Cognitive Development And Social Development - 1753 Words

This essay will concentrate on cognitive development as opposed to physical, language or social development. There are two schools of thought which aim to explain cognitive development, namely continuous cognitive development, through the behaviourist account, and stage-like development, through the organismic account (Smith, 1997). We will explore Piaget’s contributions to the field with his account of cognitive development happening through concrete stages, namely the sensorimotor, the pre-operational, concrete operational and the formal operational stages. The experiments he developed to prove his theories will also be examined, as well as the criticisms that more contemporary literature have put forth about these. By the end of this†¦show more content†¦Piaget believed shematas to be of essential importance for children’s cognitive development, and assumed that these are stored and expanded. Schematas are patterns of behaviour learned, stored and then used when confronted with similar situation, for example a person may have a schema about getting on a plane: get their boarding pass, go through security, wait in the lounge, go to their gate, get on the plane (this type of schema is called a script) and whenever they are in an airport ready to travel they will â€Å"retrieve the schema from memory and apply it to the situation†. For infants schemas tend to be a lot simpler and it is in their course of their cognitive development that these expand and multiply. According to Piaget, some schemas are innate for newborns. Units of knowledge stored in their brains at a neonatal stage, for example the â€Å"sucking schema† (Brain Mukherji, 2005) where no one had to teach the infant how to feed from his mum, or his thumb (Freud accounts for this stage of development as well, yet he does not class it as cognitive development but rather a stage in a child’s â€Å"psychosexual† development (Stone, 1991)- it is worth noting that despite the disparity between the kind of development, both theorists agreed on child development occurring in stages). Assimilation, therefore, flows on naturally from schemas as this is the process by which a learned