Piaget's Cognitive Development Summary

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Jean Piaget (1896-1980) is one of the most influential developmental psychologists of all time, his work was dedicated on cognitive development and the adaptations children go through as they adjust to their external environment. As the children he studied got older, Piaget found that their schemas -a set of thoughts and ideas that are relevant to a certain set of circumstances- got more complex and advanced. He noted that although ones schema may be very similar to someone with a similar upbringing, inevitably, everyone’s is different because they have gone through different experiences. He also believed that adaptation depended on two different processes: accommodation- in which the individuals own schema is changed to suitably manage their …show more content…

These were: the sensorimotor stage, pre-operational stage, concrete operational stage and formal operational stage. The sensorimotor stage is the first stage children go through up until the age of two, at this point, they gather knowledge through their senses and movement around their immediate environment. They are not able to distinguish themselves from their environment and assume that they view the same perspectives as others, this is known as profound egocentrism. They also fail to acknowledge object permanence, in which an object continues to exist even though it is out of sight, for babies however, this awareness is very limited and they only know of which they see. It is only later in the sensorimotor stage that they are able to obtain this knowledge gradually children as they develop general symbolic function, whereby they are able to understand and replicate objects that are not in front of …show more content…

Through his work, he has allowed for further research into this sector and enabled others with the opportunity to also conduct similar studies to correlate with his findings. However, his work has been criticized for being too ambitious and overestimating the difference in stages while also underestimating the developmental transition process between them. He assumes cognitive development to be strategical and set regardless of environmental factors, but is unable to back up this point with evidence. One other critique is that of Piaget’s sensorimotor stage theory, its been challenged under the notion that an eight month old baby may very well understand object permanence but is physically unable to reach and search for and have even lost interest in trying to find

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