3: Cognitive Development - Piaget
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Outline
– What is cognition?
– Piaget’s Theory
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Features of the theory
Sensorimotor stage
Preoperational stage
Concrete operations stage
Formal operations stage
– Problems with the theory
– Learning Outcomes
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What is cognition?

Virtually everything we do involves
thinking or cognitive functioning
– Recalling a phone number
– Remembering a list
– Following directions
– Reading your watch (how much time until…?)
How do children become able to do all
these things?
 Why are some better at some tasks?
 Why are some quicker to develop?
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A Constructivist Approach
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Jean Piaget’s theory remains
the standard against which all
other theories are judged
– Often labeled constructivist
because it depicts children as
constructing knowledge for
themselves
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Children are seen as
– Active
– Learning many important lessons
on their own
– Intrinsically motivated to learn
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Nature and Nurture

Piaget believed that nature and
nurture interact to yield cognitive
development
– Adaptation: The tendency to respond
to the demands of the environment to
meet one’s goals
– Organization: The tendency to
integrate particular observations into
coherent knowledge
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Sources of Continuity
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Three processes work together from birth
to propel development forward
– Assimilation: The process by
which people translate incoming
information into a form they can
understand
– Accommodation: The process by
which people adapt current
knowledge structures in response
to new experiences
– Equilibration: The process by
which people balance assimilation
and accommodation to create
stable understanding
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Discontinuities
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The discontinuous aspects of Piaget’s theory
are distinct, hierarchical stages
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Central properties of Piaget’s stage theory:
– Qualitative change
– Broad applicability across topics and contexts
– Brief transitions
– Invariant sequence
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Hypothesized that children progress through
four stages of cognitive development, each
building on the previous one
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Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
Concrete
Operational
7 - 12
years
Children become able to think
logically, not just intuitively. They now
can classify objects into coherent
categories and understand that
events are often influenced by
multiple factors, not just one.
Formal
Operational
12+ years
Adolescents can think systematically
and reason about what might be as
well as what is. This allows them to
understand politics, ethics, and
science fiction, as well as to engage
in scientific reasoning.
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Sensorimotor Substages
Sub Age
Description
1
Birth – 1 Infants begin to modify the
month
reflexes with which they are born
to make them more adaptive.
2
1–4
months
Infants begin to organize
separate reflexes into larger
behaviors, most of which are
centered on their own bodies.
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Sensorimotor Substages
Sub Age
Description
3
4–8
months
Infants becoming increasingly
interested in the world around them.
By the end of this substage, object
permanence, the knowledge that
objects continue to exist even when
they are out of view, typically emerges.
4
8 – 12
months
During this substage, children make
the
A-Not-B error, the tendency to reach
to where objects have been found
before, rather than to where they were
last hidden.
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Object permanence
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Objects are tied to infant’s awareness of
them
– “out of sight, out of mind”
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Hidden toy experiment
– 4 months: no attempt to search for hidden
object
– 4-9 months: visual search for object
– 9 months: search for and retrieve hidden object
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A-not-B task (Diamond, 1985)
– 9 months: A/B error after 1/2 second delay
– 12 months: 10 second delay needed to produce
error
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Piaget’s A-Not-B Task
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Sensorimotor Substages
Sub Age
Description
5
12 – 18
months
Toddlers begin to actively and
avidly explore the potential uses
to which objects can be put.
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18 – 24
months
Infants become able to form
enduring mental representations.
The first sign of this capacity is
deferred imitation, the repetition
of other people’s behavior a
substantial time after it occurred.
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Preoperational Stage
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A mix of impressive cognitive
acquisitions and equally
impressive limitations
– A notable acquisition is symbolic representation, the use
of one object to stand for another, which makes a variety of
new behaviors possible
– A major limitation is egocentrism, the tendency to perceive
the world solely from one’s own point of view
– A related limitation is centration, the tendency to focus on
a single, perceptually striking feature of an object or event
– Preoperational children also lack of understanding of the
conservation concept, the idea that merely changing the
appearance of objects does not change their key properties
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Piaget’s Three-Mountain Task
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Egocentric Conversations
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The Balance Scale: An Example of Centration
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Procedures Used to Test Conservation
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Concrete Operational Stage
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Children begin to
reason logically
about the world
They can solve
conservation
problems, but their
successful reasoning
is largely limited to
concrete situations
Thinking
systematically
remains difficult
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Inhelder and Piaget’s Pendulum Problem
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The task is to compare the
motions of longer and
shorter strings, with lighter
and heavier weights
attached, in order to
determine the influence of
weight, string length, and
dropping point on the time it
takes for the pendulum to
swing back and forth
Children below age 12
usually perform
unsystematic experiments
and draw incorrect
conclusions
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Formal Operational Stage
Cognitive development culminates in the
ability to think abstractly and to reason
hypothetically
 Individuals can imagine alternative worlds
and reason systematically about all
possible outcomes of a situation
 Piaget believed that the
attainment of the formal
operations stage, in
contrast to the other
stages, is not universal
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Implications for Education
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Piaget’s view of children’s cognitive development
suggests that children’s distinctive ways of
thinking at different ages need to be considered in
deciding how best to teach them
In addition, because children learn by mentally
and physically interacting with the environment,
relevant physical activities,
accompanied by
questions that call
attention to the lessons
of the activities, are
important in
educational practice
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Critique of Piaget’s Theory
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Although Piaget’s theory remains highly
influential, some weaknesses are now
apparent
– The stage model depicts children’s thinking as
being more consistent than it is
– Infants and young children are more cognitively
competent than Piaget recognized
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Object permanence in 3-month-olds (Bower,
1974)
Number conservation in 4 year olds
(McGarrigle & Donaldson, 1974)
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Critique of Piaget’s Theory
– Piaget’s theory understates the contribution of
the social world to cognitive development
Piaget’s tasks are culturally biased
 Schooling and literacy affect rates of development
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– e.g. Greenfield’s study of the Wolof
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Formal operational thinking is not universal
– e.g. Gladwin’s study of the Polynesian islanders
– Piaget’s theory is vague about the cognitive
processes that give rise to children’s thinking
and about the mechanisms that produce
cognitive growth
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Learning outcomes
Demonstrate an understanding of Piaget’s
theory.
 Be familiar with the experiments carried
out by Piaget
 Show an awareness of the strengths and
weaknesses of the theory.
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Reading
● Siegler, Deloache & Eisenberg, Chapter 4
● See .pdf handout for further reading
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