Piaget’s Methods

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Did Piaget’s methods of assessing the cognitive abilities of children in the sensori-motor and pre-operational stages result in underestimation of these abilities? Jean Piaget’s Stage Theory consists of four main stages of cognitve development. Broadly speaking, Piaget has been accused of underestimating the cognitive abilities of children (pre-schoolers), and overestimating the cognitive abilities of adolescents. The three main measures cognitive abilities in children are preferential looking, habituation and violations of expectations. Infants show skills of learning and memory and visual perception when developing these abilities. Some psychologists believe that slight modifications of Piaget’s tasks meant that younger children could also complete the tasks that he claimed were restricted to older children. The aim of this essay is to evaluate whether Piaget’s tasks led to an underestimation of childrens’ cognitive abilities in the first two stages of development (the sensori-motor and pre-operational stages), and if so, to what extent. Piaget describes the sensori-motor stage as the period (containing six sub-stages) where infants ability to learn about their world is limited to the actions they perform on objects using their five senses. Piaget tested this using a search task, where a child is given an object to play with, the object is hidden from the child’s view, and observed how children responded to this situation. The key development in this period is the child’s understanding of the independent relationship between the child’s actions and the existence of objects and events in the world. Piaget claimed that by the end of this period, children have obtained object permanence, which is the ability to recognize that objects continue to exist even when out of sight. In the first sensori-motor stage, Piaget found that 0-1 month old infants gazed at
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