Piaget's Theory Of Cognitive Development Research

Cognitive development of the human brain has been a source of interest for generations of educators, researchers, and psychologists. The Stanford Binet Intelligence Quotient was used in the early 1900s. Behaviorists, John Watson and B.F. Skinner, began to study children and hypothesized that children were impressionable and transformable. These researchers believed that through reward of good behavior and discouragement of unacceptable behavior a child’s environment would shape the learning abilities. From the 50s to the 70s, research was performed in order to understand the physical interworking of the human brain; however, this was limited by technology of the era to the post-mortem study of animal and human brains. Throughout history experts …show more content…
Cognitive development can be defined as the formation of thought processes. This type of development refers to how a person perceives, thinks, and gains understanding of his or her surroundings through the synergy of genetic factors and learning. The processing of information, intelligence, reasoning, language development, and memory are all areas of cognitive development. Piaget worked in Alfred Binet’s laboratory assisting in the development of IQ tests. While working on this project, Piaget began noticing answers children gave on the tests and became very interested in the thought processes of …show more content…
From birth to around two years of age, children use their senses to learn about the world around them. Infants notice movement and changes in sights and sounds of the environment. A child learns to identify familiar faces such as parents and family members and even begin to mimic facial expressions. Infants and young toddlers explore the properties of objects around them; often by placing them in their mouths. Children at this age also begin to recognize simple words such as yes and no. From 18 months to two years old, a child is increasingly verbal and may understand 100 to 150 words and add new words daily. One key component of this stage is that the child begins to understand what Piaget called “object permanence”. The ability to comprehend this concept involves a child realizing that objects do not disappear simply because they are out of sight. Object permanence is a crucial step since it leads to the ability to construct a mental representation. Piaget used the term schema to apply to the concept of mental representation. This idea is an essential part of Piaget’s whole belief of the way a mind develops. Schemas are categories created by the human mind in order to organize different objects as they are