1: Cognitive Development
-Dr.
Tejendra
Shilpa
Nath
Mehta

Developmental
Psychology
 What is Cognitive development?
We define development as the pattern of change that begins at conception
and continues through the lifespan.

Cognitive processes refer to changes in the individual’s thought,

intelligence, and language.

Watching a colorful mobile swinging above the crib, putting together a two-
word sentence, memorizing a poem, imagining what it would be like to be a
movie star, and solving a crossword puzzle all involve cognitive processes.
COGNITIVE THEORIES
Of development…
Whereas psychoanalytic theories stress the importance
of the unconscious, cognitive theories emphasize
conscious thoughts.

Three important cognitive theories are:

• Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory,

• Vygotsky’s sociocultural cognitive theory, and
• The information-processing theory.
Piaget’s
Cognitive
Develop

Piaget’s
Theory
mental

Cognitive
Developmental
Theory
Piaget’s theory states that children go through four stages
of cognitive development as they actively construct their
understanding of the world.

Each stage is age-related and consists of a distinct way of

thinking, a different way of understanding the world.

Thus, according to Piaget (1896–1980), the child’s

cognition is qualitatively different in one stage compared
with another.
Two processes underlie this cognitive construction of the
world: organization and adaptation.

To make sense of our world, we organize our experiences.

For example, we separate important ideas from less important

ideas, and we connect one idea to another.

In addition to organizing our observations and experiences, we

adapt, adjusting to new environmental demands.
Piaget’s theory is a general, unifying story of how biology and
experience sculpt cognitive development. Piaget thought that,
just as our physical bodies have structures that enable us to adapt
to the world, we build mental structures that help us to adapt to the
world.

Piaget stressed that children actively construct their own

cognitive worlds; information is not just poured into their minds
from the environment.
COGNITIVE PROCESSES

What processes do children use as they construct their

knowledge of the world?

Schemes

• As the infant or child seeks to construct an understanding of

the world, said Piaget (1954), the developing brain creates
schemes. These are actions or mental representations that
organize knowledge.
Assimilation and Accommodation
• To explain how children use and adapt their
schemes, Piaget offered two concepts:
assimilation and accommodation.
• Assimilation occurs when children use their
existing schemes to deal with new information
or experiences. Accommodation occurs
when children adjust their schemes to take
new information and experiences into
Think about a toddler who has learned the word car to identify the
family’s car. The toddler might call all moving vehicles on roads “cars,”
including motorcycles and trucks; the child has assimilated these
objects to his or her existing scheme. But the child soon learns that
motorcycles and trucks are not cars and fine-tunes the category to
exclude motorcycles and trucks, accommodating the scheme.

Assimilation and accommodation operate even in very young infants.

New- borns reflexively suck everything that touches their lips; they
assimilate all sorts of objects into their sucking scheme.
Organization

• To make sense out of their world, said Piaget, children cognitively organize their
experiences.
• Organization in Piaget’s theory is the grouping of isolated behaviors and thoughts
into a higher-order system.

A boy who has only a vague idea about how to use a hammer
may also have a vague idea about how to use other tools. After
learning how to use each one, he relates these uses, organizing
his knowledge.
Equilibration and Stages of
Development
• In trying to understand the world, the
child inevitably experiences cognitive
conflict, or disequilibrium. That is, the
child is constantly faced with
counterexamples to his or her existing
schemes and with inconsistencies.
For example, if a child believes that pouring water from a short
and wide container into a tall and narrow container changes the
amount of water, then the child might be puzzled by where the
“extra” water came from and whether there is actually more
water to drink.

• The puzzle creates disequilibrium; for Piaget, an

internal search for equilibrium creates motivation for
change. The child assimilates and accommodates,
adjusting old schemes, developing new schemes, and
organizing and reorganizing the old and new schemes.
Eventually, the organization is fundamentally different
from the old organization; it is a new way of thinking.
Children constantly assimilate and accommodate as they seek
equilibrium. There is considerable movement between states of
cognitive equilibrium and disequilibrium as assimilation and
accommodation work in concert to produce cognitive change.

Equilibration is the name Piaget gave to this mechanism by

which children shift from one stage of thought to the next.
● What are Piaget’s four stages of cognitive
development?
 THE
The SENSORIMOTOR
sensorimotor STAGE
stage lasts from birth to about 2 years of
age.

In this stage, infants construct an understanding of the world

by coordinating sensory experiences (such as seeing and
hearing) with physical, motoric actions—hence the term
“sensorimotor.
➔ Substages
Object Permanence
• According to Piaget. There is no differentiation between the self
and world; objects have no separate, permanent existence.
• By the end of the sensorimotor period, objects are both
separate from the self and permanent.
• Object permanence is the understanding that objects
continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or
touched.
• Acquiring the sense of object permanence is one of the infant’s
most important accomplishments, according to Piaget.
How could anyone know whether an infant had a sense
of object permanence or not?

The principal way that object permanence is studied is

by watching an infant’s reaction when an interesting
object disappears . If infants search for the object, it is
assumed that they believe it continues to exist.
 PIAGET’S PREOPERATIONAL STAGE
The preoperational stage,which lasts from approximately 2 to 7 years of age, is the second Piagetian stage.

In this stage, children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings.

They form stable concepts and begin to reason. At the same time, the young child’s cognitive world
is dominated by egocentrism and magical beliefs.

However, according to Piaget, preschool children still lack the ability to perform what he calls operations,
which are internalized mental actions that allow children to do mentally what they previously could
only do physically. For example, if you imagine putting two sticks together to see whether they would be as
long as another stick, without actually moving the sticks, you are performing a concrete operation.
Because Piaget called this stage “preoperational,” it might sound like an unimportant
waiting period.

Not so. However, the label preoperational emphasizes that the child does not yet
perform operations,which are reversible mental actions; they allow children to do
mentally what before they could do only physically.

Adding and subtracting numbers mentally are examples of operations.

Preoperational thought is the beginning of the ability to reconstruct in thought what has
been established in behavior. It can be divided into two substages: the symbolic function
substage and the intuitive thought substage.
The Symbolic Function Substage
• The symbolic function substage is the first substage of preoperational
thought, occurring roughly between the ages of 2 and 4.
• In this substage, the young child gains the ability to mentally represent an
object that is not present. This ability vastly expands the child’s mental
world (Carlson & Zelazo, 2008).
• Young children use scribble designs to represent people, houses, cars,
clouds, and so on;
• They begin to use language and engage in pretend play.
• However, although young children make distinct progress during this
substage, their thoughts till has important limitations, two of which are
egocentrism and animism
Egocentrism is the inability to distinguish between one’s own perspective and someone else’s perspective.

Piaget and Barbel Inhelder (1969) initially studied young children’s egocentrism by devising the three
mountains task

The child walks around the model of the mountains and becomes familiar with what the mountains look like
from different perspectives, and she can see that there are different objects on the mountains.

The child is then seated on one side of the table on which the mountains are placed.

The experimenter moves a doll to different locations around the table, at each location asking the child to
select from a series of photos the one photo that most accurately reflects the view that the doll is see- ing.

Children in the preoperational stage often pick their own view rather than the doll’s view.

Preschool children frequently show the ability to take another’s perspec- tive on some tasks but not others.
Animism, another limitation of preoperational
thought, is the belief that inanimate objects have
lifelike qualities and are capable of action.

A young child might show animism by saying, “That

tree pushed the leaf off, and it fell down,” or “The
sidewalk made me mad; it made me fall down.”
The Intuitive Thought Substage
• The intuitive thought substage is the second substage of preoperational thought,
occurring between approximately 4 and 7 years of age.
• In this substage, children begin to use primitive reasoning and questions.
• Consider 4-year-old Tommy,who is at the beginning of the intuitive thought substage.
• Although he is starting to develop his own ideas about the world he lives in, his ideas
are still simple, and he is not very good at thinking things out.
• He has difficulty understanding events that he knows are taking place but that he
cannot see.
• His fantasized thoughts bear little resemblance to reality. He cannot yet answer the
question “What if?” in any reliable way.
• For Example, he has only a vague idea of what would happen if a car were to hit him.
He also has difficulty negotiating traffic because he cannot do the mental calculations
necessary to estimate whether an approaching car will hit him when he crosses the
road.
By the age of 5, children have just about exhausted the adults around them with
“why” questions. The child’s questions signal the emergence of interest in reasoning
and in figuring out why things are the way they are.

Following are some samples of the questions children ask during the questioning
period of 4 to 6 years of age (Elkind, 1976):

• “What makes you grow up?”

• “Who was the mother when everybody was a baby?”
• “Why do leaves fall?”
• “Why does the sun shine?”

Piaget called this substage intuitive because young children seem so sure about their
knowledge and understanding yet are unaware of how they know what they know.
That is, they know something but know it without the use of rational thinking.
One limitation of preoperational thought is centration, a centering of attention
on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others.

Centration is most clearly evidenced in young children’s lack of conservation,

the awareness that altering an object’s or a substance’s appearance does not
change its basic properties.

For example, to adults, it is obvious that a certain amount of liquid stays the
same, regardless of a container’s shape. But this is not at all obvious to young
children. Instead, they are struck by the height of the liquid in the container; they
focus on that characteristic to the exclusion of others.
The Concrete Operational Stage

• Piaget proposed that the concrete operational stage lasts from approximately 7 to 11
years of age.
• In this stage, children can perform concrete operations, and they can reason logically
as long as reasoning can be applied to specific or concrete examples.

operations are mental actions that are reversible, and concrete

operations are operations that are applied to real, concrete objects.
• For example,in one task involving conservation of matter,
• The child is presented with two identical balls of clay.
• The experimenter rolls one ball into a long, thin shape; the other remains in its original
ball shape.
• The child is then asked if there is more clay in the ball or in the long, thin piece of clay.
By the time children reach the age of 7 or 8, most
answer that the amount of clay is the same.

In the clay example, the preoperational child is likely to

focus on height or width. The concrete operational
child coordinates information about both dimensions.
They can reason logically about concrete events and objects, and they make
What
gainsother abilities
in the abilityare characteristic
to classify of children
objects and to who haveabout
reason reached
thethe concrete operational
relationships
stage?
between classes of objects.
One important skill is the ability to classify or divide things into different sets or subsets and
to consider their interrelationships.

Children who have reached the concrete operational stage are also capable of seriation,
which is the ability to order stimuli along a quantitative dimension (such as length).

Another skill is transitivity, which is the ability to logically combine relations to understand
certain conclusions.
 The Formal Operational Stage
Around age 11, according to Piaget, the fourth and final stage of
cognitive development, the formal operational stage, begins.

Formal operational thought is more abstract than concrete

operational thought. Adolescents are no longer limited to actual,
concrete experiences as anchors for thought. They can conjure up
make believe situations, abstract propositions, and events that are
purely hypothetical, and can try to reason logically about them.
The abstract quality of thinking during the formal operational stage is evident in the adolescent’s
verbal problem-solving ability. Whereas the concrete operational thinker needs to see the concrete
elements A, B, and C to be able to make the logical inference that if A = B and B = C, then A = C, the
formal operational thinker can solve this problem merely through verbal [Link]
think more abstractly and idealistically, they also think more logically.

Children are likely to solve problems through trial and error; adolescents begin to think more as a
scientist thinks, devising plans to solve problems and systematically testing solutions.

This type of problem solving requires hypothetical-deductive reasoning, which involves creating a
hypothesis and deducing its implications, steps that provide ways to test the hypothesis. Thus, formal
operational thinkers develop hypotheses about ways to solve problems and then systematically
deduce the best path to follow to solve the problem.
The formal operational stage, which appears between the ages
of 11 and 15 and continues through adulthood, is Piaget’s fourth
and final stage.
• In this stage, individuals move beyond concrete experiences and think in abstract
and more logical terms.
• As part of thinking more abstractly, adolescents develop images of ideal
circumstances. They might think about what an ideal parent is like and compare
their parents to this ideal standard.
• They begin to entertain possibilities for the future and are fascinated with what they
can be.
• In solving problems, they become more systematic, developing hypotheses about
why something is happening the way it is and then testing these hypotheses.
THANK YOU