Piaget's Cognitive Developmental Theory

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word cognition as; the mental process of knowing, including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning and judgment (Cognition). Piaget’s Cognitive Developmental theory was a unique concept at the time of its inception. It was the first in depth theory on the subject and remained the standard of the field for quite some time. Throughout this paper, Piaget’s theory will be broken down into its four stages and each will be thoroughly detailed. It is the goal of this paper to see how well Piaget’s ideas withstood the test of time and see what improvements can be made to the existing theory.

Piaget suggested that there were four major cognitive stages in logical development, corresponding to four successive forms of knowledge. During each of these stages, children were hypothesized to think and reason in a different way. These stages, and their approximate ages of occurrence, were: the sensory-motor period (0-2 years), the period of pre-operations (2-7 years), the period of concrete operations (7-11 years) and the period of formal operations (11-12 years on). Piaget recognized that the acquisition of each new way of thinking would not necessarily be synchronous across all the different domains of thought. Instead, he argued that the chronology of the stages might be extremely variable, and that such variability might also occur within a given stage. Thus the ages of attainment that Piaget gave for the different cognitive stages are only approximations (Goswami, 2001).

In the sensorimotor stage the child is concerned with gaining motor control and learning about the physical world (Evans, 1973). This stage promotes that thought is based primarily on action. Every time an infant does any action such as holding a bottle or learning to turn over, they are learning more about their bodies and how it relates to them and their environment. Piaget discovered that during this stage infants engage in an act he called circular reactions. He described them as actions that a child carries out repeatedly that allow the child to better grasp the physical world. These circular reactions are furthermore broken down into three additional categories. The three diverse categories are the primary circular reactions, secondary circular reactions and lastly tertiary circular reactions. The primary circular reactions develop between months one to four after birth. These reactions originally are begun by accident. After it happens, the child’s curiosity has been interested so the action is repeated in order for the child to get a better understanding of what he is doing. These types of actions are reflex actions that generally occur within the body. Some examples of this are repeatedly inserting objects into the mouth or a constant kicking of the legs. The secondary circular reactions develop at around four months of age and the stage lasts until the child is one year old. These actions are dependent on the happenings of the child’s surroundings. These actions are different from the primary circular reactions in that they are based on the child’s intentions rather than reflexes. The child explores the physical world in this stage by accidentally creating an event and then tries to recreate the event that just happened. What makes this action interesting is the child’s lack of understanding of cause and effect. Because of this, the child uses a process of elimination of his actions to recreate the accidental event. Examples of this behavior are hitting objects and pressing buttons that make noises. The third category is tertiary circular reactions. In this category the child acts like a scientist while interacting with his surroundings. During this stage, the child will consciously do things that will keep him entertained. This is shown by his more focused play with a singular toy in order to fully understand it. Another example is when he hits several different objects with another object to hear the different sounds each makes when it is struck. Lots of interesting things happen to the child during this stage, the most notable being the development of deferred imitation.

Some more interesting occurrences that Piaget observed develop during the sensorimotor stage are those of object permanence and means-end behavior. Piaget believed that object permanence was learned rather than intrinsically known at birth. He was able to prove this using the A-not-B experiment. While performing this experiment and from observing his test children, he discovered that object permanence develops gradually over time during the first two years of life. Means-end behavior shows an advance in the child’s reasoning skills. While exhibiting this behavior, the child performs a task in order to achieve a particular outcome. This is significant because it exhibits that the child has developed a grasp of cause and effect. The child’s development of language skills signifies the end of the sensorimotor stage.

In the preoperational stage the child’s understanding becomes more conceptual. Thinking involves mental concepts that are independent of immediate experience, and language enables children to think about unseen events, such as thoughts and feelings. The young child’s reasoning is intuitive and subjective (Encarta).

During this stage the child is preoccupied with verbal skills. At this point the child can name objects and reason intuitively. Piaget has divided this stage into the preconceptual phase and the intuitive phase. In the preconceptual phase children use language and try to make sense of the world but have a much less sophisticated mode of thought than adults. They need to test thoughts with reality on a daily basis. In the intuitive phase the child slowly moves away from drawing conclusions based solely on concrete experiences with objects. However, the conclusions drawn are based on rather vague impressions and perceptual judgments. The most notable advancement that occurs in the preoperational period is the emergence of language and the use of symbols in the child. With this new skill the child is better able to communicate with the outside world and therefore is better able to learn about it.

Throughout this stage the child runs into a multitude of obstacles with new concepts. Piaget performed many tests on the concept of conservation. What he discovered was that children in this stage are unable to comprehend that objects such as water and clay are able to conserve their intrinsic properties of volume and mass respectively. He attributed this inability to the fact that children of this age do not understand the concept of reversibility. This concept outlines how an object can take one shape and then be molded to take another. An example of this is pouring water