Cognitive Development
Jean Piaget believed that cognition develops in schemas which are groups of things that we keep in our minds and can resurface at a later time. For example, when you hear the word dog a picture of a dog should appear in your mind because of your previous experiences of knowing what a dog looks like and storing it inside of a schema. Schemas can group concepts, objects, and experiences.
Schema: cognitive framework that places a concept into categories and associations.
Schema: cognitive framework that places a concept into categories and associations.
Jean Piaget's stages of Cognitive Development:
Sensorimotor: birth - 2
*Infants take information through senses and actions* Four general trends in development within this stage: Reflexes to goal oriented activity, from the body to the outside world, development of object permanence(1), and from action to mental representation. 1. Object Permanence- the understanding that objects still exist, even when they are out of sight. Pre-operational Stage: Ages 2- 7 The operations are mental actions that follow systematic, logical rules. Children in this stage gain the ability to represent actions mentally rather than physically. Reasoning becomes a large role in this stage as children are learning to reason and figure out problems. Egocentrism(2) is another major aspect of the child's life. They are very self centered. 2. Egocentrism- the inability to see or understand things from someone else's perspective. Concrete Operations: Ages 7-12 In this stage, children can think logically. They are still unable to to understand abstract ideas. reversibility(3) allows children to overcome the pull towards perceptual biases when making judgements. 3. Reversibility: the ability to reverse mental operations. Formal Operations: Ages 12 and up The last stage of cognitive development. Children can begin to think with hypothetic- deductive reasoning(4) which allows them to generate possibilities and form hypothesis in order to answer questions. 4. Hypothetic- deductive reasoning: the ability to form hypotheses about how the world works and to reason logically about those hypotheses. |
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