Unraveling Early Childhood Cognitive Development: Piaget's Perspective

Early childhood is always the most important period of development in a human life. Young children do not only growing up physically during early childhood, but also growing up mentally. Children started to advance their skills in both observing and interacting to the world around them at their early age. They also make tremendous improvement on information processing, conceptual the resources, perceptual skill and language learning. When the children continue to grow up, they understand the world changes as a function of age and experience. This child is reaching a certain stage of cognitive development, which focuses on mental processes such as perceiving, remembering, believing, and reasoning. The most significant theory in cognitive development field is from Jean Piaget. Piaget was born in Switzerland and he was a biologist, philosopher, and behavioral scientist. He proposed children around the world proceeding through a series of four stages in a fixed order, which are the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete

This stage starts from birth to approximately age of two. During this period, infants are busy discovering relationships between their bodies and the environment. However, the infant’s knowledge of the world is limited to their sensory perceptions and motor activities. They understand the world primarily on touching, sucking, chewing and manipulating objects. Some symbolic abilities such as language and image using are developed at the end of this stage. According to Piaget, the development of object permanence is one of the most important accomplishments at the sensorimotor stage of development. Object permanence is a child 's understanding the objects continue to exist even when they are not allowed to see or. For example, if the mother places a toy under a blanket, the child can seek the toy easily. This proved that the child is achieved object