Piaget's Cognitive Analysis

I had absolutely no previous knowledge about cognitive development prior to researching about it this week. I had never heard of Jean Piaget either, but I am glad that I did because his theory of cognitive development is very interesting. I learned that cognitive development is the development of the thinking and organizing parts of the brain and it involves language, reasoning, problem solving, and memory. Piaget was the first psychologist to make a study of cognitive development. Before his studies, it was just assumed children were less capable thinkers than adults. The goal of his theory was to explain how an infant and child develop into an individual who can think and reason. There are four critical stages of Piaget’s theory of cognitive …show more content…
This stage begins at birth and end around the age of two. One of the most important accomplishments of this stage is object permanence. This means that a child understands that objects do not just disappear if they cannot be seen or heard, and that they still continue to exist. This was very interesting because I always wondered if a child thought I was really gone while playing peekaboo. I know now that a younger infant really does believe I am gone, while an older infant has learned that I am still there. During the sensorimotor stage, infants try to use the limited abilities they were born with, such as looking or grasping, to learn about the world around them. There are six sub-stages to the sensorimotor stage. One sub-stage I found very interesting was the tertiary circular reactions that happen between twelve and eighteen months of age. During this time, a child experiments through trial and error. For example, a child might try making different crying sounds to see which sound receives the most attention from their parent. The sensorimotor stage is very important because it is the first time a child gets to interact and learn from the world around …show more content…
I learned that during this stage, children began thinking logically and begin to understand mental operations; however, they still struggle with abstract ideas. One topic that interested me was that child understand reversibility during the concrete operational stage. Reversibility is the awareness that actions can be reversed. For example, if a ball deflates, we know that you can easily inflate the ball with an air pump. Children who do not understand reversibility will think that the ball is permanently flat. This is very interesting to me because I do not remember consciously learning that actions can be reversed. I did not know that reversibility was something that had to be learned. It seems like I have always had this knowledge, but I have learned that this is not the case. The concrete operational stage is also where egocentrism disappears. During the preoperational stage, children cannot take other people’s viewpoints into consideration and can only think about what they see. However, during the concrete operational stage, children are able to think about the way another person would see things. Additionally, I learned that children during this stage are good at using deductive reasoning, which is going from a specific experience to and general