PIAGET: COGNITIVE
DEVELOPMENT
• How can we find out what infants and children are thinking?
• How is a child’s thinking different from an adult’s?
• Does nature or nurture have more influence on children’s
development?
• Can a child’s rate of development be accelerated?
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SOME RECURRING QUESTIONS...
• The first person to study
cognitive development
scientifically and
systematically.
• The most influential
theory of cognitive
development.
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JEAN PIAGET (1896-1980)
• The process by which the child changes its mental models of
the world to match more closely how the world actually is.
Piaget argued that children actively construct knowledge
themselves as they interact with new objects or experiences.
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ADAPTATION: SCHEMA
As the child gets older its schemas become...
More complex
More numerous
More abstract
More interconnected
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COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
The child’s understanding develops because...
Its brain is
developing
(maturation)
It is exploring
the world
around it
(experience)
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COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
• 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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SOURCES OF CONTINUITY
• The discontinuous aspects of Piaget’s theory
are distinct, hierarchical stages
• Central properties of Piaget’s stage theory:
• Qualitative change
• Broad applicability across topics and contexts
• Brief transitions
• Invariant sequence
• Hypothesized that children progress through
four stages of cognitive development, each
building on the previous one
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DISCONTINUITIES
• Development is discontinuous
• Each stage is qualitatively distinct
• The sequence is universal and invariant
Piaget said that children’s cognitive development unfolds in
stages.
These statements are true of all stage theories of development.
What might they mean as applied to cognitive development?
• What does a stage theory imply about development?
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STAGE THEORIES
Psychological attribute
Gradual change
over time
Abrupt change
Relative stability
How might the line
representing a stage
theory be different?
Time
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GRADUALIST VS. STAGE THEORIES
• 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
• Children are seen as
• Active
• Learning many important lessons on
their own
• Intrinsically motivated to learn
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A CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH
• Children’s ability to understand, think about and solve
problems in the world develops in a stop-start manner.
• At each stage of development, the child’s thinking is
qualitatively different from the other stages.
• All children go through the same stages in the same order
(but not all at the same rate)
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Piaget’s stage theory
Stage
Sensorimotor stage
Characteristics
Typical Age
Substages 1-3
Ability to deal with situations is
limited to:
i) Having sensations and
producing actions; ii) The ‘here
and now’
0-8 months
Substages 4-6
Intentional actions emerge; trial
and error behaviour; object
concept – object permanence
develops; simple pretend play;
language acquisition
8-24 months
Preconceptual
period
Symbolic thought develops;
egocentrism; animism;
centration
2-4 years
Intuitive period
Judgements based on
appearance not logical thought;
less egocentric; unable to
conserve
4-7 years
Concrete operational stage
Conservation; seriation;
transitivity; class inclusion
7-11 years
Formal operational stage
Abstract concepts; hypothetical
12+ years
Preoperational stage
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Piaget’s Stage Theory of Cognitive Development
• In the first stage, the child ‘thinks’ by sensing (‘sensori-’) and
by performing actions on (‘-motor’) the world around it.
• It does not think by manipulating mental representations, like
an adult does.
• Characterised by profound egocentrism. Does not distinguish
between itself and the environment.
• Lack of object permanence. (Piaget argued object
permanence starts to develop around 8 months)
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SENSORIMOTOR STAGE
(0-2 YEARS)
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• During the sensorimotor stage a range of cognitive
abilities develop. These include:
–
–
–
–
Object permanence
Self-recognition
Deferred imitation
Representational play
• They relate to the emergence of the general
symbolic function, which is the capacity to
represent the world mentally
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GENERAL SYMBOLIC FUNCTION
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OBJECT PERMANENCE
• Objects are tied to infant’s awareness of them
• “out of sight, out of mind”
• 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
• 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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Typical age
Search behaviour
Before 8m
8-12m
Does not search for hidden object at all.
Searches for hidden object in initial hiding
place even if the object is moved to a second
hiding place while the child watches (the ‘A
not B error’)
Searches in most recent hiding place.
12-18m
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OBJECT PERMANENCE
• ‘Peekaboo’ is played across diverse cultures
(Fernald & O’Neill, 1993). Recorded in as diverse
communities as the US, Japan and Africa.
• 3-5 months – babies laughs and smiles as the adult’s
face moves in and out of view
• 5-8 months – baby shows anticipation.
• 12 months – babies start to imitate the game – then
it is the adult who acts more like an idiot.
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OBJECT PERMANENCE
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Piaget’s Sensorimotor
• According to Piaget – the journey from reflex behaviour
to thought is long and slow. For 18 months or so, babies
learn only from their movements (according to Piaget)
and do not make the breakthrough to conceptual
thought until 18-24 months.
• Modern tools and simplified tasks suggest infants master
conceptual thought earlier. What Piaget saw as inability
may have been due to immature linguistic and motor
skills.
• Infants more cognitively competent than Piaget
envisioned. He may have been mistaken with his
emphasis on motor skills as the prime engine of
cognitive growth.
• Understands use of symbols – ability to use symbols or mental
representations without cues. Able to use numbers, words, images
where the person has attached meaning. Also – pretend
play/fantasy play begins.
• Understanding objects in space – understand scale models, maps
and the objects or spaces they represent. In the mal experiment –
90% of 5 year olds & 60% of 4 year olds able to successfully find
objects.
• Understanding causality – while Piaget argued that children link
two events simply because they occur close in time and not
because of any sense of cause and effect relationship – evidence
suggests that children DO have a sense of cause and effect.
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Pre-operational stage (2 years – 7 years)
- Cognitive advances
• Understanding identities and categorisation – the idea that people
and many things are essentially the same even if they change
form, size or appearance. Ability to determine the difference
between living and non-living things (the difference between a
rock, a person and a doll). Also learn to label people as ‘good’ or
‘bad’ etc
• Understanding Number – by age 4, most children have words for
comparing quantities
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Pre-operational stage (2 years – 7 years)
- Cognitive advances
• Egocentrism
• Failure to understand CONSERVATION
• Lack THEORY OF MIND
• Failure to recognise FALSE BELIEFS
• Unable to distinguish between Appearance and Reality
• Difficulty distinguishing between Fantasy and Reality
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Pre-operational stage (2 years – 7 years)
- Immature aspects
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Pre-operational stage
(2 years – 7 years)
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Pre-operational stage
(2 years – 7 years)
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EGOCENTRIC CONVERSATIONS
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Procedures Used to Test Conservation
2
8
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Theory of mind –
Sally anne
• Children learn to carry out concrete operations – logical
manipulation of objects – cause and effect and other
relationships between objects
• Categorisation – arrange objects in a series according to
one or more dimensions; Class inclusion (10 flowers – 7 roses,
3 carnations – are there more roses than flowers? Say ‘roses’
because they compare roses with carnations rather than
looking at the entire bunch.
• Inductive reasoning (my dog bark’s, Doris’s dog barks, all
dogs bark)
• Spatial thinking – can use a map to find a hidden object;
can estimate distance to get from one place to another
• Number/math – can work out simple story problems
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PIAget – concrete operational
Capacity for Abstract Thought
Use symbols to represent other symbols (x = 8)
Appreciate allegory and metaphor
Think in terms of what might be rather than what is
Hypothetical-deductive thinking – the pendulum
problem
• Piaget believed that the attainment of the formal
operational stage in contrast to other stages is not
universal
•
•
•
•
•
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Piaget – formal operational
• 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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Inhelder and Piaget’s Pendulum Problem
• 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
• 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
• e.g. Greenfield’s study of the Wolof
• 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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Critique of Piaget’s Theory