Piaget’s theory Flashcards
Explain Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.
Jean Paget was a Swiss psychologist who formulated a comprehensive theory of cognitive development. Piaget viewed cognitive development as a maturation process, as children develop, they have more cognitive structures. Piaget developed also the terms schemata and concepts. Schemata, refers to mental structures or rules that we use to organize knowledge and behavior. Concepts are rules that describe the properties of environmental events and their relationship to other concepts.
According to Piaget there are two processes to help children adapt in their environment:
Assimilation, is when we modify new information, to fit existing schemata, what we already know.
Accommodation, is happening when we modify what we already know, our old schemata, by new information. It produces new schemata or changes in the existing ones.
Piaget divided cognitive development into four periods:
Sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational.
Sensorimotor period, during that time infants try to understand the world through their sensory, like hearing and seeing and through their motor, like touching.
There are a lot of cognitive abilities develop at this stage. Some of those are object permanence, which is the understanding that objects occur and exist in the world despite one’s actions, deferred imitation, is when children can imitate actions who have seen being performed and self-recognition.
Towards the endpoint of this stage, infants’ start to think symbolically.
Preoperational period, from age 2 to age 7. Children start to think logically and symbolically. Is the stage where the ability to use language is rapidly developed. The symbolic representation consists of two types. Signifiers, the motor act signifies the concept and signs, words, that are symbols that have no physical resemblance to the concept.
Egocentrism, is also a common trait in this phase.
Concrete operational is from age 7 to age 11. Is the transition from childhood to adolescence. The abilities to empathize with others, performing logical analysis and understand more complex cause and effect relations are developed through that time.
Formal operational, begins at 11, children at this period start to think in an abstract manner. Children also start to get more influenced by cultural variables, like school.
Piaget also made a point about play and its role in social and cognitive development. Play for him it wasn’t a social behavior but rather a cognitive behavior. Play is the opposite of imitation. When children imitate, accommodation dominates assimilation, when children play the opposite occurs.
