COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

When we left the infant towards the end of the sensorimotor period, he had attained object permanence, was increasingly able to manipulate objects as playthings and tools, and was exploiting the greater skills of others by copying behaviours that appeared successful. These kinds of developments enable the child to engage in a higher level of representation. While the early sensorimotor infant’s schemes consisted of concrete actions, towards the end of this stage he becomes able to develop mental schemas.

The child can now use
objects to symbolize others, and is beginning to use sounds (words) for the same purpose. These skills are very useful, and the child exploits them increasingly. This leads to a new stage in development, which Piaget called the preoperational period. [preoperational period the second major phase of cognitive development, according to Piaget, extending from approximately two to six years, when the child begins to represent the world symbolically but remains intuitive and egocentric]

The preoperational period
This stage of development extends from approximately two to six years, and a number of important cognitive developments are achieved during this time. Foremost is the ability to symbolize – to represent the world in images and language. This enables children to extend their understanding fundamentally. The child becomes able to represent past and future, and to think about objects or events that are not immediately present. This soon becomes evident in forms of activity like pretend play (figure 9.6). If the sensorimotor child disappoints her parents by playing more with the wrapping than the present, the preoperational child will surprise them with the news that the box is actually a helicopter and it plans to land on the building – represented by the coffee table. Although Piaget saw the preoperational period as a time of important cognitive advances, he also emphasized the limitations of the child’s thought processes at this stage. He believed that one of the most profound limitations during this phase is egocentrism –[egocentrism inability of the preoperational child to distinguish between his/her own perspective on a situation and the perspectives of others] a tendency another person’s perspective. Piaget found many illustrations of egocentrism in his interviews with children, in his studies of their language in preschool settings, and in his experiments. The next time you get an opportunity to listen to the language of preschool children, consider the extent to which they are conversing in the way you and I would understand a conversation, such as exchanging a series of linked remarks about the same topic. A typical preschooler in one of Piaget’s major studies, Lev, engaged regularly in monologues, talking about his own activities to no one in particular: (Sitting down alone at a table): I want to do that drawing, there . . . I want to draw something, I do. I shall need a big piece of paper to do that. (After knocking over a game): There! Everything’s fallen down. (Upon finishing his drawing): Now I want to do something else. (Piaget, 1926, p. 14) preschoolers like Lev accompany their actions with words in this way when alone and when in the presence of audiences. Close connections to others’ utterances do not appear to be essential to the activity: Pie (aged 6y 5m): Where could we make another tunnel? Ah, here, Eun?
Eun (4y 11m): Look at my pretty frock. (Piaget, 1926, p. 58)
Pie (the older child) is trying to establish coordinated efforts but Eun has her own concerns. In a major study of the language of preschoolers (1926), Piaget noted that, although the children were being studied in close proximity to their peers, more than one-third of their utterances were either not directed to anyone or were so esoteric that nobody else could understand them. So, according to Piaget, the preoperational child tends to be dominated by his perceptual experiences and finds it difficult to imagine other aspects of an experience, such as how another person perceives things. The preschooler talks but does not always link her remarks to those of others. In an experimental task, the child centres attention on one aspect of a task, and fails to consider the relevance of other dimensions. Piagetians call this cognitive bias centration. Probably the best known example of this is Piaget’s famous conservation test. [centration when a preoperational child focuses on only one aspect of a problem at a time]

A preoperational child is presented with two beakers of the same shape and size. The equivalent amount of water is poured into each beaker, and the child is asked whether the amount in each is the same. Once this is agreed, a new beaker, taller and thinner than the original, is produced. The liquid from one of the original beakers is transferred to the third. The child is asked again whether the amount is the same. Preoperational children often insist that the amount has changed. They might see it as more than before, or less than before, but certainly not the same. Although the amount of liquid is actually unchanged, the child’s perceptual experience indicates otherwise – it looks taller – and this tends to dominate the child’s judgment. The child appears to have centered on one aspect of the transformation in the liquid (the increase in height) but has failed to take account of the other (the decrease in width). Another example is the ‘three mountains’ perspective task. Piaget challenged Piaget’s account of the limitations on preschool children’s thinking has been subject to many challenges. Some researchers have objected that the standard conservation task induces the child to give erroneous responses by asking the same question – ‘Are they the same or different?’ – Twice. In between, the experimenter has changed the display, and, in any case, every child knows that when a grown-up asks you a question twice, it usually means you gave the wrong answer the first time. When the question is asked only once, higher proportions of preschoolers give the correct (conserving) answer (Rose & Blank, 1974). The task demands also appear to bear heavily on children’s performance. Borke (1975) provided three- and four-year-olds with a perspective task, which involved viewing a set of familiar objects on a turntable. The task was to rotate the set to show how the objects would look from the perspective of a Sesame Street character, Grover, as he drove around the display. A majority of the children performed well, and only a small proportion made egocentric errors. It seemed as if the combination of more familiar materials and a more motivating task appeared to enable these preschoolers to demonstrate competencies that Piaget believed are attained much later in development. Other research has also shown that preschool children are able to incorporate complex ideas into their pretend play, to follow successive actions and to make predictions about their consequences. For example, Harris, Kavanaugh, and Meredith (1994) had two- and three-year-olds watch puppets pour pretend cereal into a bowl. Children could understand this idea, and could also follow the next step, in which the puppet pretended to use the pretend cereal to feed a toy animal. They could anticipate that if a puppet poured pretend milk or powder into a bowl and then tipped the bowl over an animal, the animal would get wet or powdery. This seems simple enough to us, but it points to impressive representational abilities in the child, who creates a mental image of the ce real, milk or powder and then operates on the mental image to imagine subsequent transformations. These are cognitive skills that Piaget maintained were not available during the preoperational stage. Piaget certainly pointed to some intriguing aspects of child thought, indicating that preschoolers may sometimes interpret the world quite differently from adults. Subsequent research indicating that he may have underestimated the competence of the preschooler (Bryant, 1974; Donaldson, 1978) qualifies rather than invalidates his work. After all, even if the conservation task and the ‘three mountains’ task do have methodological limitations, these tasks do appear to pose problems for preschoolers but not for older children. If you can, try the tasks out yourself with a few children aged three to eight. Invite the children to explain their responses, and judge for yourself whether Piaget has provided us with fascinating (or misleading) insights into developmental changes in children’s thinking.



Paul L. Harris (1946– ) is currently based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Harris is interested in the early development of cognition, emotion and imagination. His recent book, The Work of the Imagination, gathers together several years of research carried out at Oxford University, where he taught developmental psychology. Currently, he is studying how far children rely on their own first-hand experience or alternatively on what people tell them – especially when they confront a new domain of knowledge.


Margaret Donaldson (1926– ), author of the highly influential book Children’s Minds, worked as a child development psychologist at Edinburgh University. Donaldson challenged Piaget’s method of studying egocentricity in children, after producing different results when she applied a social dimension to Piagetian tasks given to preschoolers. Donaldson argued that the preschoolers’ inability to perform Piaget’s tasks was due to their difficulties with understanding (or abstracting) the questions, and not to their egocentricity or lack of logical skills.

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.