COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

‘Cognition’ is a broad term encompassing reasoning abilities, knowledge and memory. The study of cognitive processes is fundamental to many topics in psychology. Developmental psychologists are interested in the origins and course of cognitive capacities, with a great deal of interest therefore being paid to their manifestation in infancy. Infants react to information provided by their senses by attempting to organize experience, make sense of phenomena, and anticipate events or outcomes. In fact, when we examine what infants do with the data they obtain from the world, we find that they appear to behave in much the same way as scientists. They try things out, they collect more evidence (by exploring and by trial and error), and they start to develop theories. The idea that babies, without the benefit of a formal education and not even able to speak, could generate theories about the world seems surprising on first consideration. Yet, one of the most influential psychologists of t he last century has argued exactly this, and his account has attracted enormous interest from other psychologists and educators. The sensorimotor stage of development Jean Piaget (1896 –1980), a Swiss psychologist, developed a model of cognitive development which holds that children’s thinking progresses through a series of orderly stages. According to Piaget, each stage reflects qualitative differences in the way the child understands and acts upon the world relative to its status at another developmental phase. Later in this chapter, and in the next, we will consider the other stages of Piagetian development, but for the moment we will focus on the first, sensorimotor [sensorimotor stage the first stage of cognitive development, according to Piaget, extending from birth to approximately two years, when the child constructs an elementary understanding of the world and thought is tied closely to physical or sensory activity] stage, which Piaget described as extending from birth to approximately two years. Piaget saw the child in this stage as acting to learn about itself and its relations to the environment. A key emphasis here is on the child’s actions. Piaget believed that children learn by doing, and that they advance their understanding by testing what they know to its limits (much as scientists do). Piaget argued that initially infants lack the ability to reflect consciously on their experiences, but they do have a set of reflexive capacities (including those that we considered earlier in this chapter) that cause them to react to environmental stimuli. These are simple, but important processes. If something is placed near an infant’s mouth, she will attempt to suck it. If you place your finger in a baby’s hand, she will grasp it. The baby can also make vocal sounds. All of these actions can be repeated, and babies do indeed repeat them, generally becoming more proficient with practice. The actions can also be modified to cope with new experiences. As well as grasping your finger, infants will respond similarly if you place a rattle o toy in their hand, or if they find a bar on the side of their crib. In this way, the infant develops action based schemes – organized patterns of behaviour that she comes to rely on in dealing with her world. Before long, the infant discovers interesting new consequences from her initially reflexive schemes. Grasping some objects (toys) causes the infant to produce interesting noises (squeaks or music). Sometimes a shake (of a rattle) or a push (of a mobile) yields other appealing sounds or movements. The infant repeats the action, and the same thing happens. In these ways, babies are learning about cause–effect relations, and their own ability to influence the world. Infants show delight as they learn how to control things, and repeat the actions frequently – until it becomes too easy, and then they seek new challenges.


Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century. Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in 1896, he published his first paper (a short note on an albino sparrow) at the age of 11. He studied zoology at the University of Neuchâtel, but his interests in biological change and the origins of knowledge led him into psychology. In 1920, he moved to the Alfred Binet laboratory in Paris, where he undertook research on intelligence testing, leading to a fascination with the reasons that children suggested for their answers to standard test items. This resulted in some 60 years’ ingenious research into the development of children’s thinking. In 1955, Piaget established the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva.



Object permanence [object permanence understanding that an object continues to exist even when it cannot be seen or touched] In the course of all this seemingly playful activity, infants are learning a great deal. But at any one stage, there are limits to what they know. For example, in the first few months of life, although babies get better at manipulating objects, the stability of objects in their lives is generally beyond their control – things (such as toys) come and go. Piaget maintained that very young infants have no conception of the durability of objects: according to Piaget, at this age, while something is within reach or sight, it exists, but ‘out of sight is out of mind’. The notion that an object can continue to exist even when we cannot see it is termed object permanence. Piaget believed that this is a relatively late achievement of the sensorimotor period (around nine months). Other developments during this sensorimotor stage of development include greater experimentation with the things the infant can do with objects, learning to use objects as tools, and systematically copying others’ behaviour to achieve new skills. Piaget challenged Piaget’s descriptions and explanations of infant activities are persuasive and continue to have a great deal of influence upon developmental psychology. But they have been challenged. Subsequent research has demonstrated that Piaget tended to underestimate infants’ abilities. For example, several studies have shown that object permanence is available earlier than Piaget believed to be the case. Hood and Willatts (1986) presented five-month-olds with objects within their reaching distance. The researchers turned off the lights, removed the objects and released the babies’ arms. The infants tended to reach towards the place where the object had been located before the lights went out, indicating that the infants could maintain a representation not only of the object but also of its location. Some of the perceptual abilities that have been described in infants (e.g. face perception, discrimination among speech sounds) also present a problem for Piaget’s theory. One of his core assumptions was that children have only a limited amount of innate knowledge and that they construct their understanding of the world through active and general developmental processes. By ‘general’, Piaget has in mind that changes are preceding at roughly the same pace in most areas of the child’s knowledge. There is a broad sweep improvement going on in mental capacities that is reflected in different areas of understanding roughly simultaneously. This seems to make sense: after all, we know that babies can do a lot more at 15 months than they can at five months. But if some abilities are ‘built in’, then considerably more is innate than Piaget maintains. As well as face perception and speech discrimination, there is also intriguing evidence that infants as young as five months can add and subtract with small numbers, leading to speculation that humans are born with the capacity to perform simple arithmetical operations (Wynn, 1992). There is little basis for explaining the development of these abilities by the outcome of general changes resulting from continuous activity. Furthermore, whether these abilities are innate or not, they seem to develop at different times. Some emerge quite early, such as face perception, which is well developed (though not complete) in the preschooler. Others take a bit longer, such as language, which starts during the first year but progresses into middle childhood. Arithmetic ability is still developing into the teens. Maybe, then, Piaget is mistaken to conceive of development as one all-embracing general process, with changes occurring at about the same time across all areas of knowledge. On the basis of observations like these, some psychologists believe that it may be better to regard the growth of knowledge as involving specific domains, each with its own developmental course (Keil, 1999). This debate – between those who (like Piaget) favour domaingeneral theories and those who favour domain-specific theories – highlights fundamental questions about the nature of the human mind and is central to much of contemporary developmental psychology (see Garton, 2004; Hatano & Inagaki, 2000). Piaget made a key contribution to psychology by highlighting the importance of the infant’s actions as a source of development. Piaget was a constructivist: [constructivist theorist who attributes the acquisition of knowledge to the active processes of the learner, building on increasingly complex representations of reality] he saw development as a kind of self-directed building process, in which the individual constructs schemes of action, applies them repeatedly until reaching their limits, and then improves upon them in the light of new discoveries. Although details of his theory have been challenged, in the light of Piaget’s contributions most researchers agree that infants are active cognitive beings, not the blank slates supposed by the early behaviourists.