Piaget Of The Infant Cognitive Development Essay

The purpose of this paper is to use the habituation technique in young infants to evaluate one hypothesis derived from piaget’s theory of cognitive development. I will compare 5-months olds in a task that involves possible and impossible outcomes. Piaget’s theory specifies the cognitive competencies of children of this age. Children in the sensorimotor stage experience the world through their senses and actions by looking, hearing, and touching. Object permanence is the recognition that things continue to exist even when they do not. Piaget would explain the absence of object permanence in young infants in which that infants

I handed my infant niece, Harper, a set of keys, thinking she would shake them and giggle at the noise they made. I thought this because in Piaget’s developmental stage, sensorimotor, it states that infants learn from experimenting and their main focus is what is happening in that very moment. My prediction was correct. As soon as I held the keys in front of her she began to reach for them. Then once I handed the keys to her, she rattled them making a clanging noise.

Cognitively, the way infants process information undergoes rapid changes during the infant’s first year. For instance, the Piagetian theory of cognitive development includes (1) the sensorimotor stage in which infants, through trial an error, build their understanding of things around the world (e.g. imitation of familiar behaviour); (p. 203, Chapter 6); (2) building schemas (e.g. a 5 month old child can move or drop an object fairly rigidly, whereas an older child can do the same action but with more intentional and creative movement);(p. 202, Chapter 6) and (3) the concept of object permanence (e.g. an infant knows that an object exists even though it is hidden encourages the child’s perceptual skills and awareness of the objects ‘realness’ in the world (p.

Infants from one to four months enjoy activities that promote stimulation. Activities such as sucking and wiggling toes and fingers, kicking, and babbling promote development during this age. Once infants develop a true sense of their environment they enter into the secondary circular reactions stage. Babies are now able to sit up and observe their surroundings; consequently, infants begin attempting to recreate events in their environment that they find interesting. For example, an infant may have noticed when a rattle is shaking it creates noise; therefore, the baby shakes the rattle to recreate the noise. Throughout four to eight months’ infants continue this behavior and build their skills providing preparation to act upon these skills in Piaget’s next

In Piaget's first stage of development, the sensorimotor period, which occurs from birth until the age of two, deals with infants discovering the world through their five senses; the infants learn also through applying their motor skills and polishing them. They can also only distinguish things that are present--which are able to be seen, touched, or heard--and ends when the infant can create mental representations in their minds of those objects.

The first stage is called the Sensorimotor stage. It occupies the first two years of a child's life, from birth to 2 years old. It is called the Sensorimotor stage because in it children are occupied with sensing things and moving them. From these activities they learn what makes things happen, what the connections are between actions and their consequences. They learn to grasp and hold and what happens when they let go.

Piaget believe that children are active thinkers. He recognized that the mind develops through a series of irreversible stages. He also acknowledged that a child’s maturing brain builds schemas that are constantly assimilating and accommodating to the world around them. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is split into four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. The sensorimotor stage occurs from birth to nearly two years of age. At this stage, infants learn about the world around them by sensing it and interacting within it. It is also in this stage that the idea of object permanence develops, that is, the awareness that things continue to exist even when they are not being observed. In my personal life, I am certain that in this stage of development I would have enjoyed peek-a-boo, because if I didn’t see it, to my developing mind, it wasn’t there at all. The second stage, preoperational, lasts from two years of age to seven years of

The child I observed for the project was my five year old cousin. The activity I observed her doing is playing dress up. She likes to dress up as batgirl, wear capes, and dress up as Elsa from Frozen because they both have brown hair. This is a prime example Piaget’s preoperational state of cognitive development. This stage is described as when a child uses symbolic thinking, use of proper syntax and grammar to express full concepts. When she comes to our house she also enjoys riding her bike, coloring, playing games, and playing at the park. My mom helps her make homemade play doe; this allows her to learn how to make things. The combinations of those activities are good for intellectual, emotional, and physical growth.

Secondary circular reactions is the third substage of Piaget’s sensorimotor stage. It occurs from four months to eight months and includes repeating pleasing actions that involve objects and the baby’s own body (McLeod, 2010). Two examples of the secondary circular reactions substage are, when an infant shakes a rattle for the pleasure of hearing the sound and when an infant coos to make a person stay near them. The fourth substage happens from eight to twelve months and is known as coordination of secondary circular reactions. During this substage, the infant now shows that they can use their knowledge to reach a goal (McLeod, 2010). The infant is now able to know to use a stick to bring a toy within reaching capacity (Santrock, 2015). Tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and curiosity occurs from twelve months to eighteen months and is the fifth substage of the sensorimotor stage. In the fifth substage, infants become interested in the many effects of objects and what they can make the objects do; such as spinning a block, making it fall, sliding it across the ground, and hitting another object (Santrock, 2015). Piaget’s last substage of the sensorimotor stage is internalization of schemes, this lasts from eighteen months to twenty-four months. Once infants reach this last substage, they can form mental representations of objects and “develop the ability to use primitive

Jean Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory describes four stages of human development which he described as naturally emerging reasoning and development. The first two stages can be described as sensori-motor development. In all stages of development, the child learns to adapt, assimilate, and accommodate new information into their thought process.  Stage one is Sensorimotor which lasts from birth to 2 years of age. There are six substages which the infant’s source of actions shifts from reflexes to

What are the major challenges to Piaget's theory of cognitive development and what aspects still have value?

The sensorimotor stage is focused from birth to two years. It is divided into six substages as the infant learns to coordinate their senses and motor skills. The content

In the first, or sensorimotor, stage (birth to two years), knowledge is gained primarily through sensory impressions and motor activity. Through these two modes of learning, experienced both separately and in combination, infants gradually learn to control their own bodies and objects in the external world. Toward the end of Piaget¡¦s career, he brought about the idea that action is actually the primary source of knowledge and that perception and language are more secondary roles. He claimed that action is not random, but has organization, as well as logic. Infants from birth to four months however, are incapable of thought and are unable to differentiate themselves from others or from the environment. To infants, objects only exist when they are insight

For this paper I will be exploring Piaget's theory of cognitive development. Swiss Psychologist Jean Piaget, theorized that children progress through four key stages of cognitive development that change their understanding of the world. By observing his own children, Piaget came up with four different stages of intellectual development that included: the sensorimotor stage, which starts from birth to age two; the preoperational stage, starts from age two to about age seven; the concrete operational stage, starts from age seven to eleven; and final stage, the formal operational stage, which begins in adolescence and continues into adulthood. In this paper I will only be focusing on the

The first stage of Piaget’s development theory is the sensorimotor stage which takes place in children most commonly 0 to 2 years old. In this stage, thought is developed through direct physical interactions with the environment. Three major cognitive leaps in this stage are the development of early schemes, the development of goal-oriented behavior, and the development of object permanence. During the early stages, infants are only aware of what is immediately in front of them. They focus on what they