Piaget Development's

Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Swiss theorist Jean Piaget inspired a vision of children as
busy, motivated explorers whose thinking develops as they act
directly on the environment. Influenced by his background in biology,
Piaget believed that the child’s mind forms and modifies psychological
structures so they achieve a better fit with external reality.
 Schema
• Cognitive or mental structure by which individuals intellectually adapt
to and organize the environment.
• Concepts or categories
• Schemas never stop / become more refined
• In Piaget’s theory, two processes, adaptation and organization,
account for changes in schemes.
Adaptation :Interaction with the environment. It consists of two
complementary activities, assimilation and accommodation.
Assimilation: we use our current schemes to interpret the external
world.
We integrate new perceptual, motor, conceptual matter into existing
schema.
Assimilation: we use our current
schemes to interpret the external
world.
We integrate new perceptual,
motor, and conceptual matter into
an existing schema.
• In accommodation, we create new schemes or adjust old ones after
noticing that our current ways of thinking do not capture the
environment completely
Organization. Schemes also change throughout the organization, a
process that takes place internally, apart from direct contact with the
environment. Once children form new schemes, they rearrange them,
linking them with other schemes to create a strongly interconnected
cognitive system
 The Sensorimotor Stage
• The difference between the
newborn baby and the 2‐year‐
old child is so vast that Piaget
divided the sensorimotor stage
into six substages
 Circular reaction
• According to Piaget, at birth infants know so little that they cannot
explore purposefully. The circular reaction provides a special means of
adapting their first schemes. It involves stumbling onto a new
experience caused by the baby’s own motor activity. The reaction is
“circular” because, as the infant tries to repeat the event again and
again, a sensorimotor response that first occurred by chance
strengthens into a new scheme
• The circular reaction initially centers on the infant’s own body but
later turns outward, toward the manipulation of objects. In the
second year, it becomes experimental and creative, aimed at
producing novel outcomes
 Repeating Chance Behaviors
• . Piaget saw newborn reflexes as the building blocks of sensorimotor
intelligence. In Substage 1, babies suck, grasp, and look in much the
same way, no matter what experiences they encounter. Around 1
month, as babies enter
• Substage 2, they start to gain voluntary control over their actions through
the primary circular reaction, by repeating chance behaviors largely
motivated by basic needs. This leads to some simple motor habits, such as
sucking their fist or thumb. Babies in this substage also begin to vary their
behavior in response to environmental demands. For example, they open
their mouths differently for a bottle than for a spoon. And they start to
anticipate events. When hungry, 3‐month‐old Would stop crying as soon as
his mother entered the room—a signal that feeding time was near.
Period 1 (0 -1) month: Reflex activity
Object Concept: No differentiation of self from other objects
Period (1-4) months : First
Differentiation
Thumb-sucking frequently becomes habitual and reflects hand-mouth
coordination.
Moving objects are followed with eyes (eye coordination)
The head is moved in the direction of sounds (eye-ear coordination)
Infant’s responses are purely reflexive. No differentiation is made
between stimuli. Toward the end of the period, 1 infant begins to
distinguish between objects.
• Transition from random
to clearly coordinated
thumb sucking
Eye coordination
Eye ear coordination
 Secondary Circular Reaction
• During Substage 3, from 4 to 8 months, infants sit up and reach for
and manipulate objects. These motor achievements strengthen the
secondary circular reaction, through which babies try to repeat
interesting events in the surrounding environment that are caused by
their own actions.
• For example, a 4‐month‐old Child accidentally knocked a toy hung in
front of her, producing a fascinating swinging motion. Over the next
three days, Caitlin tried to repeat this effect, gradually forming a new
“hitting” scheme. Improved control over their own behavior permits
infants to imitate others’ behavior more effectively
 Coordination of secondary circular
reactions (8–12 months)
• 8‐ to 12‐month‐ olds combine schemes into new, more complex
action sequences. As a result, actions that lead to new schemes no
longer have a hit‐or‐miss quality—accidentally bringing the thumb to
the mouth or happening to hit the toy. Instead, 8‐ to 12‐month‐olds
can engage in intentional, or goal‐directed, behavior, coordinating
schemes deliberately to solve simple problems.
 Piaget’s famous object‐hiding
task, in which he shows the baby
an attractive toy and then hides it
behind his hand or under a cover.
Infants of this substage can find
the object by coordinating two
schemes—“pushing” aside the
obstacle and “grasping” the toy.
Piaget regarded these means-end
action sequences as the
foundation for all problem-solving
 A‐not‐B search error
• Retrieving hidden objects reveals that infants have begun to master
object permanence, the understanding that objects continue to exist
when out of sight. But this awareness is not yet complete.
• Babies still make the A‐not‐B search error: If they reach several times
for an object at a first hiding place (A), then see it moved to a second
(B), they still search for it in the first hiding place (A). Consequently,
Piaget concluded, they do not have a clear image of the object as
persisting when hidden from view.
 Tertiary circular reactions (12–18
months)

In this substage, the tertiary circular reaction, in which toddlers

repeat behaviors with variation, emerges.
According to Piaget, this capacity to experiment leads to a more
advanced understanding of object permanence. Toddlers look for a
hidden toy in several locations, displaying an accurate A–B search.
Their more flexible action patterns also permit them to imitate many
more behaviors—stacking blocks, scribbling on paper, and making
funny faces.
 Mental representation (18 months–
2 years)
Internal depictions of information that the mind can manipulate. Our
most powerful mental representations are of two kinds: (1) images, or
mental pictures of objects, people, and spaces; and (2) concepts, or
categories in which similar objects or events are grouped together.
We use a mental image to retrace our steps when we’ve misplaced
something or to imitate another’s behavior long after observing it. By
thinking in concepts and labeling them (for example, “ball” for all
rounded, movable objects used in play), we become more efficient
thinkers, organizing our diverse experiences into meaningful,
manageable, and memorable units
• Piaget noted that 18‐ to 24‐month‐olds arrive at solutions suddenly
rather than through trial‐and‐error behavior. In doing so, they seem
to experiment with actions inside their heads— evidence that they
can mentally represent their experiences.
• For example, at 19 months, a child—after bumping her new push
toy against a wall—paused for a moment as if to “think,” then
immediately turned the toy in a new direction.
• Representation also enables older toddlers to solve advanced object
permanence problems involving invisible displacement— finding a toy
moved while out of sight, such as into a small box while under a cover.
• It permits deferred imitation—the ability to remember and copy the
behavior of models who are not present. And it makes possible make‐
believe play, in which children act out everyday and imaginary
activities. As the sensorimotor stage draws to close, mental symbols
have become major instruments of thinking
 The preoperational stage,
2 to 7 years
The most obvious change is an extraordinary increase in
representational, or symbolic, activity
 Advances in Mental Representation
• Piaget acknowledged that language is our most flexible means of
mental representation. By detaching thought from action, language
permits far more efficient thinking than was possible earlier. When we
think in words, we overcome the limits of our momentary
experiences. We can deal with past, present, and future at once and
combine concepts in unique ways
• But Piaget did not regard language as the primary ingredient in
childhood cognitive change. Instead, he believed that sensorimotor
activity leads to internal images of experience, which children then
label with words (Piaget, 1936/1952). In support of Piaget’s view,
children’s first words have a strong sensorimotor basis.
 Make‐believe play
• Make‐believe play is another excellent example of the development
of representation in early childhood. Piaget believed that through
pretending, young children practice and strengthen newly acquired
representational schemes. Drawing on his ideas, several investigators
have traced the development of make-believe during the preschool
years
 Case Study
• One day, S’s 20‐month‐old brother, D, visited the classroom. D
wandered around, picked up a toy telephone receiver, said, “Hi,
Mommy,” and then dropped it. Next, he found a cup, pretended to
drink, and then toddled off again.
• Meanwhile, S joined V and P in the block area for a space shuttle
launch. “That can be our control tower,” S suggested, pointing to a
corner by a bookshelf. “Countdown!” he announced, speaking into his
“walkie‐talkie”—a small wooden block. “Five, six, two, four, one,
blastoff!” P made a doll push a pretend button, and the rocket was
off! Comparing D’s pretend play with S’s, we see three important
changes that reflect the preschool child’s growing symbolic mastery
Three important changes that reflect the preschool child’s growing symbolic
master

• Play detaches from the real‐life conditions associated with it. In early
pretending, toddlers use only realistic objects—a toy telephone to
talk into or a cup to drink from. Their earliest pretend acts usually
imitate adults’ actions and are not yet flexible. Children younger than
age 2, for example, will pretend to drink from a cup but refuse to
pretend a cup is a hat (Rakoczy, Tomasello, & Striano, 2005). They
have trouble using an object (cup) that already has obvious use as a
symbol of another object (hat).
• After age 2, children pretend with less realistic toys (a block for a
telephone receiver). Gradually, they can imagine objects and events
without any support from the real world, as S’s imaginary control
tower illustrates (O’Reilly, 1995; Striano, Tomasello, & Rochat, 2001).
And by age 3, they flexibly understand that an object (a yellow stick)
may take on one fictional identity in one pretend game (a toothbrush)
and another fictional identity (a carrot) in a different pretend game .
2. Play becomes less self‐centered. At first, make‐believe is directed
toward the self—for example, D pretends to feed only himself. Soon,
children's direct pretend actions toward other objects, as when a child
feeds a doll. Early in the third year, they become detached participants,
making a doll feed itself or pushing a button to launch a rocket
(McCune, 1993). Increasingly, preschoolers realize that agents and
recipients of pretend actions can be independent of themselves
[Link] includes more complex combinations of schemes.
• D can pretend to drink from a cup, but he does not yet combine
pouring and drinking. Later, children combine schemes with those of
peers in sociodramatic play, the make-believe with others that is
underway by the end of the second year and increases rapidly in
complexity during early childhood (Kavanaugh, 2006). Already, S and
his classmates can create and coordinate several roles in an elaborate
plot. By the end of early childhood, children have a sophisticated
understanding of role relationships and storylines (Göncü, 1993).
 Limitations of Piaget’s Theory
• Egocentrism: For Piaget, the most fundamental deficiency of
preoperational thinking is egocentrism—the failure to distinguish
others’ symbolic viewpoints from one’s own. He believed that when
children first mentally represent the world, they tend to focus on their
own viewpoint and simply assume that others perceive, think, and
feel the same way they do
 Three Mountain Problem
• He also regarded egocentrism as
responsible for preoperational
children’s animistic thinking—the
belief that inanimate objects have
lifelike qualities, such as thoughts,
wishes, feelings, and intentions
(Piaget, 1926/1930). S’s firm
insistence that someone must have
turned on the thunder. According to
Piaget, because young children
egocentrically assign human purposes
to physical events, magical thinking is
common during the preschool years.
• Piaget argued that preschoolers’ egocentric bias prevents them from
accommodating or reflecting on and revising their faulty reasoning in
response to their physical and social worlds.
 Inability to Conserve
Piaget’s famous conservation tasks reveal a variety of deficiencies in
preoperational thinking. Conservation refers to the idea that certain
physical characteristics of objects remain the same, even when their
outward appearance changes. At snack time, Priti and Sammy had
identical boxes of raisins, but when Priti spread her raisins out on the
table, Sammy was convinced that she had more
 Liquid Conservation
• In another conservation task involving liquid,
the child is shown two identical tall glasses of
water and asked if they contain equal
amounts. Once the child agrees, the water in
one glass is poured into a short, wide
container, changing its appearance but not its
amount. Then the child is asked whether the
amount of water has changed. Preoperational
children think the quantity has changed. They
explain, “There is less now because the water
is way down here” (that is, its level is so low)
or “There is more now because it is all spread
out
The inability to conserve highlights several related
aspects of preoperational children’s thinking.
• First, their understanding is centered, or characterized by centration.
They focus on one aspect of a situation, neglecting other important
features. In the conservation of liquid, the child centers on the height
of the water, failing to realize that changes in width compensate for
changes in height.
• Second, children are easily distracted by the perceptual appearance
of objects.
• Third, children treat the initial and final states of the water as
unrelated events, ignoring the dynamic transformation (pouring of
water) between them
 Irreversibility
• The most important illogical feature of preoperational thought is its
irreversibility, an inability to mentally go through a series of steps in a
problem and then reverse direction, returning to the starting point.
Reversibility is part of every logical operation. After Priti spills her
raisins, Sammy cannot reverse by thinking, “I know that Priti doesn’t
have more raisins than I do. If we put them back in that little box, her
raisins and my raisins would look just the same.
 Lack of Hierarchical Classification
• Lack of Hierarchical Classification. Preoperational children have
difficulty with hierarchical classification—the organization of objects
into classes and subclasses based on similarities and difference
 Piaget’s famous class inclusion
problem
Preoperational children center on
the overriding feature, red. They
do not think reversibly by moving
from the whole class (flowers) to
the parts (red and blue) and back
again.
 Piaget and Education
Three educational principles derived from Piaget’s theory continue to
have a major impact on both teacher training and classroom practices,
especially during early childhood:
Discovery learning. In a Piagetian classroom, children are encouraged
to discover for themselves through spontaneous interaction with the
environment. Instead of presenting ready‐made knowledge verbally,
teachers provide a rich variety of activities designed to promote
exploration, including art, puzzles, table games, dress‐up clothing,
building blocks, books, measuring tools, and musical instrument
• Sensitivity to children’s readiness to learn:
• Acceptance of individual differences. Piaget’s theory assumes that all
children go through the same sequence of development but at
different rates. Therefore, teachers must plan activities for individual
children and small groups, not just for the whole class. In addition,
teachers evaluate educational progress in relation to the child’s
previous development, rather than on the basis of normative
standards, or the average performance of same‐age peer
 Concrete Operational Thought
Conservation. The ability to pass conservation tasks provides clear
evidence of operations—mental actions that obey logical rules.
Capable of decentration, focusing on several aspects of a problem
and relating them, rather than centering on just one.
 Demonstrates reversibility, the capacity to think through a series of
steps and then mentally reverse direction, returning to the starting
point
Classification: Between ages 7 and 10, children pass Piaget’s class
inclusion problem (see page 229). This indicates that they are more
aware of classification hierarchies and can focus on relations between a
general category and two specific categories at the same time—that is,
on three relations at once (Hodges & French, 1988; Ni, 1998).
Collections—stamps, coins, baseball cards, rocks, bottle caps—become
common in middle childhood.
• Seriation. The ability to order items along a quantitative dimension,
such as length or weight, is called seriation. To test it, Piaget asked
children to arrange sticks of different lengths from shortest to longest
• Older preschoolers can put the sticks in a row, but they do so
haphazardly, making many errors. In contrast, 6‐ to 7‐year‐olds create
the series efficiently, moving in an orderly sequence from the smallest
stick, to the next largest, and so on.
• The concrete operational child can also seriate mentally, an ability
called transitive inference.
 Transitive inference problem
• Piaget showed children pairings of sticks of different
colors. From observing that Stick A is longer than Stick
B and Stick B is longer than Stick C, children must infer
that A is longer than C. Like Piaget’s class inclusion task,
transitive inference requires children to integrate three
relations at once— in this instance, A–B, B–C, and A–C.
When researchers take steps to ensure that children
remember the premises (A–B and B–C), 7‐year‐olds can
grasp transitive inference (Andrews & Halford, 1998;
Wright, 2006).
 Spatial Reasoning.
• Piaget found that school‐age children’s understanding of space is
more accurate than that of preschoolers. Let’s consider children’s
cognitive maps—mental representations of familiar large‐scale
spaces, such as their neighborhood or school. Drawing a map of a
large‐scale space requires considerable perspective‐taking skills.
Because the entire space cannot be seen at once, children must infer
its overall layout by relating its separate par
• Preschoolers and young school‐age children include landmarks on the
maps they draw, but their arrangement is not always accurate. They
do better when asked to place stickers showing the location of desks
and people on a map of their classroom. But if the map is rotated to a
position other than the orientation of the classroom, they have
difficulty (Liben & Downs, 1993).
Around age 8 to 10, children’s maps become better organized,
showing landmarks along an organized route of travel. At the same
time, children can give clear, well‐organized instructions for getting
from one place to another by using a “mental walk” strategy—
imagining another person’s movements along a route (Gauvain &
Rogoff, 1989).
By the end of middle childhood, children combine landmarks and
routes into an overall view of a large‐scale space. And they readily
draw and read maps of extended outdoor environments, even when
the orientation of the map and the space it represents do not match
(Liben, 2009).
 Limitation of Concrete operational
Thought
• Children think in an organized, logical fashion only when dealing with
concrete information they can perceive directly. Their mental
operations work poorly with abstract ideas—ones not apparent in the
real world. Consider children’s solutions to transitive inference
problems.
• When shown pairs of sticks of unequal length, the concrete
operational child can easily engage in transitive inference. But she had
difficulty with a hypothetical version of this task: “Susan is taller than
Sally, and Sally is taller than Mary. Who is the tallest?” Not until age
11 or 12 can children solve this problem.
• Children master concrete operational tasks step by step. For example,
they usually grasp the conservation of numbers first, followed by the
conservation of length, liquid, mass, and then weight. This continuum
of acquisition (or gradual mastery) of logical concepts is another
indication of the limitations of concrete operational thinking (Fischer
& Bidell, 1991). Rather than producing general logical principles that
they apply to all relevant situations, school‐age children seem to work
out the logic of each problem separately
 Question
 A 6‐ to 8‐year‐old and a 9‐ to 12‐year‐old to draw a neighborhood
map showing important landmarks, such as the school, a friend’s
house, or a shopping area. In what ways do the children’s maps differ?
 The Formal operational Stage
• According to Piaget, around age 11 young people enter the formal
operational stage, in which they develop the capacity for abstract,
systematic, scientific thinking.
• Whereas concrete operational children can “operate on reality,”
formal operational adolescents can “operate on operations.” They no
longer require concrete things or events as objects of thought.
Instead, they can come up with new, more general logical rules
through internal reflection (Inhelder & Piaget, 1955/1958)
 Hypothetico-deductive reasoning
• Piaget believed that in adolescence, young people first become
capable of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. When faced with a
problem, they start with a hypothesis, or prediction about variables
that might affect an outcome, from which they deduce logical,
testable inferences. Then they systematically isolate and combine
variables to see which of these inferences are confirmed in the real
world
 Piaget’s pendulum problem
• Adolescents’ performance on Piaget’s famous pendulum problem
illustrates this approach. Suppose we present several school-age
children and adolescents with strings of different lengths, objects of
different weights to attach to the strings, and a bar from which to
hang the strings Then we ask each of them to figure out what
influences the speed with which a pendulum swings through its arc
• Formal operational adolescents hypothesize that four variables might
be influential: (1) the length of the string, (2) the weight of the object
hung on it, (3) how high the object is raised before it is released, and
(4) how forcefully the object is pushed.
• By varying one factor at a time while holding the other three
constant, they test each variable separately and, if necessary, also in
combination. Eventually they discover that only string length makes a
difference.
 Piaget’s pendulum problem
Adolescents who engage in hypothetico-
deductive reasoning think of variables
that might possibly affect the speed
with which a pendulum swings through
its arc. Then they isolate and test each
variable, as well as test the variables in
combination. Eventually, they deduce
that the weight of the object, the height
from which it is released, and how
forcefully it is pushed have no effect on
the speed with which the pendulum
swings through its arc. Only string
length makes a difference
Difference between Formal operation and
concrete operational child on pendulum problem
• In contrast, concrete operational children cannot separate the effects
of each variable. They may test for the effect of string length without
holding weight constant—comparing, for example, a short, light
pendulum with a long, heavy one. Also, they typically fail to notice
variables that are not immediately suggested by the concrete
materials of the task—for example, how high the object is raised or
how forcefully it is released.
 Propositional thought
• A second important characteristic of Piaget’s formal operational stage
is propositional thought—adolescents’ ability to evaluate the logic of
propositions (verbal statements) without referring to real-world
circumstances. In contrast, children can evaluate the logic of
statements only by considering them against concrete evidence in the
real world.
• In a study of propositional reasoning, a researcher showed children
and adolescents a pile of poker chips and asked whether statements
about the chips were true, false, or uncertain (Osherson & Markman,
1975). In one condition, the researcher hid a chip in her hand and
presented the following propositions:
“Either the chip in my hand is green or it is not green.”
“The chip in my hand is green and it is not green.”
• In another Condition, the experimenter made the same statements
while holding either a red or a green chip in full view.
 Difference between Concrete
operational child and Formal
operational adolescents
• School-age children focused on • They understood that the
the concrete properties of the “either-or” statement is always
poker chips. When the chip was true and the “and” statement is
hidden, they replied that they always false, regardless of the
were uncertain about both poker chip’s color.
statements. When it was visible,
they judged both statements to
be true if the chip was green and
false if it was red
Although Piaget did not view language as playing a central role in
children’s cognitive development, he acknowledged its importance in
adolescence. Formal operations require language-based and other
symbolic systems that do not stand for real things, such as those in
higher mathematics.
Secondary school students use such systems in algebra and
geometry. Formal operational thought also involves verbal reasoning
about abstract concepts.
Relationships among time, space, and matter in physics and
wondered about justice and freedom in philosophy
• When Timmy was 18 months old, his mother stood behind him,
helping him throw a large ball into a box. As his skill improved, she
stepped back, letting him try on his own. Using Vygotsky’s ideas,
explain how Timmy’s mother is supporting his cognitive development.