Stages of Cognitive Development: A Piaget Perspective

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Reaction paper#2 Sree MMCC 1. Cognitive development is the development of thinking and reasoning abilities to know and perceive the world. Jean Piaget described the growth of intellectual process in four stages. Piaget believes that almost all the children, irrespective of their culture, go through the same four stages of cognitive development (Huffman & Dowdell, 2015). According Piaget each stage is essential and the order of the stages is fixed, because the skills learned in the earlier stages are mandatory for learning the skills of the later stages. The four stages are, a) sensorimotor stage, b) preoperational stage, c) concrete operational stage, d) formal operational stage. According Piaget, the first stage of cognitive development is …show more content…

The child cries and fusses for the ball instead of looking for it under the couch, because he lacks the “object permanence” which is an ability to realizing that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, touched or heard directly. Here the child thinks that ball does not exist, because he cannot see it. The child is in the sensorimotor stage of the Piaget’s stages of cognitive development. The concept of object permanence develops roughly around the age of 8 months during the Piaget’s sensorimotor stage of cognitive development. Example: A baby about 6 months of age was given a toy for a short period of time, then her mom took it and kept it under the pillow while the baby was watching, but the baby starts to become fussy. When her mom shows her the toy, she feels happy. Her mom repeats this several times while she watches but the baby lacks the object permanence and whenever she cannot see the toy, she believes it does not exist and becomes fussy and starts crying (White,

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