While Piaget’s cognitive theory consists of four stages (sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational) that children go through as they grow, McCrink and Wynn proposed a different theory of cognitive development. They developed a deeper theory suggesting that children are able to understand object permanence at an earlier age, 5-6 months, because they are able to track objects, or at least a very small limited amount at a time (McCrink & Wynn, 2004). This is because infants can remember and file objects in memory of the few objects that exist before them. In addition to object permanence, they can also discern when objects are added or subtracted before them not because
Jean Piaget best described the stages from birth to two years in what he called the sensorimotor stage. It is a stage based on infants and toddlers cognitive development. An infant uses his or her senses and motor abilities to understand the world, beginning with reflexes and ending with complex combinations of sensorimotor skills (Boeree, G.C. (2009). During the first four months of life, according to Piaget, infants interact with the world through primary circular reactions.
“Kiddy Thinks” In “Kiddy Thinks”, Alison Gopnik discusses the stages of thinking abilities of babies and young children. Using examples from her personal experiences as a parent and her experiments as a developmental psychologist, she defines these stages and explains the learning processes that take place during them. Through process analysis, Gopnik develops her thesis that babies and young children use the same learning strategies as scientists. Gopnik explains the stages of cognitive development for children from birth to the age of 4 years old. At birth, babies already know they are similar to other people.
These two ways are the processes in which we interconnect with the environment. Assimilation is the process of taking in new information and fitting it into and making it part of an existing mental idea about objects or the world. Accommodation refers to changing and existing mental idea in order to fit new information. The four stages of cognitive development are Sensorimotor stage (birth- two years) In this stage infants construct their understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences such as vision and touch with motor abilities. At the same time as a child begins to crawl they discover the idea of object permanence.
Every step controls a certain skill. Motor-sensory actions are transformed slowly to representation then to abstractions. Continuous transformations cause behavioral changes and skill levels shift as a person develops to an optimal level (2). Part B: Piaget vs. Vygotsky B1: Compare and Contrast Views on the Nature and development of Intelligence. When I contrast Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky I see that Jean Piaget believed that there are four developmental stages that everyone goes through to reach cognitive development.
(For full explanation on schemas, conservation, assimilation and accommodation and explanations of terminology see appendix 2). He put forward a theory of cognitive developmental stages and theorised that children would operate at a certain level/stage (this would also apply to adults in the Formal Operations stage). His particular insight was the role of maturation (growing up) in children's increasing capacity to understand their world: they cannot undertake certain tasks until they are psychologically mature enough to do so. He put forward a theory of 4 stages of development: Sensori-motor Birth – 2 years Preoperational 2 – 7 Years Concrete Operational 7 – 12 Years Formal Operational 12 Years and up (See appendix 1 for detailed description of four stages) Example of sensorimotor and contradiction of Piaget’s theory Children can be more cognitively skilled than Piaget recognised. For example, babies as young as four months appear to have a concept of object permanence and young children are capable of conservation if given meaningful context.
As a result, Jean Piaget proposed the cognitive development theory, which states that most children develop different ways of thinking through interacting with the environment (Santrock, 2010). According to Piaget’s theory, cognitive development occurs in four stages. The sensorimotor stage occurs in the period between birth and age two. Here, children start to learn from the environment and develop different aspects of language (Santrock, 2010). In addition, most children learn how to use different sensory and motor functions of the body.
Piaget’s theory of intellectual development is broken down into four stages; Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete operational, and Formal operational (Nixon & Aldwinckle, 2002). The “Sensorimotor stage” is the period of infancy to early toddlerhood (usually from birth to two years of age)and is divided into six sub stages, where children move from reflex dominated responses, to the beginnings of symbolic thought, as language starts to be used to represent reality. Children in this stage obtain and use knowledge primarily through motor action and sensory information (Nixon & Aldwinckle, 2002). The “Preoperational stage” covers the period between two and seven years of age, and is divided into two sub stages (Nixon & Aldwinckle, 2002). During this stage of cognitive development, children begin to think independently of actions and hold representation.
Both theorists said that a child’s cognitive development took places in stages but the way in which these theorists described the way children go through these stages was completely different. Piaget was the first theorist to say that children go through stages. He believed that there are four stages of cognitive development, these stages are: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational (Malim and Birch, 2005, p.462). During the first stage, sensorimotor, which Piaget believed happened when the child was between the ages of birth and two years, this is when the child only accepts things that are given to them. They learn about objects and develop their motor skills, they also learn about what happens when they do certain things, for example, if a child is lying in a cot with a mobile over their head they will learn that if they hit the mobile it will move so they will do it again and again.
This is achieved through the actions of the developing person on the world” (Cherry, 2010). Piaget created a theory of cognitive development of children, which breaks down into four different stages: Sensorimotor Stage Preoperational Stage Concrete Operational Stage Formal Operations Stage Piaget’s notion that infants were born with schemes beginning at birth called “reflexes”. Infants begin to use these reflexes to adapt to their environments, and then the schemes are replaced with more constructed schemes. Apart of Piaget’s theory was that what a child processes at a early age are based on actions then as the child gets older the processes later turn to mental operations. Piaget called these processes Assimilation and Accommodation.