Describe and evaluate Piaget’s theory of cognitive development

Cognitive development is looking at the way children learn and process information. Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was a psychologist looking into the development of cognitive processes; his research is still highly influential today for studies carried out on cognitive development in children. Piaget believed intelligence is the balance which a person achieves between themselves and the environment and that this was achieved by the actions on the world of a young person who is developing. Piaget constructed several concepts to define the stages of child development; he was fascinated by the way that all children seemed to go through the same stages of discovering the world at the same time. Piaget’s research suggested a stage theory on each stage the children had a distinct type of thinking.

The first stage of four which Piaget defines is the sensorimotor stage (0-2 years). The baby is able to understand the world by using its senses and motor actions. They are able to pretend to play and use single words towards the end of its sensorimotor stage. An important feature of the sensory motor stage is object permanence and the development of this. Learning that objects do not disappear when they are out of sight. However there are problems with Piaget’s research on this stage of development, this has been discovered by other researchers carrying out studies using heart-rate, rate of sucking and habituation technique. Bower (1982) discovered that a child of three and a half months were more shocked when they did not see the object than when they did see the object when the screen was removed; he discovered this by looking at the heart rate of the child. Another study conducted by Meltzoff and Moore (1994) discovered that facial expression shown by adults to 6-week old children were imitated the next day.