Cognitive Development In Early Childhood

Cognitive development is the process that leads to the emergence of the ability to think and understand (Siegler, DeLoache, Eisenberg, & Saffran, 2014). This process involves the “development of thinking and reasoning” (Siegler et al., 2014, p.15) throughout childhood, including the growth of capabilities such as “perception, attention, language, problem solving, reasoning, memory, conceptual understanding, and intelligence” (Siegler et al., 2014, p. 131). Children contribute to their development through self-initiated activity even before they are born, by practicing breathing and digestive processes and exercising

Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, studied cognitive development from a biological perspective. As part of his theory, he looked at organization and adaptation which were the two main principles in the human 's mind and development. He further explained that human beings dependably strive to acquire a state of balance. Adaptation occurs when children encounter cognitive disability, this is known as, the situation where children will see the world as it is, and what they’re experiencing. Therefore, children incorporate new information and combine it with the existing one. Piaget refers to this as accommodation. This process occurs when new information does not fit well in the structures that already exists. For example, a child sees an earthworm

Cognitive abilities enable children to process the sensory information that they collect from the environment. According to Wood, Smith and Grossniklaus (2012), Piaget defined cognitive development as the progressive reorganization of the mental processes that results in biological experience and maturation. As numerous researchers have explained, children normally undergo many changes from birth to adolescents, most of them being growth related. According to Cook (2005), the changes in thinking is what researchers call cognitive development. In toddlers, cognitive development is observed through the early use of tools and objects, the child’s behavior when objects are moved in front of them and their understanding when objects and when people are in their environment. As observed with Taylor, he could easily tell that someone new had come in his house and he did not respond to me the way he responded to his mother. Cognitive development during childhood plays a vital role in their future abilities and

Child development is one of the main aspects of growing and developing as a human being, especially Cognitive Development. Encyclopedia of Children’s Health defines cognitive development as “The construction of thought processes, including remembering, problem solving, and decision-making from childhood through adolescence to adulthood.” Starting from a young age, babies begin to learn about the world that surrounds them. They learn and absorb new information in the environment that surrounds them. These skills continue to grow stronger as babies brain continue to develop more through experiences and the expansion of their surroundings. As they become older, they will find it more difficult to develop

The overall idea surrounding Piaget’s Cognitive Development theory is that development is solely dependent upon maturation. Piaget believed that people simply developed as they got older, without environmental factors affecting development. The concrete operational stage explains cognitive development in children that are seven to twelve years old. Children this age display logic skills, the ability to apply rules and categories, and are able to infer. This is also the stage where children are supposed to learn to take in multiple variables and develop the skill of conservation.

According to Piaget there are four stages of intelligence. They are as follows: the Sensorimotor stage from birth to 2 years of age. In this stage Piaget states that the child is able to objects and stimuli but lack an internal representation of the outside world. The Preoperational stage from ages two to seven in which the child is able to use language to communicate, they also have the ability to think in images and draw those images. The Concrete Operational stage from ages seven - eleven is where the child should be using logical reasoning and is able to think in multiple dimensions. The last stage is the Formal Operational stage, which lasts from age eleven to adulthood. In this phase the child/adult has the increased ability to have idealistic, logical and abstract thoughts. Piaget also developed the idea of a schema. A schema is how people organize the information they gather into smaller

Erikson's stages of life include eight main stages. The first stage is infancy and it starts at 0 to 1 year of age and the basic conflict is called trust vs mistrust. In this stage, infants begin to start developing trust when their caregivers provide care, reliability, and affection. Lack of this will lead to mistrust. The second stage is early childhood and it starts at 2 to 3 years of age and the basic conflict is called autonomy vs shame and doubt. In this stage, children build up personal control over their physical skills and mostly their independence. Success over this will cause feelings of autonomy and failure leads to shame and doubt. The third stage is preschool and it starts at 3 to 5 years of age and the basic conflict is initiative vs guilt. In this stage, children assert

Throughout the year we have learned about many different theorists who have done a great but also horrible job at explaining adolescent/ young adult development. In this paper I will be talking about Freud and Piaget, and how I think that Piaget was the better theorist than Freud when it comes to talking about development. I will also be talking about the similarities and difference between the two. For starters, what are their specific steps of development?

Sensorimotor Stage: During this stage parents can encourage the object permanence accomplishments, the feeling that the object exists even if they can’t be seen. Parents can hide the favorite toys of their infant’s partially, which makes the infant reach for the toys and as the infant grows, the toys can be hidden completely for the infant to look for.

Cognitive development is a process which enhancing the ability of learning. The cognitive theories emphasize on conscious thoughts which highlight the mental aspects of development such as logic and memory. The primary factors of cognitive theories is the structure and development of the individual’s thought processes and the means of these processes can effort the person’s understanding of the world. Therefore, the cognitive theories study on how this understanding, and the expectations it creates, can affect the individual’s behavior. There are three types of cognitive development theories in human which are Piaget’s Cognitive development theory, Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Cognitive theory and Information-Processing theory. (refer to Figure 1 in Appendix 1). All of them focus on the development of complex thinking skills.

Between birth to 6 months babies and children use their senses to become aware e.g. knowing they are hungry, as well as recognising key people in their lives and responding to physical smiles. In the next 6 months, they are beginning to understand tone of voice and begin to have favourite toys. Between 1 to 2 years children start to use objects correctly e.g. a cup. At this point they have a rapidly extending vocabulary and show awareness of others. 3 to 4 years is the age when children are fascinated by why things happen. By age 4 they can give reasons for their actions, remember major events and sort objects by colour and size.

It stresses on learning through thinking. It studies how people treat, organize, and transform information to affect their behavior. The most representative theorist of cognitive theory is Jean Piaget (1896-1980). He was born in Switzerland, and he has three children. It is impressive that most of his research is based on observation and studying of his own children. Cognitive development stages are the central part of Piaget’s theory, which demonstrate the development stages of children’s ability to think from infancy to adolescence, how to gain knowledge, self-awareness, awareness of the others and the environment. These stages are respectively relative to 4 ranges of age. It consists of characteristics of each stage and phenomena of each. The first stage between birth to 2 years old, children learn the external through senses and action, instinctively. They sense object permanently and they usually show anxiety to strangers. The second stage is between age of 2 to 6 years old, children form ideas with words and images, which is tend to be over generalizing. Developmental phenomena of this stage include pretending play, egocentrism and language development. And then the third stage from 7 to 11 years old, children think logically about concrete events and understand similar events. In this period, abilities of conversation and mathematical transformation get to be developed. Last stage, 12

Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who regarded cognitive development as a maturational process (Martin, Carlson & Buskist, 2010). Piaget constructed his conclusions through the observation of his own children and children at his Centre of Genetic Epistemology in Geneva. Piaget observed that children depend on an altered type of thinking when compared to the way in which adults think. A child’s thinking is qualitatively different than an adult’s thinking. Through his study, Piaget found that children of a similar age are inclined to behave in a similar manner and make similar mistakes when problem-solving. According to Piaget, as children develop they acquire cognitive structures known as schemata and concepts. Schemata are mental representations / rules to help children understand their world and solve problems. Concepts are rules that describe properties of environmental events and their relations to other concepts (Martin, Carlson & Buskist, 2007). Children obtain schemata and concepts by engaging with their surroundings. The

Cognition is a process where different aspects of the mind are working together that lead to knowledge. Piaget’s cognitive development theory is based on stages that children go through as they grow that lead them to actively learn new information. Cognitive change occurs with schemes that children and adults go through to make sense of what is happening around them. The change that occurs is activity based when the child is young and later in life correlates to mental thinking. Piaget’s stages of cognitive development start from birth to adulthood and it begins with the sensorimotor stage, a child from birth to the age of 2 years old learns and thinks by doing and figuring out how something works. The second stage is the preoperational stage and in this stage children from ages 2 through 7 years are developing their language and they do pretend play (Berk, 2005, p.20). Concrete operational is the third stage and children ages 7 to 11 years old lack abstract but have more logic than they did when they were younger. The last stage is formal

Cognition is the study of the mind works. When we study cognitive development, we are acknowledging the fact that changes occur in how we think and learn as we grow. There is a very big difference in the way that children and adults think about and understand their environment.