PIAGET'S THEORY

OF COGNITIVE
DEVELOPMENT

JEAN PIAGET
Brain and Cognitive Development from Infancy
and Toodlerhood to Early Childhood

Prepared by: Group 1

Abasula, Mark Norman
Acuna, Nicole Anne M.
Aguilar, Dennise Angela S.
Alpe, John Richard
Jean Piaget
• born August 9, 1896,— died September 16, 1980
• Swiss psychologist who was the first to make a systematic study
of the acquisition of understanding in children.
• He come up with a conclusion by observing his three children's
intellectual development from infancy to language.
• In Paris Piaget devised and administered reading tests to
schoolchildren and became interested in the types of errors they
made, leading him to explore the reasoning process in these
young children.
• Piaget continued to develop the theme he had first discovered in
Paris, that the mind of the child evolves through a series of set
stages to adulthood.
Infancy Cognitive

• The first 2 years of the child's life are not growing just on
their physical aspects but also mentally. Through their
everyday interaction on their environment they are
learning and creating new connections between their
nerve cells both within their brains, and between their
brains and body.
• goal-directed behavior and object permanence are the
two milestones and are the highlights and major
accomplishments of infant cognitive development.
Three basic components

• Schemas
• Adaptation Processess
• Stages of Cognitive Development
Schemas
• the basic building block of intelligent behavior – a way of
organizing knowledge. Indeed, it is useful to think of
schemas as “units” of knowledge, each relating to one
aspect of the world, including objects, actions, and
abstract (i.e., theoretical) concepts.
• A schema can be defined as a set of linked mental
representations of the world, which we use both to
understand and to respond to situations. The assumption
is that we store these mental representations and apply
them when needed.
Adaptation Processes
• Piaget viewed intellectual growth as a process of
adaptation or adjustment to the world.
• Enable the transition from one stage to another
(equilibrium, assimilation and accomodation)
• Assimilation Which is using an existing schema to deal with a new
object or situation.
• Accommodation This happens when the existing schema (knowledge)
does not work, and needs to be changed to deal with a new object or
situation.
• Equilibration This is the force which moves development along.
• Piaget believed that cognitive development did not progress at a
steady rate, but rather in leaps and bounds.
• Equilibrium occurs when a child's schemas can deal with most new
information through assimilation. However, an unpleasant state of
disequilibrium occurs when new information cannot be fitted into
existing schemas (assimilation).
Stages of Cognitive Development

• Piaget did not claim that a particular stage was

reached at a certain age -although descriptions of the
stages often include an indication of the age at which
the average child would reach each stage.
Sensorimotor Stage (Birth-2 years)
• The main achievement during this stage is object permanence -
knowing that an object still exists, even if it is hidden.
• It requires the ability to form a mental representation (i.e., a
schema) of the object.
Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
• During this stage, young children can think about things
symbolically. This is the ability to make one thing - a word
or an object - stand for something other than itself.
• Thinking is still egocentric, and the infant has difficulty
taking the viewpoint of others.
2 Cognitive milestone
• Goal-directed behavior
• Object permanence
Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development
• newborns interact with the environment entirely through
reflexive behaviors. They are just following their instincts
and involuntary reactions to get what they need such as
food, air and attention rather than thinking what they are
going to do.
• he believed that as babies begin to grow and learn about
their environment through their senses, they begin to
think what they want to accomplish, how to accomplish it,
and then they would do it.
Six Sub-stages of Infancy according to Piaget
• Reflexive Activity
• Primary Circular Reactions
• Secondary Circular Reactions
• Coordination of Secondary Schemes
• Tertiary Circular Reactions
• Beginning of representational thought
1. Reflexive Activity
• Lasts from birth to approximately 1 month
• While babies are being engaged in reflexive activities
such as sucking when offered a bottle or breast, they are
learning about their environment and how they can
interact through it.
• Babies dont think about baheving reflexively; they simply
act out those reflexes automatically.
2. Primary Circular Reactions
• Spans the ages of 1 to 4 months
• During this time, babies intentionally repeat actions thet
bring them pleasure and desired outcomes. They do
things on purpose because it feels good or it gets them
what they want.
• A small infant may suck on her fist because it feels good
and it soothes her.
• Researchers believed that babies this age may also
develop expectancy about cause and effect situations
2.1 Babies will begin to see that a pattern of events is connected,
and begin to expect the second event after they experience the
first event. Example, a baby this age may learn that when they
see a bottle, they expect that they will soon be fed.
• Erickson's observation that young infants learn to trust or
mistrust their environment.
• If a baby learns the pattern that they have a need, such as
hunger or discomfort, and that need is regularly addressed,
they will learn to expect their needs to be met and they learn to
trust.
• On the other hand, if babies learns the pattern that they have
needs and those needs are not regularly addressed, they will
learn to expect their needs to not be met and they learn to
mistrust the world aroung them.
3. Secondary Circular Reactions
• Lasts from about age 4 to 8 months
• Babies begin to repeat actios onto objects outside their body that bring them
pleasure and desired outcomes.
• During this period, babies move beyond just repeating actions onto their
environment. Babies learn by feeling things out; they use their mouths, hands,
and other body parts to touch and to experiment with toys and other objects
around them.
• For example, by about age 5 months, babies will track an object with their eyes,
even after it leaves their direct line of vision. They will turn their head or even
their whole body to continue watching something that grabs their attention.
• While they're taking in information and practicing cause and effect experiments,
their memory continues to grow stronger.
4. Coordination of Secondary Schemes
• Ages 8 to 12 months
• During this time, they begin to show intentional means-end bahavior,
which means that babies begin to put different activities together to
achieve a goal because they've learned how cause and effect works.
• Infants are now building what they have learned in the first three stages in
order to get what they want. Babies at this age mimic what they see
others are doing.
• If they see someone clap, they will clap. They'll repeat the same sort of
experiment with different objects to see how those events are similar or
different and if there are different outcomes.
• For example, they may practice dropping differrent objects to see what
happens. They'll learn that when they stand up and drop a plastic toy on
the hardwood floor, it will make a banging noise, but when they drop a
stuffed plush animal on the same floor it will make no real sound.
4.1 Another major development during this period is that of object
permanence, the underswtanding that something exist even if it
can't be seen.
• Before, now, babies believed, in an implicit way, that when
something moved from their sight, it no longer continued
to exist. Now babies begin to understand that something
might still exist even if they can't be seen.
• This is how the game “Peek-a-boo” helps babies learn.
Even though they can't see their caretaker's face hidden
behind the blanket, their caretaker continues to exist and
will reappear shortly.
5. Tertiary Circular Reactions
• Between the ages of 12 to 18 months
• During this period, toddlers continue to explore their
environment and create experiments to see how things
work.
• They will play with anything they can find; however, they
do not yet realize that certain things like knives, electric
outlets, and pots on top of a hot stove can hurt them. For
this reason, parents and caregivers need to be vigilant
about keeping their household safe by babyproofing their
home.
5.1 Object permanence in Tertiary (Third) Circular Reactions

• Object permanence is not achieved all at once, but rather,

gradually emerges. During the sub-stageTertiary Circular Reaction
babies come to realize that something can be hidden and moved
and still exist. Now babies will look for an object that has been
hidden or moved. As babies ability to build memories grows and
incorporates all their senses, they developed cross-modal
recognition memory. This means that children are able to see a
mental picture of an object they are holding in their hand in their
mind, without actually looking at it. They remember that object as
a complete package through all their senses; they remember its
texture and size in their hands, its sound through their ears, and
perhaps even its smell.
6. Beginning of representational thought
• Ages 18 to 24 months
• During this time, babies begin to be symbol-oriented,
which means that they create a general image of things in
their minds and retain them as examples of some objects.
They may create in their mind a picture of a stuffed bear,
and use it to represent other stuffed animals he may play
with or later see. Because of this, babies may look for
their favorite stuffed animal in the toy basket because
they know that's where its kept even if they didn't see
their caregivers put it there. As well, babies' recall and
recognition memory also improve greatly.
6.1 -21 months
• Toddlers learn scripts, or routines, about how certain things are
done. For example, they learn that to “go somewhere in the
car,”Dad and toddler go out to the garage, Dad buckles baby in
the car seat, and then Dad climbs in the front seat and starts the
car.
• A more specific mental milestones during this period, babies
grasp the idea or past, present, and future. They begin to
understand things categorically, which is to say that they become
capable to recognize a shirt as a shirt, even though they don't
know all shirts are not the same. They begin to recognize what
things are alike and why, and what other objects fit or do not fit
into particular categories.
6.2

• Toddlers keep building their capacity to think symbolically

and categorically around age 24 months, they develop the
capacity to pretend and imagine things that aren't their in
front of them. As they achieve this new level of
imaginative thought, they take their first steps beyond
concrete thinking (e.g., only being able to think about
things that are in front of you).
References
• https://www.gracepointwellness.org/461-child-development-parenting-
infants-0-2/article/10112-infancy-cognitive-development
• https://www.verywellmind.com/piagets-stages-of-cognitive-development-
2795457
• https://georgewbush-
whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/earlychildhood/sect2.html
• https://www.webmd.com/children/piaget-stages-of-development
• https://www.webmd.com/parenting/ss/slideshow-toddler-milestones-second-
year
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Piaget#targetText=Jean
%20Piaget%2C%20(born%20August%209,in%2020th%2Dcentury
%20developmental%20psychology.
• https://www.slideshare.net/ayushigupta547/jean-piaget-theory-of-cognitive-
development