According to Piaget the stages Involve discontinuous qualitative

According to Piaget, the stages • Involve discontinuous (qualitative) change • Form an invariant sequence – Stages are never skipped

Sensorimotor Stage (birth-2 years) • Newborns have reflexes (motor behavior) and basic perceptual abilities – Refine these innate responses (accommodation) during the first month of life

• Gradually become capable of repeating satisfying behaviors that initially occurred by chance

• First learn to repeat actions involving their own body – Ex: thumb sucking • Then learn to repeat actions involving objects – Ex: shaking rattle

• Object Permanence: Understanding that objects continue to exist when they cannot be perceived directly – Infants have some understanding of object permanence at around 8 months

– A-not-B error: Tendency to reach where objects have been found before, rather than where they were last hidden • Suggests full understanding of object permanence is not present – Infants make this error until about 12 months of age

• From 12 months on, infants increasingly engage in active exploration of objects and their possible functions

• At end of sensorimotor stage (18 -24 months), mental representations develop – Deferred Imitation: Imitation of a behavior after a period of delay • Implies mental representation (memory)

Preoperational Stage (2 -7 years) • Egocentrism: Tendency to focus on one’s own viewpoint and ignore others’ perspectives – Ex: 3 Mountains Task

• Centration: Tendency to focus on one feature of an object or event to the neglect of other important features

• Conservation: Understanding that certain physical properties of objects remain the same even when their outward appearance changes

• Preoperational children fail conservation tasks because of – Centration – A tendency to focus on static states rather than transformations

Concrete Operations Stage (7 -12 years) • Understand conservation tasks – Can focus on multiple features of an object or event – Can consider transformations, not just static states

Limitations of Concrete Operations – Children’s logical thinking is limited to concrete information that can be perceived directly • Can’t reason about abstract or hypothetical ideas

Formal Operations Stage (12 and older) • Ability to think abstractly or hypothetically – “What if. . . ? ”

• Can think systematically (scientific reasoning) – Ex: pendulum problem

Criticisms of Piaget’s Theory: • Underestimated role of social environment in cognitive development – Ex: Certain experiences (like formal schooling) may promote conservation and other abilities

• Does not explain HOW cognitive development occurs – Better description than explanation of children’s cognitive development

• The stage model describes children’s thinking as being more consistent than it really is – Ex: Children can solve some conservation problems sooner than others

• Infants and young children are more cognitively advanced than Piaget thought – Ex: deferred imitation (and thus mental representation) is present earlier than Piaget thought