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 Cognitive Development
 “The mind of the child is searching for meaning. This drive, or yearning to know, is the basis for intellectual development.
As the child attaches meaning to perceived events and experiences, each new event is incorporated into the child's expanding image bank, providing for new approaches to tasks. The child moves from a reliance on concrete objects and first-hand experiences to an increasing ability to think more abstractly. Through observing, listening, and making inferences related to life experiences, the child becomes capable of complex thinking.
Curiosity motivates the child to solve problems, at first by trial and error and later through using strategies, resources, and techniques to test out hypothetical possibilities and find solutions. The child learns to acquire, organize, and use information in increasingly complex ways.”
(Minnesota Department of Education, 1991, p. 25)
Cognitive development refers to a person's ability to think about and perceive his or her environment. Because cognitive development is associated with what's happening in the brain, it's difficult to know exactly how a person's cognitive ability develops. Most information about cognitive development comes from observing infants, toddlers, and preschool children as they interact with the environment.
In general, cognitive development is thought to involve the processes of attention, perception, memory, problem-solving, and logical thinking. As a child grows, he or she uses these processes to become a more complex person who can interact with the environment in a variety of ways.
Attention refers to a child's ability to look at and play or work with an object for an extended period of time. If a child is not able to sustain attention, he or she will not be able to learn as much about the properties of the object or the task.
Perception refers to using the senses that were discussed in the section on motor development –sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Perceptions become more organized in the brain as a child gets older. For instance, an older child can close his or her eyes and identify an object, such as an orange, by tasting, smelling, feeling, and finally, seeing the object. This is because children integrate, or put together, information they have gathered through their senses. This information affects the way children move their bodies or react (socially, emotionally, or cognitively) to people or objects in the environment.
Memory is necessary for all learning to take place. Memory enables people to link past and present experiences in order to understand their environment. For example, very young children use memory to differentiate their parents from strangers. A child who stays away from something dangerous may be using his or her memory of a negative experience, such as a parent saying "no." Memory is also functioning when people use language to name objects or describe events in the past.
Attention, perception, and memory combine to aid the child in becoming an active problem solver and logical thinker. Problem-solving begins in early infancy. When babies perceive they are hungry, they solve the problem by remembering that when they cry, someone will come and give them food. Children learn the cause-and-effect nature of the world when they push a button, and a toy makes a sound. If the sound is pleasant to the child, he or she will remember to push the button when presented with the same toy.
Each of these processes becomes increasingly complex as the child develops into a preschooler who sings songs, tells stories, orders items from smallest to largest, names colors and numbers, or tries to convince his or her parents that bedtime is too early. Learning is believed to continue throughout an individual’s life span. This makes sense, because the longer we live, the more learning experiences we can have. Humans are active learners; we seek experiences and are constantly trying to understand the objects and people with whom we come in contact. For children, play is the primary way for learning to occur.
Stages of Cognitive Development
In the early 1900s, Jean Piaget developed a theory of cognitive development by watching the way his children interacted with objects throughout their childhood. This theory is very popular in child development and education, and it has become the foundation of much research on child development.
Piaget described four stages of development: sensori-motor, pre-operational, concrete-operational,and formal-operational. Although children move through these stages at different rates, all children begin at the sensori-motor stage and go through the stages in order. But for various reasons, not all people will pass through all the stages.
Sensori-Motor Stage
During the first two years of life, the child learns to control his or her body in space (their environment). The infant uses physical senses and motor skills to interact with and learn about the environment. At this stage children learn that certain actions have a reliable effect on the environment. The final step in this stage is object permanence, which means that children realize that objects or people continue to exist even when they can’t be seen or heard.
Pre-Operational Stage
During this period, thought is dominated by what is seen. A child at this stage can only consider one element – space, time, volume, shape, or weight – at a time. For example, if a child is shown two identical balls of clay and sees that they are both the same size (volume). When one of the balls is smashed down like a pancake, the pre-operational child will insist that the flattened ball is bigger and has more clay (perhaps now judging it by space). This is despite the fact that the child saw that the two balls were exactly the same size before. Language development during this period is very rapid. In the beginning, children may use the word “dog” to describe any animal that walks on four legs. Later, they learn appropriate labels for animals. Children show a greater interest in playing with other children at the pre-operational stage than they did at the previous stage, and they begin to give reasons for their beliefs and actions. However, the pre-operational child will often show faulty reasoning because they are not yet skilled at integrating a lot of information. Children are typically in this stage until about age 7.
Concrete-Operational Stage
From ages 7 to 11, children become capable of mentally seeing an object or event, and they can understand that a piece of clay contains the same amount of material whether it is formed into a shape or flattened out. They are also able to think about what happens to objects without having to experiment with the object. For example, they recognize that water in a tall, thin glass can be the same amount of water in a short, fat glass. During this stage of development the child can reason, but only when using concrete objects.
Formal-Operational Stage
By the time children reach age 12, their cognitive development is characterized by thinking and reasoning. They can think about abstract concepts like love, peace, and right or wrong. They can hypothesize about events and consider more than one variable at a time. Mental development is usually complete by the end of this period, around 15 years old.
Information in this lesson is used with permission from:
Minnesota Department of Education. (1991). Model learner outcomes for early childhood
education. Minneapolis, MN: The Minnesota Curriculum Services Center.
Rush, K. (1999). Early childhood: The role of the paraprofessional. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, Institute on Community Integration.
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