Chapter 7: Cognitive Development
Learning objectives
- Describe each of Piaget’s theories and stages of sensorimotor intelligence
- Explain learning and memory abilities in infants and toddlers
- Illustrate limitations in early childhood thinking, including animism, egocentrism, and conservation errors
- Explain theory of mind
- Describe Vygotsky’s model, including the zone of proximal development
- Describe key characteristics of Piaget’s concrete operational intelligence
- Explain the information processing theory of memory
In addition to rapid physical growth, young children also exhibit significant development of their cognitive abilities. There are two primary perspectives on thinking: constructivist and information-processing. The constructivist perspective, based on the work of Piaget, takes a qualitative, stage-theory approach. This view hypothesizes that cognitive improvement is relatively sudden and drastic. The information-processing perspective derives from the study of artificial intelligence and explains cognitive development in terms of the growth of specific components of the overall process of thinking, such as attention, memory, processing speed, and metacognition.
