COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

COGNITION is "the mental action or process of

acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought,
experience, and the senses. It encompasses
PROCESSES: such as
knowledge, attention, memory, judgment and
evaluation, etc. and
SCHEMA: mental structure of preconceived ideas, a
framework representing some aspect of the world,
or a system of organizing and perceiving new information.
 JEAN PIAGET’S THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Development occurs in stages that evolve via equilibration, in which

children seek a balance (equilibrium) between what they encounter in
their environments and cognitive processes and schemas they have
 Equilibration involves three stages:
 Accommodation
 Changing the existing schemas to fit the relevant new information
about the environment
 Assimilation
 Incorporating new information into the child’s existing schemas
 Equilibrium
 Occurs when child’s existing mode of thought and existing schemas
are adequate for confronting and adapting to the challenges of
environment
JEAN PIAGET’S THEORY OF
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

 Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 years)

 9 months and older have a sense of object permanence
 Knowledge that objects continue to exist even when imperceptible
to the infants
 Children begin to show signs of representational thought
 Child starts to be able to think about people and objects that are
not necessarily perceptible at that moment
JEAN PIAGET’S THEORY OF
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

 Preoperational Stage (2 to 6-7 years)

 The child begins actively to develop the internal
mental representations that started at the end of the
sensorimotor stage
 Children exhibit centration
A tendency to focus on only one especially noticeable
aspect of a complicated object or situation
JEAN PIAGET’S THEORY OF
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

 Concrete-Operational Stage (7-8 to 11-12)

 Children become able to manipulate mentally the
internal representations that they formed during the
preoperational period
 Conservation of quantity
 The child is able mentally to conserve (keep in mind) a
given quantity despite observing changes in the
appearance of the object or substance
JEAN PIAGET’S THEORY OF
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

 Formal-Operational Stage (older than 11-12 years)

 Children develop mental operations on abstractions
and symbols that may not have physical, concrete
forms
 Children are finally fully able to take on
perspectives other than their own, even when they
are not working with concrete objects
THANKS