Brain complexity: baby brains under study: Piaget (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, January 22, 2018, 21:12 (2279 days ago) @ David Turell

It's time I introduce Jean Piaget who was an initiator of child mental development studies in a very structured way:

https://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html

The goal of the theory is to explain the mechanisms and processes by which the infant, and then the child, develops into an individual who can reason and think using hypotheses.

To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental processes as a result of biological maturation and environmental experience. Children construct an understanding of the world around them, then experience discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover in their environment.

Piaget proposed four stages of cognitive development which reflect the increasing sophistication of children's thought:

1. Sensorimotor stage (birth to age 2)

2. Pre-operational stage (from age 2 to age 7)

3. Concrete operational stage (from age 7 to age 11)

4. Formal operational stage (age 11+ - adolescence and adulthood).

Sensorimotor Stage (Birth-2 yrs)
The main achievement during this stage is object permanence - knowing that an object still exists, even if it is hidden.

It requires the ability to form a mental representation (i.e., a schema) of the object.

Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
During this stage, young children can think about things symbolically. This is the ability to make one thing - a word or an object - stand for something other than itself.

Thinking is still egocentric, and the infant has difficulty taking the viewpoint of others.

Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years)
Piaget considered the concrete stage a major turning point in the child's cognitive development because it marks the beginning of logical or operational thought.

This means the child can work things out internally in their head (rather than physically try things out in the real world).

Children can conserve number (age 6), mass (age 7), and weight (age 9). Conservation is the understanding that something stays the same in quantity even though its appearance changes.

Formal Operational Stage (11 years and over)
The formal operational stage begins at approximately age eleven and lasts into adulthood. During this time, people develop the ability to think about abstract concepts, and logically test hypotheses.

Comment: Thinking develops from zero. We had some of this in med school