LESSON 3. SENSORIMOTOR PERIOD AND PECEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT
•Piaget´s cognitive processes.
- Piaget believed that the basic building blocks of the way we understand the world are
mental structures called schemes.
- Schemes are organized patterns of functioning that adapt and change with mental
development.
• At first, schemes are related to physical, or sensorimotor activity, such as
picking up or reaching for toys.
• As children develop, their schemes move to a mental level, reflecting thought.
• Schemes are similar to computer software: They direct and determine how data
from the world, such as new events or objects, are considered and dealt with.
- There is a very important assumption that underlies Piaget’s view of intelligence: If
children are to know something, they must construct that knowledge themselves.
- Indeed, Piaget described the child as a constructivist — an individual who acts on
novel objects and events and thereby gains some understanding of their essential
features.
•Organization: Is the process by which children combine existing schemes into
new and more complex intellectual schemes.
• For example, an infant who has “gazing,” “reaching,” and “grasping”
reflexes soon organizes these initially unrelated schemes into a more
complex structure— visually directed reaching—that enables him to
reach out and discover the characteristics of many interesting objects in
the environment.
•Assimilation: Is the process by which people understand an experience in terms
of their current stage of cognitive development and way of thinking.
Assimilation occurs, then, when a stimulus or event is acted upon, perceived,
and understood in accordance with existing patterns of thought.
• For example, an infant who tries to suck on any toy in the same way is
assimilating the objects to her existing sucking scheme. Similarly, a child
who encounters a flying squirrel at a zoo and calls it a "bird" is
assimilating the squirrel to his existing scheme of bird.
•Accommodation: In contrast, when we change our existing ways of thinking,
understanding, or behaving in response to encounters with new stimuli or
events, accommodation takes place.
• For instance, when a child sees a flying squirrel and calls it "a bird with
a tail," he is beginning to accommodate new knowledge, modifying his
scheme of bird.
- Piaget believed that the earliest schemes are primarily limited to the reflexes with
which we are all born, such as sucking and rooting. Infants start to modify these simple
early schemes almost immediately, through the processes of assimilation and
accommodation, in response to their exploration of the environment.
•Piaget´s stages of Cognitive Development.
- Piaget identified four major periods, or stages, of cognitive development.
• the sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years),
• the preoperational stage (2 to 7 years),
• the stage of concrete operations (7 to 11 years),
• and the stage of formal operations (11 years and beyond).
- These stages of intellectual growth represent qualitatively different levels of
functioning and form what Piaget calls an invariant developmental sequence; that is, all
children progress through the stages in the same order.
- Piaget argued that stages can never be skipped because each successive stage builds on
the accomplishments of previous stages.
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
