what is your cognitive development essay

Piaget’s Theory and Stages of Cognitive Development

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

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Key Takeaways

• Jean Piaget is famous for his theories regarding changes in cognitive development that occur as we move from infancy to adulthood.
• Cognitive development results from the interplay between innate capabilities (nature) and environmental influences (nurture).
• Children progress through four distinct stages , each representing varying cognitive abilities and world comprehension: the sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years), the preoperational stage (2 to 7 years), the concrete operational stage (7 to 11 years), and the formal operational stage (11 years and beyond).
• A child’s cognitive development is not just about acquiring knowledge, the child has to develop or construct a mental model of the world, which is referred to as a schema .
• Piaget emphasized the role of active exploration and interaction with the environment in shaping cognitive development, highlighting the importance of assimilation and accommodation in constructing mental schemas.

Stages of Development

Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through four different stages of intellectual development which reflect the increasing sophistication of children’s thought

Each child goes through the stages in the same order (but not all at the same rate), and child development is determined by biological maturation and interaction with the environment.

At each stage of development, the child’s thinking is qualitatively different from the other stages, that is, each stage involves a different type of intelligence.

Although no stage can be missed out, there are individual differences in the rate at which children progress through stages, and some individuals may never attain the later stages.

Piaget did not claim that a particular stage was reached at a certain age – although descriptions of the stages often include an indication of the age at which the average child would reach each stage.

The Sensorimotor Stage

Ages: Birth to 2 Years

The first stage is the sensorimotor stage , during which the infant focuses on physical sensations and learning to coordinate its body.

Major Characteristics and Developmental Changes:

• The infant learns about the world through their senses and through their actions (moving around and exploring their environment).
• During the sensorimotor stage, a range of cognitive abilities develop. These include: object permanence; self-recognition (the child realizes that other people are separate from them); deferred imitation; and representational play.
• They relate to the emergence of the general symbolic function, which is the capacity to represent the world mentally
• At about 8 months, the infant will understand the permanence of objects and that they will still exist even if they can’t see them and the infant will search for them when they disappear.

During the beginning of this stage, the infant lives in the present. It does not yet have a mental picture of the world stored in its memory therefore it does not have a sense of object permanence.

If it cannot see something, then it does not exist. This is why you can hide a toy from an infant, while it watches, but it will not search for the object once it has gone out of sight.

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.

Towards the end of this stage the general symbolic function begins to appear where children show in their play that they can use one object to stand for another. Language starts to appear because they realise that words can be used to represent objects and feelings.

The child begins to be able to store information that it knows about the world, recall it, and label it.

Individual Differences

• Cultural Practices : In some cultures, babies are carried on their mothers’ backs throughout the day. This constant physical contact and varied stimuli can influence how a child perceives their environment and their sense of object permanence.
• Gender Norms : Toys assigned to babies can differ based on gender expectations. A boy might be given more cars or action figures, while a girl might receive dolls or kitchen sets. This can influence early interactions and sensory explorations.

Learn More: The Sensorimotor Stage of Cognitive Development

The Preoperational Stage

Ages: 2 – 7 Years

Piaget’s second stage of intellectual development is the preoperational stage . It takes place between 2 and 7 years. At the beginning of this stage, the child does not use operations, so the thinking is influenced by the way things appear rather than logical reasoning.

A child cannot conserve which means that the child does not understand that quantity remains the same even if the appearance changes.

Furthermore, the child is egocentric; he assumes that other people see the world as he does. This has been shown in the three mountains study.

As the preoperational stage develops, egocentrism declines, and children begin to enjoy the participation of another child in their games, and let’s pretend play becomes more important.

Toddlers often pretend to be people they are not (e.g. superheroes, policemen), and may play these roles with props that symbolize real-life objects. Children may also invent an imaginary playmate.

• Toddlers and young children acquire the ability to internally represent the world through language and mental imagery.
• During this stage, young children can think about things symbolically. This is the ability to make one thing, such as a word or an object, stand for something other than itself.
• A child’s thinking is dominated by how the world looks, not how the world is. It is not yet capable of logical (problem-solving) type of thought.
• Moreover, the child has difficulties with class inclusion; he can classify objects but cannot include objects in sub-sets, which involves classifying objects as belonging to two or more categories simultaneously.
• Infants at this stage also demonstrate animism. This is the tendency for the child to think that non-living objects (such as toys) have life and feelings like a person’s.

By 2 years, children have made some progress toward detaching their thoughts from the physical world. However, have not yet developed logical (or “operational”) thought characteristics of later stages.

Thinking is still intuitive (based on subjective judgments about situations) and egocentric (centered on the child’s own view of the world).

• Cultural Storytelling : Different cultures have unique stories, myths, and folklore. Children from diverse backgrounds might understand and interpret symbolic elements differently based on their cultural narratives.
• Race & Representation : A child’s racial identity can influence how they engage in pretend play. For instance, a lack of diverse representation in media and toys might lead children of color to recreate scenarios that don’t reflect their experiences or background.

Learn More: The Preoperational Stage of Cognitive Development

The Concrete Operational Stage

Ages: 7 – 11 Years

By the beginning of the concrete operational stage , the child can use operations (a set of logical rules) so they can conserve quantities, realize that people see the world in a different way (decentring), and demonstrate improvement in inclusion tasks. Children still have difficulties with abstract thinking.

• During this stage, children begin to think logically about concrete events.
• Children begin to understand the concept of conservation; understanding that, although things may change in appearance, certain properties remain the same.
• During this stage, children can mentally reverse things (e.g., picture a ball of plasticine returning to its original shape).
• During this stage, children also become less egocentric and begin to think about how other people might think and feel.

The stage is called concrete because children can think logically much more successfully if they can manipulate real (concrete) materials or pictures of them.

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.

But operational thought is only effective here if the child is asked to reason about materials that are physically present. Children at this stage will tend to make mistakes or be overwhelmed when asked to reason about abstract or hypothetical problems.

• Cultural Context in Conservation Tasks : In a society where resources are scarce, children might demonstrate conservation skills earlier due to the cultural emphasis on preserving and reusing materials.
• Gender & Learning : Stereotypes about gender abilities, like “boys are better at math,” can influence how children approach logical problems or classify objects based on perceived gender norms.

Learn More: The Concrete Operational Stage of Development

The Formal Operational Stage

Ages: 12 and Over

The formal operational period begins at about age 11. As adolescents enter this stage, they gain the ability to think in an abstract manner, the ability to combine and classify items in a more sophisticated way, and the capacity for higher-order reasoning.

Adolescents can think systematically and reason about what might be as well as what is (not everyone achieves this stage). This allows them to understand politics, ethics, and science fiction, as well as to engage in scientific reasoning.

Adolescents can deal with abstract ideas: e.g. they can understand division and fractions without having to actually divide things up, and solve hypothetical (imaginary) problems.

• Concrete operations are carried out on things whereas formal operations are carried out on ideas. Formal operational thought is entirely freed from physical and perceptual constraints.
• During this stage, adolescents can deal with abstract ideas (e.g. no longer needing to think about slicing up cakes or sharing sweets to understand division and fractions).
• They can follow the form of an argument without having to think in terms of specific examples.
• Adolescents can deal with hypothetical problems with many possible solutions. E.g. if asked ‘What would happen if money were abolished in one hour’s time? they could speculate about many possible consequences.

From about 12 years children can follow the form of a logical argument without reference to its content. During this time, people develop the ability to think about abstract concepts, and logically test hypotheses.

This stage sees the emergence of scientific thinking, formulating abstract theories and hypotheses when faced with a problem.

• Culture & Abstract Thinking : Cultures emphasize different kinds of logical or abstract thinking. For example, in societies with a strong oral tradition, the ability to hold complex narratives might develop prominently.
• Gender & Ethics : Discussions about morality and ethics can be influenced by gender norms. For instance, in some cultures, girls might be encouraged to prioritize community harmony, while boys might be encouraged to prioritize individual rights.

Learn More: The Formal Operational Stage of Development

Piaget’s Theory

• Piaget’s theory places a strong emphasis on the active role that children play in their own cognitive development.
• According to Piaget, children are not passive recipients of information; instead, they actively explore and interact with their surroundings.
• This active engagement with the environment is crucial because it allows them to gradually build their understanding of the world.

1. How Piaget Developed the Theory

Piaget was employed at the Binet Institute in the 1920s, where his job was to develop French versions of questions on English intelligence tests. He became intrigued with the reasons children gave for their wrong answers to the questions that required logical thinking.

He believed that these incorrect answers revealed important differences between the thinking of adults and children.

Piaget branched out on his own with a new set of assumptions about children’s intelligence:

• Children’s intelligence differs from an adult’s in quality rather than in quantity. This means that children reason (think) differently from adults and see the world in different ways.
• Children actively build up their knowledge about the world . They are not passive creatures waiting for someone to fill their heads with knowledge.
• The best way to understand children’s reasoning is to see things from their point of view.

Piaget did not want to measure how well children could count, spell or solve problems as a way of grading their I.Q. What he was more interested in was the way in which fundamental concepts like the very idea of number , time, quantity, causality , justice , and so on emerged.

Piaget studied children from infancy to adolescence using naturalistic observation of his own three babies and sometimes controlled observation too. From these, he wrote diary descriptions charting their development.

He also used clinical interviews and observations of older children who were able to understand questions and hold conversations.

2. Piaget’s Theory Differs From Others In Several Ways:

Piaget’s (1936, 1950) theory of cognitive development explains how a child constructs a mental model of the world. He disagreed with the idea that intelligence was a fixed trait, and regarded cognitive development as a process that occurs due to biological maturation and interaction with the environment.

Children’s ability to understand, think about, and solve problems in the world develops in a stop-start, discontinuous manner (rather than gradual changes over time).

• It is concerned with children, rather than all learners.
• It focuses on development, rather than learning per se, so it does not address learning of information or specific behaviors.
• It proposes discrete stages of development, marked by qualitative differences, rather than a gradual increase in number and complexity of behaviors, concepts, ideas, etc.

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 claimed that knowledge cannot simply emerge from sensory experience; some initial structure is necessary to make sense of the world.

According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent learning and knowledge are based.

Schemas are the basic building blocks of such cognitive models, and enable us to form a mental representation of the world.

Piaget (1952, p. 7) defined a schema as: “a cohesive, repeatable action sequence possessing component actions that are tightly interconnected and governed by a core meaning.”

In more simple terms, Piaget called the schema the basic building block of intelligent behavior – a way of organizing knowledge. Indeed, it is useful to think of schemas as “units” of knowledge, each relating to one aspect of the world, including objects, actions, and abstract (i.e., theoretical) concepts.

Wadsworth (2004) suggests that schemata (the plural of schema) be thought of as “index cards” filed in the brain, each one telling an individual how to react to incoming stimuli or information.

When Piaget talked about the development of a person’s mental processes, he was referring to increases in the number and complexity of the schemata that a person had learned.

When a child’s existing schemas are capable of explaining what it can perceive around it, it is said to be in a state of equilibrium, i.e., a state of cognitive (i.e., mental) balance.

Operations are more sophisticated mental structures which allow us to combine schemas in a logical (reasonable) way.

As children grow they can carry out more complex operations and begin to imagine hypothetical (imaginary) situations.

Apart from the schemas we are born with schemas and operations are learned through interaction with other people and the environment.

Piaget emphasized the importance of schemas in cognitive development and described how they were developed or acquired.

A schema can be defined as a set of linked mental representations of the world, which we use both to understand and to respond to situations. The assumption is that we store these mental representations and apply them when needed.

Examples of Schemas

A person might have a schema about buying a meal in a restaurant. The schema is a stored form of the pattern of behavior which includes looking at a menu, ordering food, eating it and paying the bill.

This is an example of a schema called a “script.” Whenever they are in a restaurant, they retrieve this schema from memory and apply it to the situation.

The schemas Piaget described tend to be simpler than this – especially those used by infants. He described how – as a child gets older – his or her schemas become more numerous and elaborate.

Piaget believed that newborn babies have a small number of innate schemas – even before they have had many opportunities to experience the world. These neonatal schemas are the cognitive structures underlying innate reflexes. These reflexes are genetically programmed into us.

For example, babies have a sucking reflex, which is triggered by something touching the baby’s lips. A baby will suck a nipple, a comforter (dummy), or a person’s finger. Piaget, therefore, assumed that the baby has a “sucking schema.”

Similarly, the grasping reflex which is elicited when something touches the palm of a baby’s hand, or the rooting reflex, in which a baby will turn its head towards something which touches its cheek, are innate schemas. Shaking a rattle would be the combination of two schemas, grasping and shaking.

4. The Process of Adaptation

Piaget also believed that a child developed as a result of two different influences: maturation, and interaction with the environment. The child develops mental structures (schemata) which enables him to solve problems in the environment.

Adaptation is the process by which the child changes its mental models of the world to match more closely how the world actually is.

Adaptation is brought about by the processes of assimilation (solving new experiences using existing schemata) and accommodation (changing existing schemata in order to solve new experiences).

The importance of this viewpoint is that the child is seen as an active participant in its own development rather than a passive recipient of either biological influences (maturation) or environmental stimulation.

When our existing schemas can explain what we perceive around us, we are in a state of equilibration . However, when we meet a new situation that we cannot explain it creates disequilibrium, this is an unpleasant sensation which we try to escape, and this gives us the motivation to learn.

According to Piaget, reorganization to higher levels of thinking is not accomplished easily. The child must “rethink” his or her view of the world. An important step in the process is the experience of cognitive conflict.

In other words, the child becomes aware that he or she holds two contradictory views about a situation and they both cannot be true. This step is referred to as disequilibrium .

Jean Piaget (1952; see also Wadsworth, 2004) viewed intellectual growth as a process of adaptation (adjustment) to the world. This happens through assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration.

To get back to a state of equilibration, we need to modify our existing schemas to learn and adapt to the new situation.

This is done through the processes of accommodation and assimilation . This is how our schemas evolve and become more sophisticated. The processes of assimilation and accommodation are continuous and interactive.

5. Assimilation

Piaget defined assimilation as the cognitive process of fitting new information into existing cognitive schemas, perceptions, and understanding. Overall beliefs and understanding of the world do not change as a result of the new information.

Assimilation occurs when the new experience is not very different from previous experiences of a particular object or situation we assimilate the new situation by adding information to a previous schema.

This means that when you are faced with new information, you make sense of this information by referring to information you already have (information processed and learned previously) and trying to fit the new information into the information you already have.

• Imagine a young child who has only ever seen small, domesticated dogs. When the child sees a cat for the first time, they might refer to it as a “dog” because it has four legs, fur, and a tail – features that fit their existing schema of a dog.
• A person who has always believed that all birds can fly might label penguins as birds that can fly. This is because their existing schema or understanding of birds includes the ability to fly.
• A 2-year-old child sees a man who is bald on top of his head and has long frizzy hair on the sides. To his father’s horror, the toddler shouts “Clown, clown” (Siegler et al., 2003).
• If a baby learns to pick up a rattle he or she will then use the same schema (grasping) to pick up other objects.

6. Accommodation

Accommodation: when the new experience is very different from what we have encountered before we need to change our schemas in a very radical way or create a whole new schema.

Psychologist Jean Piaget defined accommodation as the cognitive process of revising existing cognitive schemas, perceptions, and understanding so that new information can be incorporated.

This happens when the existing schema (knowledge) does not work, and needs to be changed to deal with a new object or situation.

In order to make sense of some new information, you actually adjust information you already have (schemas you already have, etc.) to make room for this new information.

• A baby tries to use the same schema for grasping to pick up a very small object. It doesn’t work. The baby then changes the schema by now using the forefinger and thumb to pick up the object.
• A child may have a schema for birds (feathers, flying, etc.) and then they see a plane, which also flies, but would not fit into their bird schema.
• In the “clown” incident, the boy’s father explained to his son that the man was not a clown and that even though his hair was like a clown’s, he wasn’t wearing a funny costume and wasn’t doing silly things to make people laugh. With this new knowledge, the boy was able to change his schema of “clown” and make this idea fit better to a standard concept of “clown”.
• A person who grew up thinking all snakes are dangerous might move to an area where garden snakes are common and harmless. Over time, after observing and learning, they might accommodate their previous belief to understand that not all snakes are harmful.

7. Equilibration

Piaget believed that all human thought seeks order and is uncomfortable with contradictions and inconsistencies in knowledge structures. In other words, we seek “equilibrium” in our cognitive structures.

Equilibrium occurs when a child’s schemas can deal with most new information through assimilation. However, an unpleasant state of disequilibrium occurs when new information cannot be fitted into existing schemas (assimilation).

Piaget believed that cognitive development did not progress at a steady rate, but rather in leaps and bounds. Equilibration is the force which drives the learning process as we do not like to be frustrated and will seek to restore balance by mastering the new challenge (accommodation).

Once the new information is acquired the process of assimilation with the new schema will continue until the next time we need to make an adjustment to it.

Equilibration is a regulatory process that maintains a balance between assimilation and accommodation to facilitate cognitive growth. Think of it this way: We can’t merely assimilate all the time; if we did, we would never learn any new concepts or principles.

Everything new we encountered would just get put in the same few “slots” we already had. Neither can we accommodate all the time; if we did, everything we encountered would seem new; there would be no recurring regularities in our world. We’d be exhausted by the mental effort!

Applications to Education

Think of old black and white films that you’ve seen in which children sat in rows at desks, with ink wells, would learn by rote, all chanting in unison in response to questions set by an authoritarian old biddy like Matilda!

Children who were unable to keep up were seen as slacking and would be punished by variations on the theme of corporal punishment. Yes, it really did happen and in some parts of the world still does today.

Piaget is partly responsible for the change that occurred in the 1960s and for your relatively pleasurable and pain-free school days!

“Children should be able to do their own experimenting and their own research. Teachers, of course, can guide them by providing appropriate materials, but the essential thing is that in order for a child to understand something, he must construct it himself, he must re-invent it. Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly”. Piaget (1972, p. 27)

Plowden Report

Piaget (1952) did not explicitly relate his theory to education, although later researchers have explained how features of Piaget’s theory can be applied to teaching and learning.

Piaget has been extremely influential in developing educational policy and teaching practice. For example, a review of primary education by the UK government in 1966 was based strongly on Piaget’s theory. The result of this review led to the publication of the Plowden Report (1967).

In the 1960s the Plowden Committee investigated the deficiencies in education and decided to incorporate many of Piaget’s ideas into its final report published in 1967, even though Piaget’s work was not really designed for education.

The report makes three Piaget-associated recommendations:

• Children should be given individual attention and it should be realized that they need to be treated differently.
• Children should only be taught things that they are capable of learning
• Children mature at different rates and the teacher needs to be aware of the stage of development of each child so teaching can be tailored to their individual needs.

“The report’s recurring themes are individual learning, flexibility in the curriculum, the centrality of play in children’s learning, the use of the environment, learning by discovery and the importance of the evaluation of children’s progress – teachers should “not assume that only what is measurable is valuable.”

Discovery learning – the idea that children learn best through doing and actively exploring – was seen as central to the transformation of the primary school curriculum.

How to teach

Within the classroom learning should be student-centered and accomplished through active discovery learning. The role of the teacher is to facilitate learning, rather than direct tuition.

Because Piaget’s theory is based upon biological maturation and stages, the notion of “readiness” is important. Readiness concerns when certain information or concepts should be taught.

According to Piaget’s theory, children should not be taught certain concepts until they have reached the appropriate stage of cognitive development.

According to Piaget (1958), assimilation and accommodation require an active learner, not a passive one, because problem-solving skills cannot be taught, they must be discovered.

Therefore, teachers should encourage the following within the classroom:

• Educational programs should be designed to correspond to Piaget’s stages of development. Children in the concrete operational stage should be given concrete means to learn new concepts e.g. tokens for counting.
• Devising situations that present useful problems, and create disequilibrium in the child.
• Focus on the process of learning, rather than the end product of it. Instead of checking if children have the right answer, the teacher should focus on the student’s understanding and the processes they used to get to the answer.
• Child-centered approach. Learning must be active (discovery learning). Children should be encouraged to discover for themselves and to interact with the material instead of being given ready-made knowledge.
• Accepting that children develop at different rates so arrange activities for individual children or small groups rather than assume that all the children can cope with a particular activity.
• Using active methods that require rediscovering or reconstructing “truths.”
• Using collaborative, as well as individual activities (so children can learn from each other).
• Evaluate the level of the child’s development so suitable tasks can be set.
• Adapt lessons to suit the needs of the individual child (i.e. differentiated teaching).
• Be aware of the child’s stage of development (testing).
• Teach only when the child is ready. i.e. has the child reached the appropriate stage.
• Providing support for the “spontaneous research” of the child.
• Using collaborative, as well as individual activities.
• Educators may use Piaget’s stages to design age-appropriate assessment tools and strategies.

Classroom Activities

Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years):.

Although most kids in this age range are not in a traditional classroom setting, they can still benefit from games that stimulate their senses and motor skills.

• Object Permanence Games : Play peek-a-boo or hide toys under a blanket to help babies understand that objects still exist even when they can’t see them.
• Sensory Play : Activities like water play, sand play, or playdough encourage exploration through touch.
• Imitation : Children at this age love to imitate adults. Use imitation as a way to teach new skills.

Preoperational Stage (2-7 years):

• Role Playing : Set up pretend play areas where children can act out different scenarios, such as a kitchen, hospital, or market.
• Use of Symbols : Encourage drawing, building, and using props to represent other things.
• Hands-on Activities : Children should interact physically with their environment, so provide plenty of opportunities for hands-on learning.
• Egocentrism Activities : Use exercises that highlight different perspectives. For instance, having two children sit across from each other with an object in between and asking them what the other sees.

Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years):

• Classification Tasks : Provide objects or pictures to group, based on various characteristics.
• Hands-on Experiments : Introduce basic science experiments where they can observe cause and effect, like a simple volcano with baking soda and vinegar.
• Logical Games : Board games, puzzles, and logic problems help develop their thinking skills.
• Conservation Tasks : Use experiments to showcase that quantity doesn’t change with alterations in shape, such as the classic liquid conservation task using different shaped glasses.

Formal Operational Stage (11 years and older):

• Hypothesis Testing : Encourage students to make predictions and test them out.
• Abstract Thinking : Introduce topics that require abstract reasoning, such as algebra or ethical dilemmas.
• Problem Solving : Provide complex problems and have students work on solutions, integrating various subjects and concepts.
• Debate and Discussion : Encourage group discussions and debates on abstract topics, highlighting the importance of logic and evidence.
• Feedback and Questioning : Use open-ended questions to challenge students and promote higher-order thinking. For instance, rather than asking, “Is this the right answer?”, ask, “How did you arrive at this conclusion?”

While Piaget’s stages offer a foundational framework, they are not universally experienced in the same way by all children.

Social identities play a critical role in shaping cognitive development, necessitating a more nuanced and culturally responsive approach to understanding child development.

Piaget’s stages may manifest differently based on social identities like race, gender, and culture:

• Race & Teacher Interactions : A child’s race can influence teacher expectations and interactions. For example, racial biases can lead to children of color being perceived as less capable or more disruptive, influencing their cognitive challenges and supports.
• Racial and Cultural Stereotypes : These can affect a child’s self-perception and self-efficacy . For instance, stereotypes about which racial or cultural groups are “better” at certain subjects can influence a child’s self-confidence and, subsequently, their engagement in that subject.
• Gender & Peer Interactions : Children learn gender roles from their peers. Boys might be mocked for playing “girl games,” and girls might be excluded from certain activities, influencing their cognitive engagements.
• Language : Multilingual children might navigate the stages differently, especially if their home language differs from their school language. The way concepts are framed in different languages can influence cognitive processing. Cultural idioms and metaphors can shape a child’s understanding of concepts and their ability to use symbolic representation, especially in the pre-operational stage.

Curriculum Development

According to Piaget, children’s cognitive development is determined by a process of maturation which cannot be altered by tuition so education should be stage-specific.

For example, a child in the concrete operational stage should not be taught abstract concepts and should be given concrete aid such as tokens to count with.

According to Piaget children learn through the process of accommodation and assimilation so the role of the teacher should be to provide opportunities for these processes to occur such as new material and experiences that challenge the children’s existing schemas.

Furthermore, according to this theory, children should be encouraged to discover for themselves and to interact with the material instead of being given ready-made knowledge.

Curricula need to be developed that take into account the age and stage of thinking of the child. For example there is no point in teaching abstract concepts such as algebra or atomic structure to children in primary school.

Curricula also need to be sufficiently flexible to allow for variations in the ability of different students of the same age. In Britain, the National Curriculum and Key Stages broadly reflect the stages that Piaget laid down.

For example, egocentrism dominates a child’s thinking in the sensorimotor and preoperational stages. Piaget would therefore predict that using group activities would not be appropriate since children are not capable of understanding the views of others.

However, Smith et al. (1998), point out that some children develop earlier than Piaget predicted and that by using group work children can learn to appreciate the views of others in preparation for the concrete operational stage.

The national curriculum emphasizes the need to use concrete examples in the primary classroom.

Shayer (1997), reported that abstract thought was necessary for success in secondary school (and co-developed the CASE system of teaching science). Recently the National curriculum has been updated to encourage the teaching of some abstract concepts towards the end of primary education, in preparation for secondary courses. (DfEE, 1999).

Child-centered teaching is regarded by some as a child of the ‘liberal sixties.’ In the 1980s the Thatcher government introduced the National Curriculum in an attempt to move away from this and bring more central government control into the teaching of children.

So, although the British National Curriculum in some ways supports the work of Piaget, (in that it dictates the order of teaching), it can also be seen as prescriptive to the point where it counters Piaget’s child-oriented approach.

However, it does still allow for flexibility in teaching methods, allowing teachers to tailor lessons to the needs of their students.

Social Media (Digital Learning)

Jean Piaget could not have anticipated the expansive digital age we now live in.

Today, knowledge dissemination and creation are democratized by the Internet, with platforms like blogs, wikis, and social media allowing for vast collaboration and shared knowledge. This development has prompted a reimagining of the future of education.

Classrooms, traditionally seen as primary sites of learning, are being overshadowed by the rise of mobile technologies and platforms like MOOCs (Passey, 2013).

The millennial generation, defined as the first to grow up with cable TV, the internet, and cell phones, relies heavily on technology.

They view it as an integral part of their identity, with most using it extensively in their daily lives, from keeping in touch with loved ones to consuming news and entertainment (Nielsen, 2014).

Social media platforms offer a dynamic environment conducive to Piaget’s principles. These platforms allow for interactions that nurture knowledge evolution through cognitive processes like assimilation and accommodation.

They emphasize communal interaction and shared activity, fostering both cognitive and socio-cultural constructivism. This shared activity promotes understanding and exploration beyond individual perspectives, enhancing social-emotional learning (Gehlbach, 2010).

A standout advantage of social media in an educational context is its capacity to extend beyond traditional classroom confines. As the material indicates, these platforms can foster more inclusive learning, bridging diverse learner groups.

This inclusivity can equalize learning opportunities, potentially diminishing biases based on factors like race or socio-economic status, resonating with Kegan’s (1982) concept of “recruitability.”

However, there are challenges. While the potential of social media in learning is vast, its practical application necessitates intention and guidance. Cuban, Kirkpatrick, and Peck (2001) note that certain educators and students are hesitant about integrating social media into educational contexts.

This hesitancy can stem from technological complexities or potential distractions. Yet, when harnessed effectively, social media can provide a rich environment for collaborative learning and interpersonal development, fostering a deeper understanding of content.

In essence, the rise of social media aligns seamlessly with constructivist philosophies. Social media platforms act as tools for everyday cognition, merging daily social interactions with the academic world, and providing avenues for diverse, interactive, and engaging learning experiences.

Applications to Parenting

Parents can use Piaget’s stages to have realistic developmental expectations of their children’s behavior and cognitive capabilities.

For instance, understanding that a toddler is in the pre-operational stage can help parents be patient when the child is egocentric.

Play Activities

Recognizing the importance of play in cognitive development, many parents provide toys and games suited for their child’s developmental stage.

Parents can offer activities that are slightly beyond their child’s current abilities, leveraging Vygotsky’s concept of the “Zone of Proximal Development,” which complements Piaget’s ideas.

• Peek-a-boo : Helps with object permanence.
• Texture Touch : Provide different textured materials (soft, rough, bumpy, smooth) for babies to touch and feel.
• Sound Bottles : Fill small bottles with different items like rice, beans, bells, and have children shake and listen to the different sounds.
• Memory Games : Using cards with pictures, place them face down, and ask students to find matching pairs.
• Role Playing and Pretend Play : Let children act out roles or stories that enhance symbolic thinking. Encourage symbolic play with dress-up clothes, playsets, or toy cash registers. Provide prompts or scenarios to extend their imagination.
• Story Sequencing : Give children cards with parts of a story and have them arranged in the correct order.
• Number Line Jumps : Create a number line on the floor with tape. Ask students to jump to the correct answer for math problems.
• Classification Games : Provide a mix of objects and ask students to classify them based on different criteria (e.g., color, size, shape).
• Logical Puzzle Games : Games that involve problem-solving using logic, such as simple Sudoku puzzles or logic grid puzzles.
• Debate and Discussion : Provide a topic and let students debate on pros and cons. This promotes abstract thinking and logical reasoning.
• Hypothesis Testing Games : Present a scenario and have students come up with hypotheses and ways to test them.
• Strategy Board Games : Games like chess, checkers, or Settlers of Catan can help in developing strategic and forward-thinking skills.

Critical Evaluation

• The influence of Piaget’s ideas on developmental psychology has been enormous. He changed how people viewed the child’s world and their methods of studying children.

He was an inspiration to many who came after and took up his ideas. Piaget’s ideas have generated a huge amount of research which has increased our understanding of cognitive development.

• Piaget (1936) was one of the first psychologists to make a systematic study of cognitive development. His contributions include a stage theory of child cognitive development, detailed observational studies of cognition in children, and a series of simple but ingenious tests to reveal different cognitive abilities.
• His ideas have been of practical use in understanding and communicating with children, particularly in the field of education (re: Discovery Learning). Piaget’s theory has been applied across education.
• According to Piaget’s theory, educational programs should be designed to correspond to the stages of development.
• Are the stages real? Vygotsky and Bruner would rather not talk about stages at all, preferring to see development as a continuous process. Others have queried the age ranges of the stages. Some studies have shown that progress to the formal operational stage is not guaranteed.

For example, Keating (1979) reported that 40-60% of college students fail at formal operation tasks, and Dasen (1994) states that only one-third of adults ever reach the formal operational stage.

The fact that the formal operational stage is not reached in all cultures and not all individuals within cultures suggests that it might not be biologically based.

• According to Piaget, the rate of cognitive development cannot be accelerated as it is based on biological processes however, direct tuition can speed up the development which suggests that it is not entirely based on biological factors.
• Because Piaget concentrated on the universal stages of cognitive development and biological maturation, he failed to consider the effect that the social setting and culture may have on cognitive development.

Cross-cultural studies show that the stages of development (except the formal operational stage) occur in the same order in all cultures suggesting that cognitive development is a product of a biological process of maturation.

However, the age at which the stages are reached varies between cultures and individuals which suggests that social and cultural factors and individual differences influence cognitive development.

Dasen (1994) cites studies he conducted in remote parts of the central Australian desert with 8-14-year-old Indigenous Australians. He gave them conservation of liquid tasks and spatial awareness tasks. He found that the ability to conserve came later in the Aboriginal children, between ages of 10 and 13 (as opposed to between 5 and 7, with Piaget’s Swiss sample).

However, he found that spatial awareness abilities developed earlier amongst the Aboriginal children than the Swiss children. Such a study demonstrates cognitive development is not purely dependent on maturation but on cultural factors too – spatial awareness is crucial for nomadic groups of people.

Vygotsky , a contemporary of Piaget, argued that social interaction is crucial for cognitive development. According to Vygotsky the child’s learning always occurs in a social context in cooperation with someone more skillful (MKO). This social interaction provides language opportunities and Vygotsky considered language the foundation of thought.

• Piaget’s methods (observation and clinical interviews) are more open to biased interpretation than other methods. Piaget made careful, detailed naturalistic observations of children, and from these, he wrote diary descriptions charting their development. He also used clinical interviews and observations of older children who were able to understand questions and hold conversations.

Because Piaget conducted the observations alone the data collected are based on his own subjective interpretation of events. It would have been more reliable if Piaget conducted the observations with another researcher and compared the results afterward to check if they are similar (i.e., have inter-rater reliability).

Although clinical interviews allow the researcher to explore data in more depth, the interpretation of the interviewer may be biased.

For example, children may not understand the question/s, they have short attention spans, they cannot express themselves very well, and may be trying to please the experimenter. Such methods meant that Piaget may have formed inaccurate conclusions.

• As several studies have shown Piaget underestimated the abilities of children because his tests were sometimes confusing or difficult to understand (e.g., Hughes , 1975).

Piaget failed to distinguish between competence (what a child is capable of doing) and performance (what a child can show when given a particular task). When tasks were altered, performance (and therefore competence) was affected. Therefore, Piaget might have underestimated children’s cognitive abilities.

For example, a child might have object permanence (competence) but still not be able to search for objects (performance). When Piaget hid objects from babies he found that it wasn’t till after nine months that they looked for it.

However, Piaget relied on manual search methods – whether the child was looking for the object or not.

Later, researchers such as Baillargeon and Devos (1991) reported that infants as young as four months looked longer at a moving carrot that didn’t do what it expected, suggesting they had some sense of permanence, otherwise they wouldn’t have had any expectation of what it should or shouldn’t do.

• The concept of schema is incompatible with the theories of Bruner (1966) and Vygotsky (1978). Behaviorism would also refute Piaget’s schema theory because is cannot be directly observed as it is an internal process. Therefore, they would claim it cannot be objectively measured.
• Piaget studied his own children and the children of his colleagues in Geneva to deduce general principles about the intellectual development of all children. His sample was very small and composed solely of European children from families of high socio-economic status. Researchers have, therefore, questioned the generalisability of his data.
• For Piaget, language is considered secondary to action, i.e., thought precedes language. The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978) argues that the development of language and thought go together and that the origin of reasoning has more to do with our ability to communicate with others than with our interaction with the material world.

Piaget’s Theory vs Vygotsky

Piaget maintains that cognitive development stems largely from independent explorations in which children construct knowledge of their own.

Whereas Vygotsky argues that children learn through social interactions, building knowledge by learning from more knowledgeable others such as peers and adults. In other words, Vygotsky believed that culture affects cognitive development.

These factors lead to differences in the education style they recommend: Piaget would argue for the teacher to provide opportunities that challenge the children’s existing schemas and for children to be encouraged to discover for themselves.

Alternatively, Vygotsky would recommend that teachers assist the child to progress through the zone of proximal development by using scaffolding.

However, both theories view children as actively constructing their own knowledge of the world; they are not seen as just passively absorbing knowledge.

They also agree that cognitive development involves qualitative changes in thinking, not only a matter of learning more things.

What is cognitive development?

Cognitive development is how a person’s ability to think, learn, remember, problem-solve, and make decisions changes over time.

This includes the growth and maturation of the brain, as well as the acquisition and refinement of various mental skills and abilities.

Cognitive development is a major aspect of human development, and both genetic and environmental factors heavily influence it. Key domains of cognitive development include attention, memory, language skills, logical reasoning, and problem-solving.

Various theories, such as those proposed by Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, provide different perspectives on how this complex process unfolds from infancy through adulthood.

What are the 4 stages of Piaget’s theory?

Piaget divided children’s cognitive development into four stages; each of the stages represents a new way of thinking and understanding the world.

He called them (1) sensorimotor intelligence , (2) preoperational thinking , (3) concrete operational thinking , and (4) formal operational thinking . Each stage is correlated with an age period of childhood, but only approximately.

According to Piaget, intellectual development takes place through stages that occur in a fixed order and which are universal (all children pass through these stages regardless of social or cultural background).

Development can only occur when the brain has matured to a point of “readiness”.

What are some of the weaknesses of Piaget’s theory?

Cross-cultural studies show that the stages of development (except the formal operational stage) occur in the same order in all cultures suggesting that cognitive development is a product of a biological maturation process.

However, the age at which the stages are reached varies between cultures and individuals, suggesting that social and cultural factors and individual differences influence cognitive development.

What are Piaget’s concepts of schemas?

Schemas are mental structures that contain all of the information relating to one aspect of the world around us.

According to Piaget, we are born with a few primitive schemas, such as sucking, which give us the means to interact with the world.

These are physical, but as the child develops, they become mental schemas. These schemas become more complex with experience.

Baillargeon, R., & DeVos, J. (1991). Object permanence in young infants: Further evidence . Child development , 1227-1246.

Bruner, J. S. (1966). Toward a theory of instruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Belkapp Press.

Cuban, L., Kirkpatrick, H., & Peck, C. (2001). High access and low use of technologies in high school classrooms: Explaining an apparent paradox.  American Educational Research Journal ,  38 (4), 813-834.

Dasen, P. (1994). Culture and cognitive development from a Piagetian perspective. In W .J. Lonner & R.S. Malpass (Eds.), Psychology and culture (pp. 145–149). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

Gehlbach, H. (2010). The social side of school: Why teachers need social psychology.  Educational Psychology Review ,  22 , 349-362.

Hughes, M. (1975). Egocentrism in preschool children . Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Edinburgh University.

Inhelder, B., & Piaget, J. (1958). The growth of logical thinking from childhood to adolescence . New York: Basic Books.

Keating, D. (1979). Adolescent thinking. In J. Adelson (Ed.), Handbook of adolescent psychology (pp. 211-246). New York: Wiley.

Kegan, R. (1982).  The evolving self: Problem and process in human development . Harvard University Press.

Nielsen. 2014. “Millennials: Technology = Social Connection.” http://www.nielsen.com/content/corporate/us/en/insights/news/2014/millennials-technology-social-connecti on.html.

Passey, D. (2013).  Inclusive technology enhanced learning: Overcoming cognitive, physical, emotional, and geographic challenges . Routledge.

Piaget, J. (1932). The moral judgment of the child . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Piaget, J. (1936). Origins of intelligence in the child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Piaget, J. (1945). Play, dreams and imitation in childhood . London: Heinemann.

Piaget, J. (1957). Construction of reality in the child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Piaget, J., & Cook, M. T. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children . New York, NY: International University Press.

Piaget, J. (1981).  Intelligence and affectivity: Their relationship during child development.(Trans & Ed TA Brown & CE Kaegi) . Annual Reviews.

Plowden, B. H. P. (1967). Children and their primary schools: A report (Research and Surveys). London, England: HM Stationery Office.

Siegler, R. S., DeLoache, J. S., & Eisenberg, N. (2003). How children develop . New York: Worth.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wadsworth, B. J. (2004). Piaget’s theory of cognitive and affective development: Foundations of constructivism . New York: Longman.

Further Reading

• BBC Radio Broadcast about the Three Mountains Study
• Piagetian stages: A critical review
• Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory

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Cognitive Development Theory: What Are the Stages?

Sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operational stage, formal operational stage.

Cognitive development is the process by which we come to acquire, understand, organize, and learn to use information in various ways. Cognitive development helps a child obtain the skills needed to live a productive life and function as an independent adult.

The late Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget was a major figure in the study of cognitive development theory in children. He believed that it occurs in four stages—sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.

This article discusses Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, including important concepts and principles.

FatCamera / Getty Images

History of Cognitive Development

During the 1920s, the psychologist Jean Piaget was given the task of translating English intelligence tests into French. During this process, he observed that children think differently than adults do and have a different view of the world. He began to study children from birth through the teenage years—observing children who were too young to talk, and interviewing older children while he also observed their development.

Piaget published his theory of cognitive development in 1936. This theory is based on the idea that a child’s intelligence changes throughout childhood and cognitive skills—including memory, attention, thinking, problem-solving, logical reasoning, reading, listening, and more—are learned as a child grows and interacts with their environment.

Stages of Cognitive Development

Piaget’s theory suggests that cognitive development occurs in four stages as a child ages. These stages are always completed in order, but last longer for some children than others. Each stage builds on the skills learned in the previous stage.

The four stages of cognitive development include:

• Sensorimotor
• Preoperational
• Concrete operational
• Formal operational

The sensorimotor stage begins at birth and lasts until 18 to 24 months of age. During the sensorimotor stage, children are physically exploring their environment and absorbing information through their senses of smell, sight, touch, taste, and sound.

The most important skill gained in the sensorimotor stage is object permanence, which means that the child knows that an object still exists even when they can't see it anymore. For example, if a toy is covered up by a blanket, the child will know the toy is still there and will look for it. Without this skill, the child thinks that the toy has simply disappeared.

Language skills also begin to develop during the sensorimotor stage.

Activities to Try During the Sensorimotor Stage

Appropriate activities to do during the sensorimotor stage include:

• Playing peek-a-boo
• Reading books
• Providing toys with a variety of textures
• Singing songs
• Playing with musical instruments
• Rolling a ball back and forth

The preoperational stage of Piaget's theory of cognitive development occurs between ages 2 and 7 years. Early on in this stage, children learn the skill of symbolic representation. This means that an object or word can stand for something else. For example, a child might play "house" with a cardboard box.

At this stage, children assume that other people see the world and experience emotions the same way they do, and their main focus is on themselves. This is called egocentrism .

Centrism is another characteristic of the preoperational stage. This means that a child is only able to focus on one aspect of a problem or situation. For example, a child might become upset that a friend has more pieces of candy than they do, even if their pieces are bigger.

During this stage, children will often play next to each other—called parallel play—but not with each other. They also believe that inanimate objects, such as toys, have human lives and feelings.

Activities to Try During the Preoperational Stage

Appropriate activities to do during the preoperational stage include:

• Playing "house" or "school"
• Building a fort
• Playing with Play-Doh
• Building with blocks
• Playing charades

The concrete operational stage occurs between the ages of 7 and 11 years. During this stage, a child develops the ability to think logically and problem-solve but can only apply these skills to objects they can physically see—things that are "concrete."

Six main concrete operations develop in this stage. These include:

• Conservation : This skill means that a child understands that the amount of something or the number of a particular object stays the same, even when it looks different. For example, a cup of milk in a tall glass looks different than the same amount of milk in a short glass—but the amount did not change.
• Classification : This skill is the ability to sort items by specific classes, such as color, shape, or size.
• Seriation : This skill involves arranging objects in a series, or a logical order. For example, the child could arrange blocks in order from smallest to largest.
• Reversibility : This skill is the understanding that a process can be reversed. For example, a balloon can be blown up with air and then deflated back to the way it started.
• Decentering : This skill allows a child to focus on more than one aspect of a problem or situation at the same time. For example, two candy bars might look the same on the outside, but the child knows that they have different flavors on the inside.
• Transitivity : This skill provides an understanding of how things relate to each other. For example, if John is older than Susan, and Susan is older than Joey, then John is older than Joey.

Activities to Try During the Concrete Operational Stage

Appropriate activities to do during the concrete operational stage include:

• Using measuring cups (for example, demonstrate how one cup of water fills two half-cups)
• Solving simple logic problems
• Practicing basic math
• Doing crossword puzzles
• Playing board games

The last stage in Piaget's theory of cognitive development occurs during the teenage years into adulthood. During this stage, a person learns abstract thinking and hypothetical problem-solving skills.

Deductive reasoning—or the ability to make a conclusion based on information gained from a person's environment—is also learned in this stage. This means, for example, that a person can identify the differences between dogs of various breeds, instead of putting them all in a general category of "dogs."

Activities to Try During the Formal Operational Stage

Appropriate activities to do during the formal operational stage include:

• Learning to cook
• Solving crossword and logic puzzles
• Exploring hobbies
• Playing a musical instrument

Piaget's theory of cognitive development is based on the belief that a child gains thinking skills in four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. These stages roughly correspond to specific ages, from birth to adulthood. Children progress through these stages at different paces, but according to Piaget, they are always completed in order.

National Library of Medicine. Cognitive testing . MedlinePlus.

Oklahoma State University. Cognitive development: The theory of Jean Piaget .

SUNY Cortland. Sensorimotor stage .

Marwaha S, Goswami M, Vashist B. Prevalence of principles of Piaget’s theory among 4-7-year-old children and their correlation with IQ . J Clin Diagn Res. 2017;11(8):ZC111-ZC115. doi:10.7860%2FJCDR%2F2017%2F28435.10513

Börnert-Ringleb M, Wilbert J. The association of strategy use and concrete-operational thinking in primary school . Front Educ. 2018;0. doi:10.3389/feduc.2018.00038

By Aubrey Bailey, PT, DPT, CHT Dr, Bailey is a Virginia-based physical therapist and professor of anatomy and physiology with over a decade of experience.

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Child cognitive development is a fascinating and complex process that entails the growth of a child’s mental abilities, including their ability to think, learn, and solve problems. This development occurs through a series of stages that can vary among individuals. As children progress through these stages, their cognitive abilities and skills are continuously shaped by a myriad of factors such as genetics, environment, and experiences. Understanding the nuances of child cognitive development is essential for parents, educators, and professionals alike, as it provides valuable insight into supporting the growth of the child’s intellect and overall well-being.

Throughout the developmental process, language and communication play a vital role in fostering a child’s cognitive abilities . As children acquire language skills, they also develop their capacity for abstract thought, reasoning, and problem-solving. It is crucial for parents and caregivers to be mindful of potential developmental delays, as early intervention can greatly benefit the child’s cognitive development. By providing stimulating environments, nurturing relationships, and embracing diverse learning opportunities, adults can actively foster healthy cognitive development in children.

Key Takeaways

• Child cognitive development involves the growth of mental abilities and occurs through various stages.
• Language and communication are significant factors in cognitive development , shaping a child’s ability for abstract thought and problem-solving.
• Early intervention and supportive environments can play a crucial role in fostering healthy cognitive development in children.

Child Cognitive Development Stages

Child cognitive development is a crucial aspect of a child’s growth and involves the progression of their thinking, learning, and problem-solving abilities. Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget developed a widely recognized theory that identifies four major stages of cognitive development in children.

Sensorimotor Stage

The Sensorimotor Stage occurs from birth to about 2 years old. During this stage, infants and newborns learn to coordinate their senses (sight, sound, touch, etc.) with their motor abilities. Their understanding of the world begins to develop through their physical interactions and experiences. Some key milestones in this stage include object permanence, which is the understanding that an object still exists even when it’s not visible, and the development of intentional actions.

Preoperational Stage

The Preoperational Stage takes place between the ages of 2 and 7 years old. In this stage, children start to think symbolically, and their language capabilities rapidly expand. They also develop the ability to use mental images, words, and gestures to represent the world around them. However, their thinking is largely egocentric, which means they struggle to see things from other people’s perspectives. During this stage, children start to engage in pretend play and begin to grasp the concept of conservation, recognizing that certain properties of objects (such as quantity or volume) remain the same even if their appearance changes.

Concrete Operational Stage

The Concrete Operational Stage occurs between the ages of 7 and 12 years old. At this stage, children’s cognitive development progresses to more logical and organized ways of thinking. They can now consider multiple aspects of a problem and better understand the relationship between cause and effect . Furthermore, children become more adept at understanding other people’s viewpoints, and they can perform basic mathematical operations and understand the principles of classification and seriation.

Formal Operational Stage

Lastly, the Formal Operational Stage typically begins around 12 years old and extends into adulthood. In this stage, children develop the capacity for abstract thinking and can consider hypothetical situations and complex reasoning. They can also perform advanced problem-solving and engage in systematic scientific inquiry. This stage allows individuals to think about abstract concepts, their own thought processes, and understand the world in deeper, more nuanced ways.

By understanding these stages of cognitive development, you can better appreciate the complex growth process that children undergo as their cognitive abilities transform and expand throughout their childhood.

Key Factors in Cognitive Development

Genetics and brain development.

Genetics play a crucial role in determining a child’s cognitive development. A child’s brain development is heavily influenced by genetic factors, which also determine their cognitive potential , abilities, and skills. It is important to understand that a child’s genes do not solely dictate their cognitive development – various environmental and experiential factors contribute to shaping their cognitive abilities as they grow and learn.

Environmental Influences

The environment in which a child grows up has a significant impact on their cognitive development. Exposure to various experiences is essential for a child to develop essential cognitive skills such as problem-solving, communication, and critical thinking. Factors that can have a negative impact on cognitive development include exposure to toxins, extreme stress, trauma, abuse, and addiction issues, such as alcoholism in the family.

Nutrition and Health

Maintaining good nutrition and health is vital for a child’s cognitive development. Adequate nutrition is essential for the proper growth and functioning of the brain . Key micronutrients that contribute to cognitive development include iron, zinc, and vitamins A, C, D, and B-complex vitamins. Additionally, a child’s overall health, including physical fitness and immunity, ensures they have the energy and resources to engage in learning activities and achieve cognitive milestones effectively .

Emotional and Social Factors

Emotional well-being and social relationships can also greatly impact a child’s cognitive development. A supportive, nurturing, and emotionally healthy environment allows children to focus on learning and building cognitive skills. Children’s emotions and stress levels can impact their ability to learn and process new information. Additionally, positive social interactions help children develop important cognitive skills such as empathy, communication, and collaboration.

In summary, cognitive development in children is influenced by various factors, including genetics, environmental influences, nutrition, health, and emotional and social factors. Considering these factors can help parents, educators, and policymakers create suitable environments and interventions for promoting optimal child development.

Language and Communication Development

Language skills and milestones.

Children’s language development is a crucial aspect of their cognitive growth. They begin to acquire language skills by listening and imitating sounds they hear from their environment. As they grow, they start to understand words and form simple sentences.

• Infants (0-12 months): Babbling, cooing, and imitating sounds are common during this stage. They can also identify their name by the end of their first year. Facial expressions play a vital role during this period, as babies learn to respond to emotions.
• Toddlers (1-3 years): They rapidly learn new words and form simple sentences. They engage more in spoken communication, constantly exploring their language environment.
• Preschoolers (3-5 years): Children expand their vocabulary, improve grammar, and begin participating in more complex conversations.

It’s essential to monitor children’s language development and inform their pediatrician if any delays or concerns arise.

Nonverbal Communication

Nonverbal communication contributes significantly to children’s cognitive development. They learn to interpret body language, facial expressions, and gestures long before they can speak. Examples of nonverbal communication in children include:

• Eye contact: Maintaining eye contact while interacting helps children understand emotions and enhances communication.
• Gestures: Pointing, waving goodbye, or using hand signs provide alternative ways for children to communicate their needs and feelings.
• Body language: Posture, body orientation, and movement give clues about a child’s emotions and intentions.

Teaching children to understand and use nonverbal communication supports their cognitive and social development.

Parent and Caregiver Interaction

Supportive interaction from parents and caregivers plays a crucial role in children’s language and communication development. These interactions can improve children’s language skills and overall cognitive abilities . Some ways parents and caregivers can foster language development are:

• Reading together: From an early age, reading books to children enhance their vocabulary and listening skills.
• Encouraging communication: Ask open-ended questions and engage them in conversations to build their speaking skills.
• Using rich vocabulary: Expose children to a variety of words and phrases, promoting language growth and understanding.

By actively engaging in children’s language and communication development, parents and caregivers can nurture cognitive, emotional, and social growth.

Cognitive Abilities and Skills

Cognitive abilities are the mental skills that children develop as they grow. These skills are essential for learning, adapting, and thriving in modern society. In this section, we will discuss various aspects of cognitive development, including reasoning and problem-solving, attention and memory, decision-making and executive function, as well as academic and cognitive milestones.

Reasoning and Problem Solving

Reasoning is the ability to think logically and make sense of the world around us. It’s essential for a child’s cognitive development, as it enables them to understand the concept of object permanence , recognize patterns, and classify objects. Problem-solving skills involve using these reasoning abilities to find solutions to challenges they encounter in daily life .

Children develop essential skills like:

• Logical reasoning : The ability to deduce conclusions from available information.
• Perception: Understanding how objects relate to one another in their environment.
• Schemes: Organizing thoughts and experiences into mental categories.

Attention and Memory

Attention refers to a child’s ability to focus on specific tasks, objects, or information, while memory involves retaining and recalling information. These cognitive abilities play a critical role in children’s learning and academic performance . Working memory is a vital component of learning, as it allows children to hold and manipulate information in their minds while solving problems and engaging with new tasks.

• Attention: Focuses on relevant tasks and information while ignoring distractions.
• Memory: Retains and retrieves information when needed.

Decision-Making and Executive Function

Decision-making is the process of making choices among various alternatives, while executive function refers to the higher-order cognitive processes that enable children to plan, organize, and adapt in complex situations. Executive function encompasses components such as:

• Inhibition: Self-control and the ability to resist impulses.
• Cognitive flexibility: Adapting to new information or changing circumstances.
• Planning: Setting goals and devising strategies to achieve them.

Academic and Cognitive Milestones

Children’s cognitive development is closely linked to their academic achievement. As they grow, they achieve milestones in various cognitive domains that form the foundation for their future learning. Some of these milestones include:

• Language skills: Developing vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure.
• Reading and mathematics: Acquiring the ability to read and comprehend text, as well as understanding basic mathematical concepts and operations.
• Scientific thinking: Developing an understanding of cause-and-effect relationships and forming hypotheses.

Healthy cognitive development is essential for a child’s success in school and life. By understanding and supporting the development of their cognitive abilities, we can help children unlock their full potential and prepare them for a lifetime of learning and growth.

Developmental Delays and Early Intervention

Identifying developmental delays.

Developmental delays in children can be identified by monitoring their progress in reaching cognitive, linguistic, physical, and social milestones. Parents and caregivers should be aware of developmental milestones that are generally expected to be achieved by children at different ages, such as 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, 9 months, 18 months, 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, and 5 years. Utilizing resources such as the “Learn the Signs. Act Early.” program can help parents and caregivers recognize signs of delay early in a child’s life.

Resources and Support for Parents

There are numerous resources available for parents and caregivers to find information on developmental milestones and to learn about potential developmental delays, including:

• Learn the Signs. Act Early : A CDC initiative that provides pdf checklists of milestones and resources for identifying delays.
• Parental support groups : Local and online communities dedicated to providing resources and fostering connections between families experiencing similar challenges.

Professional Evaluations and Intervention Strategies

If parents or caregivers suspect a developmental delay, it is crucial to consult with healthcare professionals or specialists who can conduct validated assessments of the child’s cognitive and developmental abilities. Early intervention strategies, such as the ones used in broad-based early intervention programs , have shown significant positive impacts on children with developmental delays to improve cognitive development and outcomes.

Professional evaluations may include:

• Pediatricians : Primary healthcare providers who can monitor a child’s development and recommend further assessments when needed.
• Speech and language therapists : Professionals who assist children with language and communication deficits.
• Occupational therapists : Experts in helping children develop or improve on physical and motor skills, as well as social and cognitive abilities.

Depending on the severity and nature of the delays, interventions may involve:

• Individualized support : Tailored programs or therapy sessions specifically developed for the child’s needs.
• Group sessions : Opportunities for children to learn from and interact with other children experiencing similar challenges.
• Family involvement : Parents and caregivers learning support strategies to help the child in their daily life.

Fostering Healthy Cognitive Development

Play and learning opportunities.

Encouraging play is crucial for fostering healthy cognitive development in children . Provide a variety of age-appropriate games, puzzles, and creative activities that engage their senses and stimulate curiosity. For example, introduce building blocks and math games for problem-solving skills, and crossword puzzles to improve vocabulary and reasoning abilities.

Playing with others also helps children develop social skills and better understand facial expressions and emotions. Provide opportunities for cooperative play, where kids can work together to achieve a common goal, and open-ended play with no specific rules to boost creativity.

Supportive Home Environment

A nurturing and secure home environment encourages healthy cognitive growth. Be responsive to your child’s needs and interests, involving them in everyday activities and providing positive reinforcement. Pay attention to their emotional well-being and create a space where they feel safe to ask questions and explore their surroundings.

Promoting Independence and Decision-Making

Support independence by allowing children to make decisions about their playtime, activities, and daily routines. Encourage them to take age-appropriate responsibilities and make choices that contribute to self-confidence and autonomy. Model problem-solving strategies and give them opportunities to practice these skills during play, while also guiding them when necessary.

Healthy Lifestyle Habits

Promote a well-rounded lifestyle, including:

• Sleep : Ensure children get adequate and quality sleep by establishing a consistent bedtime routine.
• Hydration : Teach the importance of staying hydrated by offering water frequently, especially during play and physical activities.
• Screen time : Limit exposure to electronic devices and promote alternative activities for toddlers and older kids.
• Physical activity : Encourage children to engage in active play and exercise to support neural development and overall health .

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the key stages of child cognitive development.

Child cognitive development can be divided into several key stages based on Piaget’s theory of cognitive development . These stages include the sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years), preoperational stage (2-7 years), concrete operational stage (7-11 years), and formal operational stage (11 years and beyond). Every stage represents a unique period of cognitive growth, marked by the development of new skills, thought processes, and understanding of the world.

What factors influence cognitive development in children?

Several factors contribute to individual differences in child cognitive development, such as genetic and environmental factors. Socioeconomic status, access to quality education, early home environment, and parental involvement all play a significant role in determining cognitive growth. In addition, children’s exposure to diverse learning experiences, adequate nutrition, and mental health also influence overall cognitive performance .

How do cognitive skills vary during early childhood?

Cognitive skills in early childhood evolve as children progress through various stages . During the sensorimotor stage, infants develop fundamental skills such as object permanence. The preoperational stage is characterized by the development of symbolic thought, language, and imaginative play. Children then enter the concrete operational stage, acquiring the ability to think logically and solve problems. Finally, in the formal operational stage, children develop abstract reasoning abilities, complex problem-solving skills and metacognitive awareness.

What are common examples of cognitive development?

Examples of cognitive development include the acquisition of language and vocabulary, the development of problem-solving skills, and the ability to engage in logical reasoning. Additionally, memory, attention, and spatial awareness are essential aspects of cognitive development. Children may demonstrate these skills through activities like puzzle-solving, reading, and mathematics.

How do cognitive development theories explain children’s learning?

Piaget’s cognitive development theory suggests that children learn through active exploration, constructing knowledge based on their experiences and interactions with the world. In contrast, Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory emphasizes the role of social interaction and cultural context in learning. Both theories imply that cognitive development is a dynamic and evolving process, influenced by various environmental and psychological factors.

Why is it essential to support cognitive development in early childhood?

Supporting cognitive development in early childhood is critical because it lays a strong foundation for future academic achievement, social-emotional development, and lifelong learning. By providing children with diverse and enriching experiences, caregivers and educators can optimize cognitive growth and prepare children to face the challenges of today’s complex world. Fostering cognitive development early on helps children develop resilience, adaptability, and critical thinking skills essential for personal and professional success.

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What Is Cognitive Development? 3 Psychology Theories

But don’t worry, we will try our best to help you with the essentials of this complex field of study.

We’ll start with some background, then show you how cognitive skills are used every day. In addition, we will explain a few theories and describe fascinating studies.

Since cognitive development goes beyond childhood and into adolescence, we are sure you will want to know all about this, too.

To end this article, we provide some helpful resources. You can use these to support the cognitive skills of your students or clients.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free . These science-based exercises explore fundamental aspects of positive psychology, including strengths, values, and self-compassion, and will give you the tools to enhance the wellbeing of your clients, students, or employees.

This Article Contains:

What is cognitive development in psychology, cognitive development skills & important milestones, 5 real-life examples of cognitive development, 3 ground-breaking cognitive development theories, a look at cognitive development in adolescence, 3 fascinating research studies, helpful resources from positivepsychology.com, a take-home message.

Cognitive development is how humans acquire, organize, and learn to use knowledge (Gauvain & Richert, 2016).

In psychology, the focus of cognitive development has often been only on childhood. However, cognitive development continues through adolescence and adulthood. It involves acquiring language and knowledge, thinking, memory, decision making, problem solving, and exploration (Von Eckardt, 1996).

Much of the research within cognitive development in children focuses on thinking, developing knowledge, exploring, and solving problems (Carpendale & Lewis, 2015).

Nature vs nurture debate

The nature versus nurture debate refers to how much an individual inherits compared to how much they are influenced by the environment. How do nature and nurture shape cognitive development?

American psychologist Arthur Jensen (1969, 1974) emphasized the role of genetics within intelligence, arguing for a genetic difference in the intelligence of white and Black people.

Jensen (1969) made some very bold assertions, stating that Black people have lower cognitive abilities. His research was heavily criticized for being discriminatory. He did not consider the inbuilt bias of psychometric testing (Ford, 1996). The lower test scores of Black individuals were more likely to be a result of a lack of resources and poor-quality life opportunities (Ford, 2004).

In an enormous cross-sample of 11,000 adolescent twins, Brant et al. (2013) found that those with a higher intelligence quotient (IQ) appeared to be more influenced by nurture and stimulation. The researchers suggested this may be because of their heightened attention and arousal system, absorbing more information from the environment, being more open to new experiences, and allowing brain plasticity and changes to occur.

They also found that adolescents with a lower IQ showed more genetic influence on their IQ from their parents. The researchers suggested that their lower levels of intelligence may result in lower motivation levels and an inability to seek out new experiences.

This study highlights the need for those with lower IQ levels to be supported with positive interventions to increase their cognitive abilities and capacity.

These milestones reflect skill achievement and take into account genetic makeup and environmental influence (Dosman, Andrews, & Goulden, 2012).

Here are a few of these important milestones, the associated skills, and the age at which they are typically achieved. The following table is modified from the Child Development Institute .

Table 1. Children’s cognitive milestones and skill development

Language and other cognitive skills

Language skills are essential for a child’s ability to communicate and engage with others. These skills support other areas of a child’s development, such as cognitive, literacy, and social development (Roulstone, Loader, Northstone, & Beveridge, 2002).

The modified table below was sourced from the Australian parenting website raisingchildren.net.au and describes how language develops in children.

Table 2. Language development from 0 to 8 years

Thinking skills

Thinking concerns manipulating information and is related to reasoning, decision making, and problem solving (Kashyap & Minda, 2016). It is required to develop language, because you need words to think.

Cognitive development activities helps thinking and reasoning to grow. Thinking is a skill that does not commence at birth. It develops gradually through childhood and advances more rapidly when children are around two years old. Reasoning develops around six. By the time they’re 11, children’s thinking becomes much more abstract and logical (Piaget, 1936).

Developing knowledge

Knowledge is essential for cognitive development and academic achievement. Increased knowledge equates to better speaking, reading, listening, and reasoning skills. Knowledge is not only related to language. It can also be gained by performing a task (Bhatt, 2000). It starts from birth as children begin to understand the world around them through their senses (Piaget, 1951).

Building knowledge is important for children to encode and retrieve new information. This makes them able to learn new material. Knowledge helps to facilitate critical thinking (Piaget, 1936). Clearly, the development of children’s knowledge base is a critical part of cognitive development.

Memory development

The development of memory is lifelong and related to personal experiences.

Explicit memory, which refers to remembering events and facts of everyday life, develops in the first two years (Stark, Yassa, & Stark, 2010). Explicit memory develops around 8 to 10 months.

Working memory and its increase in performance can be seen from three to four years through adolescence (Ward, Berry, & Shanks, 2013). This is demonstrated through increased attention, the acquisition of language, and increased knowledge.

Implicit memory, which is unconscious and unintentional, is an early developing memory system in infants and develops as the brain matures (Ward et al., 2013).

Perceptual skills

Perceptual skills develop from birth. They are an important aspect of cognitive development. Most children are born with senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell (Karasik, Tamis-LeMonda, & Adolph, 2014).

As children develop, they learn to communicate by interacting with their environment and using their sensory and motor skills (Karasik et al., 2014).

When visual, tactile, and auditory skills are combined, they emerge as perceptual skills. These perceptual skills are then used to gauge spatial relationships, discriminate between figure and ground, and develop hand–eye coordination (Libertus & Hauf, 2017).

Exploring and solving problems

Problem solving can be seen in very young children when they play with blocks, objects, and balls. It is entwined with perceptual skills and memory. Very young children playing with blocks, picking up a spoon, or even looking for objects demonstrate the development of problem solving skills (Goldschmied & Jackson, 1994). This is known as heuristic play (Auld, 2002).

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To understand how people think and process information, it is important to look at how cognitive skills are used in everyday life. Here are some real-life examples of cognitive development.

Decision making

To make a decision, a person needs to weigh up information and make the best choice. As an example, think about a restaurant menu. There is a lot of information on the menu about food options. Reading the menu requires you to analyze the data then reduce it to make a specific meal choice.

Recognition of faces

Have you ever wondered why it is possible to recognize a person even when they have grown a beard, wear makeup or glasses, or change their hair color?

Cognitive processing is used in facial recognition and explains why we still recognize people we meet after a long time, despite sometimes drastic changes in their physical appearance.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

This widely used therapeutic intervention is based on an understanding of cognition and how it changes behavior.

It is based on the premise that cognition and behavior are linked, and this theory is often used to help individuals overcome negative thinking patterns . CBT provides them with alternative positive thinking patterns to promote positive behavior.

The cognitive processes of short-term and long-term memory explain forgetting. An example of forgetting can be seen in students who do not study for exams. If they do not transfer the information from short-term to long-term memory, they forget the knowledge required for the examination and may fail.

Thinking and cognition are required for reasoning. Reasoning involves intellect and an attempt to search for the truth from new or existing information. An example of this activity can be seen in political debates on television.

They all attempt to explain how cognitive development occurs.

Piaget’s cognitive development theory

Jean Piaget (1936) is famous for his theory of cognition that considers four specific stages of development .

The sensorimotor stage (0–2 years) is when infants build an understanding of the world through their senses and movement (touching, feeling, listening, and watching). This is when children develop object permanence.

The pre-operational stage (2–7 years) is when language and abstract thinking arise. This is the stage of symbolic play.

When a child is 7 years old, they enter Piaget’s concrete-operational stage , which goes up to 11 years. This is when logical and concrete thought come into action.

At the age of 11 onward, children learn logical and abstract rules and solve problems. Piaget described this as the formal operational stage.

Vygotsky’s theory

Lev Vygotsky described an alternative theory. He believed that children’s cognitive development arises through their physical interaction with the world (Vygotsky, 1932). Vygotsky’s theory is based on the premise that the support of adults and peers enables the development of higher psychological functions. His is known as the sociocultural theory (Yasnitsky, 2018).

Vygotsky believed that a child’s initial social interactions prompt development, and as the child internalizes learning, this shifts their cognition to an individual level.

Vygotsky (1932) considered children akin to apprentices, learning from the more experienced, who understand their needs.

There are two main themes of Vygotsky’s theory.

The zone of proximal development is described as the distance between the actual development level and the level of potential. This is determined by independent problem solving when children are collaborating with more able peers or under the guidance of an adult (Vygotsky, 1931).

This may explain why some children perform better in the presence of others who have more knowledge and skills but more poorly on their own. These skills, displayed in a social context but not in an isolated setting, are within the zone of proximal development. This highlights how a more knowledgeable person can provide support to a child’s cognitive development (Vygotsky, 1932).

Thinking and speech are considered essential. Vygotsky described a connected relationship between language development and the thinking process. His theory explains how younger children use speech to think out loud. Gradually, they evolve silent inner speech once mental concepts and cognitive awareness are developed (Vygotsky, 1931).

Ecological systems theory

Another more modern theory, similar in some sense to Vygotsky’s, is one by American psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner (1974). He suggested that a child’s environment, within an arrangement of structures, has a differing impact on the child (Bronfenbrenner, 1974).

Bronfenbrenner’s five structures are the micro-system, mesosystem, ecosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem. These concern the surrounding environment, family, school, values, customs, and cultures. They are interrelated, with each system influencing others to impact the child’s development (Bronfenbrenner, 1977).

Bronfenbrenner (1974) considered the micro-system as the most influential. This system contains the developing child, family, and educational environment, and impacts a child’s cognitive development the most.

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development – Sprouts

Adolescence is a period of transition between late childhood and the beginning of adulthood.

Based on Inhelder and Piaget’s (1958) stage theory of cognitive growth, adolescence is when children become self-conscious and concerned with other people’s opinions as they go through puberty (Steinberg, 2005). The psychosocial context of adolescents is considerably different from that of children and adults.

The brain goes through a dramatic remodeling process in adolescence. Neural plasticity facilitates the development of social cognitive skills (Huttenlocher, 1979). Structural development of cortical regions of the brain may significantly influence cognitive functioning during adolescence (Huttenlocher, De Courten, Garey, & Van der Loos, 1983).

Recognition of facial expressions and emotion is one area of social cognition that has been investigated in adolescence (Herba & Phillips, 2004). The amygdala, a part of the brain associated with emotion processing, was found to be significantly activated in response to fearful facial expressions in a study of adolescents (Baird et al., 1999). This highlights that the development of emotional cognition is prominent in this age group.

Here are three we find most interesting.

1. A cognitive habilitation program for children

Millians and Coles (2014) studied five children who had experienced learning and academic deficits because of prenatal alcohol exposure. Before and after an intervention, researchers gave standardized tests of nonverbal reasoning and academic achievement to the children.

Four of the five children showed increases to the average range of scores on measures of nonverbal, reasoning, reading, and mathematics. This study highlighted the benefit of interventions to address children’s cognitive difficulties and learning problems, even when the cognitive difficulties are apparent from birth.

2. Bilingual babies and enhanced learning

Introducing babies to two languages has been shown to improve cognitive abilities, especially problem solving (Ramírez-Esparza, García-Sierra, & Kuhl, 2017).

Spanish babies between 7 and 33.5 months were given one hour of English sessions for 18 weeks. By the end of the 18 weeks, the children produced an average of 74 English words and phrases. This study showed that the age between 0 and 3 years is the best time to learn a second language and gain excellent proficiency. However, languages can be learned at any time in life.

3. Unusual autobiographical memory

In an unusual case study, a woman described as ‘AJ’ was found to have highly superior autobiographical memory, a condition that dominated her life (Parker, Cahill, & McGaugh, 2006).

Her memory was described as ‘nonstop, uncontrollable and automatic.’ AJ did not use any mnemonic devices to recall. She could tell you what she was doing on any day of her life.

AJ could also recall her past with a high level of accuracy. This study provided some insightful details of the neurobiology of autobiographical memory and changes in the prefrontal cortex that cause these superior cognitive abilities.

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The first few years of a child’s life show rapid changes in brain development. This is part of the child’s cognitive development. There are a number of different theories of how and when this occurs. These are not set in stone, but are a guide to the cognitive development of children.

If children are not achieving their milestones at the approximate times they should, extra support can help make a difference. Even children with fetal alcohol syndrome can achieve considerably improved cognition with specialized support.

Remember, cognitive development does not end in childhood, as Piaget’s schema theory first suggested. It continues through adolescence and beyond. Cognitive development changes carry on through much of a teenager’s life as the brain is developing.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free .

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• Vygotsky, L. S. (1931). Adolescent pedagogy: The development of thinking and concept formation in adolescence . Marxists.org.
• Vygotsky, L. S. (1932). Thought and language. Chapter 6: The development of scientific concepts in childhood . Marxists.org.
• Yasnitsky, A. (2018). Vygotsky’s science of superman: from utopia to concrete psychology. In A. Yasnitsky (Ed.). Questioning Vygotsky’s legacy: Scientific psychology or heroic cult . Routledge.
• Ward, E. V., Berry, C. J., & Shanks, D. R. (2013). An effect of age on implicit memory that is not due to explicit contamination: Implications for single and multiple-systems theories. Psychology and Aging , 28 (2), 429–442.

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Chapter 3: Student Development

Cognitive development: the theory of jean piaget.

Cognition refers to thinking and memory processes, and cognitive development refers to long-term changes in these processes. One of the most widely known perspectives about cognitive development is the cognitive stage theory of a Swiss psychologist named Jean Piaget . Piaget created and studied an account of how children and youth gradually become able to think logically and scientifically. Because his theory is especially popular among educators, we focus on it in this chapter.

Piaget was a psychological constructivist : in his view, learning proceeded by the interplay of assimilation (adjusting new experiences to fit prior concepts) and accommodation (adjusting concepts to fit new experiences). The to-and-fro of these two processes leads not only to short-term learning, but also to long-term developmental change . The long-term developments are really the main focus of Piaget’s cognitive theory.

After observing children closely, Piaget proposed that cognition developed through distinct stages from birth through the end of adolescence. By stages he meant a sequence of thinking patterns with four key features:

• They always happen in the same order.
• No stage is ever skipped.
• Each stage is a significant transformation of the stage before it.
• Each later stage incorporated the earlier stages into itself.

Basically this is the “staircase” model of development mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Piaget proposed four major stages of cognitive development, and called them (1) sensorimotor intelligence, (2) preoperational thinking, (3) concrete operational thinking, and (4) formal operational thinking. Each stage is correlated with an age period of childhood, but only approximately.

The sensorimotor stage: birth to age 2

In Piaget’s theory, the sensorimotor stage is first, and is defined as the period when infants “think” by means of their senses and motor actions. As every new parent will attest, infants continually touch, manipulate, look, listen to, and even bite and chew objects. According to Piaget, these actions allow them to learn about the world and are crucial to their early cognitive development.

The infant’s actions allow the child to represent (or construct simple concepts of) objects and events. A toy animal may be just a confusing array of sensations at first, but by looking, feeling, and manipulating it repeatedly, the child gradually organizes her sensations and actions into a stable concept, toy animal . The representation acquires a permanence lacking in the individual experiences of the object, which are constantly changing. Because the representation is stable, the child “knows,” or at least believes, that toy animal exists even if the actual toy animal is temporarily out of sight. Piaget called this sense of stability object permanence , a belief that objects exist whether or not they are actually present. It is a major achievement of sensorimotor development, and marks a qualitative transformation in how older infants (24 months) think about experience compared to younger infants (6 months).

During much of infancy, of course, a child can only barely talk, so sensorimotor development initially happens without the support of language. It might therefore seem hard to know what infants are thinking, but Piaget devised several simple, but clever experiments to get around their lack of language, and that suggest that infants do indeed represent objects even without being able to talk (Piaget, 1952). In one, for example, he simply hid an object (like a toy animal) under a blanket. He found that doing so consistently prompts older infants (18–24 months) to search for the object, but fails to prompt younger infants (less than six months) to do so. (You can try this experiment yourself if you happen to have access to young infant.) “Something” motivates the search by the older infant even without the benefit of much language, and the “something” is presumed to be a permanent concept or representation of the object.

The preoperational stage: age 2 to 7

In the preoperational stage , children use their new ability to represent objects in a wide variety of activities, but they do not yet do it in ways that are organized or fully logical. One of the most obvious examples of this kind of cognition is dramatic play , the improvised make-believe of preschool children. If you have ever had responsibility for children of this age, you have likely witnessed such play. Ashley holds a plastic banana to her ear and says: “Hello, Mom? Can you be sure to bring me my baby doll? OK!” Then she hangs up the banana and pours tea for Jeremy into an invisible cup. Jeremy giggles at the sight of all of this and exclaims: “Rinnng! Oh Ashley, the phone is ringing again! You better answer it.” And on it goes.

In a way, children immersed in make-believe seem “mentally insane,” in that they do not think realistically. But they are not truly insane because they have not really taken leave of their senses. At some level, Ashley and Jeremy always know that the banana is still a banana and not really a telephone; they are merely representing it as a telephone. They are thinking on two levels at once—one imaginative and the other realistic. This dual processing of experience makes dramatic play an early example of metacognition , or reflecting on and monitoring of thinking itself. Metacognition is a highly desirable skill for success in school, one that teachers often encourage (Bredekamp & Copple, 1997; Paley, 2005). Partly for this reason, teachers of young children (preschool, kindergarten, and even first or second grade) often make time and space in their classrooms for dramatic play, and sometimes even participate in it themselves to help develop the play further.

The concrete operational stage: age 7 to 11

As children continue into elementary school, they become able to represent ideas and events more flexibly and logically. Their rules of thinking still seem very basic by adult standards and usually operate unconsciously, but they allow children to solve problems more systematically than before, and therefore to be successful with many academic tasks. In the concrete operational stage, for example, a child may unconsciously follow the rule: “If nothing is added or taken away, then the amount of something stays the same.” This simple principle helps children to understand certain arithmetic tasks, such as in adding or subtracting zero from a number, as well as to do certain classroom science experiments, such as ones involving judgments of the amounts of liquids when mixed. Piaget called this period the concrete operational stage because children mentally “operate” on concrete objects and events. They are not yet able, however, to operate (or think) systematically about representations of objects or events. Manipulating representations is a more abstract skill that develops later, during adolescence.

Concrete operational thinking differs from preoperational thinking in two ways, each of which renders children more skilled as students. One difference is reversibility , or the ability to think about the steps of a process in any order. Imagine a simple science experiment, for example, such as one that explores why objects sink or float by having a child place an assortment of objects in a basin of water. Both the preoperational and concrete operational child can recall and describe the steps in this experiment, but only the concrete operational child can recall them in any order . This skill is very helpful on any task involving multiple steps—a common feature of tasks in the classroom. In teaching new vocabulary from a story, for another example, a teacher might tell students: “First make a list of words in the story that you do not know, then find and write down their definitions, and finally get a friend to test you on your list.” These directions involve repeatedly remembering to move back and forth between a second step and a first—a task that concrete operational students—and most adults—find easy, but that preoperational children often forget to do or find confusing. If the younger children are to do this task reliably, they may need external prompts, such as having the teacher remind them periodically to go back to the story to look for more unknown words

The other new feature of thinking during the concrete operational stage is the child’s ability to decenter , or focus on more than one feature of a problem at a time. There are hints of decentration in preschool children’s dramatic play, which requires being aware on two levels at once—knowing that a banana can be both a banana and a “telephone.” But the decentration of the concrete operational stage is more deliberate and conscious than preschoolers’ make-believe. Now the child can attend to two things at once quite purposely. Suppose you give students a sheet with an assortment of subtraction problems on it, and ask them to do this: “Find all of the problems that involve two-digit subtraction and that involve borrowing from the next column. Circle and solve only those problems.” Following these instructions is quite possible for a concrete operational student (as long as they have been listening!) because the student can attend to the two subtasks simultaneously—finding the two-digit problems and identifying which actually involve borrowing. (Whether the student actually knows how to “borrow” however, is a separate question.)

In real classroom tasks, reversibility and decentration often happen together. A well-known example of joint presence is Piaget’s experiments with conservation , the belief that an amount or quantity stays the same even if it changes apparent size or shape (Piaget, 2001; Matthews, 1998). Imagine two identical balls made of clay. Any child, whether preoperational or concrete operational, will agree that the two indeed have the same amount of clay in them simply because they look the same. But if you now squish one ball into a long, thin “hot dog,” the preoperational child is likely to say that the amount of that ball has changed—either because it is longer or because it is thinner, but at any rate because it now looks different. The concrete operational child will not make this mistake, thanks to new cognitive skills of reversibility and decentration: for him or her, the amount is the same because “you could squish it back into a ball again” (reversibility) and because “it may be longer, but it is also thinner” (decentration). Piaget would say the concrete operational child “has conservation of quantity.”

The classroom examples described above also involve reversibility and decentration. As already mentioned, the vocabulary activity described earlier requires reversibility (going back and forth between identifying words and looking up their meanings); but it can also be construed as an example of decentration (keeping in mind two tasks at once—word identification and dictionary search). And as mentioned, the arithmetic activity requires decentration (looking for problems that meet two criteria and also solving them), but it can also be construed as an example of reversibility (going back and forth between subtasks, as with the vocabulary activity). Either way, the development of concrete operational skills support students in doing many basic academic tasks; in a sense they make ordinary schoolwork possible

The formal operational stage: age 11 and beyond

In the last of the Piagetian stages, the child becomes able to reason not only about tangible objects and events, but also about hypothetical or abstract ones. Hence it has the name formal operational stage —the period when the individual can “operate” on “forms” or representations. With students at this level, the teacher can pose hypothetical (or contrary-to-fact) problems: “What if the world had never discovered oil?” or “What if the first European explorers had settled first in California instead of on the East Coast of the United States?” To answer such questions, students must use hypothetical reasoning , meaning that they must manipulate ideas that vary in several ways at once, and do so entirely in their minds

The hypothetical reasoning that concerned Piaget primarily involved scientific problems. His studies of formal operational thinking therefore often look like problems that middle or high school teachers pose in science classes. In one problem, for example, a young person is presented with a simple pendulum, to which different amounts of weight can be hung (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). The experimenter asks: “What determines how fast the pendulum swings: the length of the string holding it, the weight attached to it, or the distance that it is pulled to the side?” The young person is not allowed to solve this problem by trial-and-error with the materials themselves, but must reason a way to the solution mentally. To do so systematically, he or she must imagine varying each factor separately, while also imagining the other factors that are held constant. This kind of thinking requires facility at manipulating mental representations of the relevant objects and actions—precisely the skill that defines formal operations.

As you might suspect, students with an ability to think hypothetically have an advantage in many kinds of school work: by definition, they require relatively few “props” to solve problems. In this sense they can in principle be more self-directed than students who rely only on concrete operations—certainly a desirable quality in the opinion of most teachers. Note, though, that formal operational thinking is desirable but not sufficient for school success, and that it is far from being the only way that students achieve educational success. Formal thinking skills do not insure that a student is motivated or well-behaved, for example, nor does it guarantee other desirable skills, such as ability at sports, music, or art. The fourth stage in Piaget’s theory is really about a particular kind of formal thinking, the kind needed to solve scientific problems and devise scientific experiments. Since many people do not normally deal with such problems in the normal course of their lives, it should be no surprise that research finds that many people never achieve or use formal thinking fully or consistently, or that they use it only in selected areas with which they are very familiar (Case & Okomato, 1996). For teachers, the limitations of Piaget’s ideas suggest a need for additional theories about development—ones that focus more directly on the social and interpersonal issues of childhood and adolescence. The next sections describe some of these.

Bredekamp, S. & Copple, C. (1997). Developmentally appropriate practice, Revised edition. Washington, D.C.: National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Case, R. & Okamoto, Y. (1996). The role of central conceptual structures in children’s thought . Chicago: Society for Research on Child Development.

Inhelder, B. & Piaget, J. (1958). The growth of logical thinking from childhood to adolescence: An essay on the growth of formal operational structures . New York: Basic Books.

Matthews, G. (1998). The philosophy of childhood . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Paley, V. (2005). A child’s work: The importance of fantasy play . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Piaget, J. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children . New York: International Universities Press.

Piaget, J. (2001). The psychology of intelligence . Oxford, UK: Routledge

• Educational Psychology. Authored by : Kelvin Seifert and Rosemary Sutton. Located at : https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/BookDetail.aspx?bookId=153 . License : CC BY: Attribution

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16 Cognitive Development: An Overview

David F. Bjorklund, Developmental Evolutionary Psychology Lab, Department of Psychology, Florida Atlantic University.

• Published: 16 December 2013
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In this overview, I focus on contemporary research and theory related to five “truths” of cognitive development: (1) cognitive development proceeds as a result of the dynamic and reciprocal transaction of endogenous and exogenous factors; (2) cognitive development involves both stability and plasticity over time; (3) cognitive development involves changes in the way information is represented, although children of every age possess a variety of ways to represent experiences; (4) children develop increasing intentional control over their behavior and cognition; and (5) cognitive development occurs within a social context. Cognitive development happens at a variety of levels, and developmental scientists are becoming increasingly aware of the need to be cognizant of this and the interactions among the various levels to produce a true developmental science.

Cognitive development proceeds as a result of the dynamic and reciprocal transaction of endogenous and exogenous factors.

Cognitive development involves both stability and plasticity over time.

Cognitive development involves changes in the way information is represented, although children of every age possess a variety of ways to represent experiences.

Children develop increasing intentional control over their behavior and cognition.

Cognitive development occurs within a social context.

Human infants and children have strong dispositions/intuitive information-processing biases, but our species’ thinking is highly sensitive to context and highly plastic, and this is particularly true early in life, when developmental trajectories are put in motion.

The ability to represent the intentions and goals of other people allows children to learn through observation and direct teaching, permitting the acquisition of knowledge and skills that were foreign to our ancestors.

The development of executive function involves age-related changes in working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility and plays a central role in the development of higher-level cognition and the regulation of one’s emotions and behaviors.

Background knowledge, or knowledge base, has a significant influence on how children think.

Cultural “explanations” for cognitive development do not provide alternative interpretations to those based on biology (e.g., neurological factors, evolutionary explanations) or specific experience (e.g., how mothers talk to their babies); rather, cognitive development must be seen as the result of interacting factors at multiple levels of organization, with the social environment being a critical ingredient in this mix.

Although there are many characteristics of human beings that make us distinct from our simian cousins, our cognition is high among them. Humans’ abilities to represent relationships, contemplate the past, anticipate the future, and adapt to a broader range of environments than any other mammal make us intellectually distinct in the animal kingdom. We are not the only “thinking” animal, of course, and our impressive suite of cognitive abilities has deep evolutionary roots, some of which can be inferred by studying our close genetic relatives, the great apes. But Homo sapiens ’ intellectual wherewithal has resulted in our species attaining ecological dominance over the globe, for better or worse, making the study of cognition perhaps the most central topic in attaining an understanding of humankind. Most critical for the current handbook, human cognition develops, emerging over infancy and childhood as a result of a continuous interaction of species-typical abilities and environment, broadly defined, and becoming adapted to the specific cultural environment in which children grow up. An understanding of cognitive development is not only of great theoretical importance but also has some obvious practical implications, especially with respect to the education of children and the modification of intellectual deficits attributed to deleterious early environments.

The field of cognitive development is a vast and varied one, and, on the surface, some of the topics classified under the rubric of “cognitive development” seem quite disparate and unrelated. For instance, many psychologists focus on lower-level mechanisms, such as developmental differences in speed of processing or memory span, which can seem light years away from topics such as theory of mind, metacognition, and scientific reasoning. The disparity is due, in part, to the exceptional range over which human cognition extends. Human cognition is affected by basic-level processes that influence how information is encoded, stored, and processed, much as the cognition of other animals with complex brains is. However, these basic-level abilities also develop in conjunction with a representational system that is far different from those of other animals, permitting the development of symbolic thought and forms of thinking and problem solving that require explanations beyond those afforded solely via basic-level analyses. Yet, despite the difference in levels of analysis (and other differences, such as examining developmental function vs. individual differences), the field of cognitive development is unified by some basic beliefs and themes. Some of the themes represent points of controversies as opposed to areas of agreement (e.g., the extent to which cognitive development is influenced by endogenous vs. exogenous factors), and each scientist will have his or her own pet issues that may not be shared with the same level of enthusiasm by others in the field.

I have not attempted in this chapter to provide a complete description of all issues, controversies, or topics of modern cognitive development; any overview chapter by necessity must be incomplete. Rather, I have organized the chapter around what I see as five general “truths” about cognitive development. These truths are actually generalizations, and I make no pretense that they have the authority of scientific law. Other researchers may have a different set of “truths,” and I might (and in fact have; Bjorklund, 1997 , 2005 ) generate a different list depending on the audience or points I wish to address. In the process of discussing these truths, I have slipped in other issues that I believe are important to understanding cognitive development (my set of pet issues), including the importance of taking an evolutionary perspective, the use of comparative animal data, and the distinction between domain-general and domain-specific mechanisms. The five “truths” are as follows:

I believe these “truths” will be familiar to most cognitive developmental psychologists and at least some of the topics will be central to the theoretical and research questions that stimulate all developmental scientists’ quest for knowledge.

Cognitive Development Proceeds as a Result of the Dynamic and Reciprocal Transaction of Endogenous and Exogenous Factors

One issue central to all of psychology is that of nature versus nurture. Traditionally, this has been posed as a dichotomy: Is human thought and behavior genetically/biologically determined or is it shaped by learning/experience/culture? This is dealt with in a more sophisticated way today, in that everyone is an interactionist, with the issue being better expressed as “how do biological/endogenous factors interact with environmental/exogenous factors to produce the adult phenotype?” From this perspective, cognitive development does not simply mature, or bloom, over time, nor is it solely a product of a child’s culture; rather, it emerges over the course of ontogeny as a result of the dynamic and reciprocal transaction between a child’s biological constitution, including genetics, and his or her physical and social environment ( Bjorklund, Ellis, & Rosenberg, 2007 ; Gottlieb, 2007 ). This can be seen in a wide range of research in cognitive development, from the ontogeny of the brain ( Greenough, Black, & Wallace, 1987 ) and the development of perceptual systems ( Lickliter, 1990 ), to the interaction between specific genes associated with intelligence and whether a child is breastfed or bottle-fed ( Caspi et al., 2007 ).

Developmental Systems and Cognitive Development

At the crux of cognitive development (in fact, of development in general) is the idea that development is not simply “produced” by genes, nor constructed by the environment, but emerges from the continuous, bidirectional interaction between all levels of biological and environmental factors ( Gottlieb, 2007 ; Gottlieb, Wahlsten, & Lickliter, 2006 ; Oyama, 2000 ; see chapters by Lickliter and by Moore in this handbook). From this perspective, even phenomena usually identified as innate, such as imprinting in precocial birds, result from the interaction of genetic and environmental factors. For example, research by Gottlieb (1992) demonstrated that ducklings required auditory experience prior to hatching—hearing their mother’s call, the call of brood mates, or even their own vocalization—in order to approach the appropriate (i.e., same-species) maternal call hours after hatching. In other research, birds that received visual experience prior to hatching showed enhanced visual discrimination abilities shortly after hatching, but species-atypical experiences interfered with auditory attachment behaviors ( Lickliter, 1990 ). Bobwhite quail that were exposed to patterned light days before hatching generally failed to approach the species-typical maternal call in a subsequent test, with some approaching the call of a chicken! In other words, even for usually reliably developing phenomena, experience necessarily interacts with genes to affect their expression.

Such interactions are seen in the development of individual differences in intelligence in children (see the chapter by Flynn & Blair in this handbook). For example, it is well established that children growing up in emotionally supportive homes and receiving cognitively rich experiences tend to have higher IQs than do children growing up in high-risk homes who receive less intellectual stimulation ( NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2005 ). However, the adverse effects of a nonstimulating environment are often exacerbated for children with medical problems. For example, classic research by Zeskind and Ramey (1978 , 1981 ) revealed that children from impoverished homes who were given educational daycare beginning in their first year of life showed enhanced IQs relative to control children. However, the effects of the intervention were moderated by the biological constitution of the infants at birth. By chance, approximately half of the infants in their rural, poverty sample were fetally malnourished. Fetal malnourishment is associated with slower development, more aversive cries, and less responsiveness in infants. Whereas fetally malnourished babies in the educational daycare group displayed normal IQs comparable to nonfetally malnourished infants in the educational group by 18 months, the fetally malnourished infants in the control group showed the lowest IQ (71 at 36 months of age), 14 points less than the IQs of the biologically normal children in the control group. Some of the differences in the cognitive outcomes of the fetally malnourished children were attributed to ways mothers interacted with their children and how this changed over time. The general lethargy shown by fetally malnourished infants in the control condition did not evoke much in the way of social interaction from their impoverished, highly stressed mothers, which set the stage for future interactions. Mothers tended to initiate little in the way of interaction with their infants, and their infants, in turn, reciprocated. This pattern of less attention and social give-and-take between infant and mother persisted long after children had “recovered” from the poor prenatal diet. In contrast, the social interaction received by the fetally malnourished children in the educational daycare resulted in increased responsiveness, behaviors that they brought home with them. These more outgoing children affected their mothers and set the stage for a more positive interactional style, which, by 18 months of age, was associated with significantly higher IQs.

Gene–Environment Interactions and the Development of Intelligence

Genetic versus environmental effects on the development of intelligence have been the topic of controversy for nearly 100 years (see Gould, 1981 ). Most behavioral genetic accounts put the heritability of intelligence as measured by IQ between 0.50 and 0.60 (i.e., between 50% and 60% of differences in IQ among people can be attributed to differences in genetics), with shared environmental effects (mainly home environment) being significantly less ( Plomin et al., 2008 ). However, estimates of heritability and shared environmental effects vary as a function of the family in which children grow up ( Rowe, Jacobson, & der Oord, 1999 ; Turkheimer et al., 2003 ). For example, in one study of 3,139 adolescent sibling pairs, Rowe and his colleagues reported a heritability of IQ of 0.57 and an effect of shared environment of 0.13. When the sample was divided into adolescents who came from homes where parents had greater than a high-school education versus those with a high-school education or less, the pattern changed substantially. For the high-education group the heritability of IQ was now 0.74 and the effect of shared environment was 0; in contrast, for children from the low-education families, heritability of IQ was reduced to 0.26 and the effect of shared environment was 0.23 (see also Turkheimer et al., 2003 ). Consistent with earlier theorizing ( Bronfenbrenner & Ceci, 1994 ; Scarr, 1993 ), these findings indicate that heritability of IQ varies with environmental conditions. When the environment is “good enough” to support intellectual accomplishments, as presumably the high-education homes were, individual differences in genes presumably contribute more to IQ level than individual differences in environment; when environmental conditions are less than optimal for supporting IQ, however, individual differences in genes are less predictive of IQ, with shared-environment effects increasing in significance.

More straightforward gene × environment interactions are found in contemporary behavioral genetics studies that have identified specific genes associated with intelligence, but only under certain environments. For example, Caspi and his colleagues (2007) identified a variant of a gene associated with higher IQ, but only for children who were breastfed. The gene, located on chromosome 11, is associated with the processing of fatty acids. In two large-scale samples, one from New Zealand and the other from Great Britain, people who had either of two variants of the gene, and were breastfed as infants, had significantly higher IQs (between about 5 and 10 points) than people with the gene who were not breastfed, and people with a third variant of the gene. For this latter group of people, adult IQ did not vary as a function of whether they were breastfed as infants or not. This is a typical type of finding from recent behavioral genetics literature; individual genes have small effects that are usually mediated by the environment, with likely many genes being associated with complex psychological characteristics, such as the development of intelligence ( Plomin, Kennedy, & Craig, 2006 ).

Fleshing Out of Skeletal Competencies

Debates among contemporary researchers often revolve around the extent to which infants enter the world “prepared” by natural selection to encounter a species-typical environment and are constrained to process some information more efficiently than others, with some arguing that infants and young children inherit skeletal competencies ( Geary, 2005 ) or core knowledge ( Baillargeon, 2008 ; Carey, 2009 , 2011 ; Spelke & Kinzler, 2007 ) in specific domains (folk physics, folk biology, and folk psychology), with these competencies being fleshed out over the course of development as children explore, play, and engage in social interactions. Consider the case of processing human faces. In adults, portions of the right frontal cortex appear to be specialized for processing human faces, and adults are especially skilled at processing upright faces, although these special face-processing skills do not apply to upside-down faces or extend to faces of animals from other species—monkeys, for instance. This general pattern is evident by 9 months of age, with infants displaying an upright-face advantage for human faces but not for monkey faces. However, 6-month-old infants process both human and monkey upright faces more efficiently than upside-down faces, displaying a more general “face-processing” bias. This is consistent with the suggestion that infants’ brains are biased to process faces, but that the processing of human faces becomes more specialized with age and experience (e.g., de Haan, Oliver, & Johnson, 1998 ; Johnson & de Haan, 2001 ; Pascalis, de Haan, & Nelson, 2002 ). According to Pascalis and his colleagues (2002 , p. 1321), “the ability to perceive faces narrows with development, due in large measure to the cortical specialization that occurs with experience viewing faces. In this view, the sensitivity of the face recognition system to differences in identity among the faces of one’s own species will increase with age and with experience in processing those faces.”

Even perspectives that have been labeled as neo-nativism (e.g., Spelke, 1991 ; Spelke & Kinzler, 2007 ) do not attribute fully formed “innate ideas” to infants and children, but argue instead that infants inherit a small set of knowledge systems, shaped by natural selection, that serve as the basis for the development of flexible skills and belief systems (e.g., mathematics, knowledge of the properties of objects, reasoning about other people’s thoughts). For example, Geary (1995) proposed that children possess sets of universal biologically primary abilities that have been shaped by natural selection over our species’ phylogeny that children use spontaneously and that will emerge in a species-typical fashion if children experience a species-typical environment. Language and simple quantitative abilities are examples of biologically primary abilities. These are contrasted with culturally determined biologically secondary abilities that do not have an evolutionary history, often require external motivation for their mastery, and are based on biologically primary abilities. Reading and more advanced forms of mathematics are examples of biologically secondary abilities. Although children may be prepared by natural selection to acquire language, for instance, appropriate environmental input is necessary (social interaction in a language-using culture), and when learning to read children require substantial adult support and instruction in applying a series of biologically primary abilities to achieve mastery.

Intuitive mathematics . As an example of biologically primary abilities, consider those Geary proposed for mathematics: numerosity, ordinality, simple arithmetic, and counting. Numerosity refers to the ability to determine quickly the number of items in a set without counting. Using looking-time procedures, 6-month-old infants have been shown to be able to make discriminations between arrays of three versus four items ( Starkey, Spelke, & Gelman, 1990 ; van Loosbroek & Smitsman, 1990 ), as have many mammal and bird species (see Davis & Pérusse, 1988 ), including cats, chimpanzees, and an African grey parrot. Ordinality refers to a basic understanding of more than and less than relationships, and there is evidence for this late in infancy. In one study, Strauss and Curtis (1981) conditioned infants to point to either the larger or smaller array of dots. For instance, infants may have been shown arrays of three and four dots and trained to point to the smaller array. After training, infants were shown two new arrays, in this case two versus three dots. If they had learned merely to point to the array with three dots, they should continue to point to the three-dot array on the new trials. However, if they had learned an ordinal relation (i.e., point to the smaller array), they should point to the two-dot array on the new trial. Infants did the latter, suggesting they had learned an ordinal relationship.

With respect to simple arithmetic, some researchers have interpreted patterns of infants’ attention to unexpected events (using the violation-of-expectation procedure ; see the chapter by Rakison & Lawson in this handbook) as evidence that they can add and subtract small quantities (e.g., 1 + 1 = 2; 2 − 1 = 1). In an experiment by Wynn (1992) , on one set of trials, 5-month-old infants saw a doll placed on a stage, and a screen was raised to hide the object. Infants watched as a hand holding a second doll moved behind the screen and then exited the stage, empty-handed. If infants have some notion of simple arithmetic, they should infer that there are now two dolls behind the screen. When the screen was then lowered, the possible outcome revealed exactly this, two dolls; for the impossible outcome, only one doll was behind the screen. Infants increased their looking time to the impossible condition, consistent with the idea that they expected two dolls to be behind the screen, and they expressed surprise (reflected by increased looking time) when their expectation was violated when only one doll appeared. This phenomenon has been replicated numerous times (e.g., Simon, Hespos, & Rochat, 1995 ; Walden et al., 2007 ), although some question whether this finding reflects not simple addition but rather a more perceptually based phenomenon (e.g., Clearfield & Westfahl, 2006 ).

Counting is a later-emerging ability, with children acquiring the various principles of counting (e.g., each item in an array is associated with one and only one number name; number names must be in a stable, repeatable order; the final number in a series represents the quantity of the set; the order in which things are counted is irrelevant) over the preschool years ( Gelman & Gallistel, 1978 ). Preschool children spontaneously count things, gradually acquiring the principles of counting and the number names used in their culture before they enter school.

Young children’s tool use . Infants and young children also seem prepared to assume that tools are designed for an intended function, referred to as the design stance ( Dennett, 1990 ). That is, once children see a tool being used, or use a tool themselves, for a specific purpose, they assume the tool is “for” that purpose. This is illustrated in a study in which 12- and 18-month-old children watched an experimenter use the straight end of a spoon or a novel spoonlike object to insert into a hole in a box to turn on a light ( Barrett, David, & Needham, 2007 ). When infants were given the opportunity to turn on the light, they used the novel tool appropriately (i.e., grabbed the spoonlike end and inserted the straight end) most of the time, but did so less than 25% of the time when the familiar spoon was used as a tool. By 12 months of age, infants had apparently formed the category “spoon” and knew how this tool should be used. Although such a design stance can lead to less effective problem solving, it also functions to constrain learning in a way that, on average, likely results in infants and children learning the utility of tools from watching other people use them, greatly facilitating their understanding and use of tools, something that is ubiquitous in human cultures. This is something that other tool-using primates seem not to realize. For example, when selecting a tool to solve a problem, tool-using monkeys are not influenced by having used a tool before, as human children are, but will use any equally useful but novel tool ( Cummins-Sebree & Fragaszy, 2005 ; see also Buttelmann et al., 2008 , for similar studies with great apes).

There has always been debate among developmentalists about the extent to which ontogeny is governed by biological versus environmental factors. Contemporary research and theory has changed substantially the nature of this debate, however. The nativists and empiricists of the old days are gone. Advances in genetics and brain research make it clear that biological development always occurs in an environmental context, and this extends to the expression of genes. The cognition of infants and children is constrained by biological factors, yet there is sufficient neuronal plasticity for the considerable influence of experience, broadly defined. Development is a transaction between endogenous and exogenous factors, with hormones and the firing of neighboring neurons being microenvironmental factors for other neurons, and thus for cognition and its development. Debates related to the old nature/nurture issue persist among cognitive developmentalists, but they are framed differently than in the past, and today’s “extremists” share far more ground than their arguments often seem to suggest.

Cognitive Development Involves Both Stability and Plasticity over Time

Cognitive development is about change over time—yet once a level of cognitive competence is established, will it remain stable over time? Will infants with good visual memories grow up to be children and adults with superior memory abilities? Will high-IQ 4-year olds retain their intellectual advantage relative to their peers by high-school graduation? To what extent can patterns or levels of cognition be changed once established? That is, how plastic, or modifiable, is cognition?

There is evidence that some basic-level processes are relatively stable over development, beginning in infancy. For example, in one study, measures of visual reaction times (the time it takes infants to begin an eye movement toward a picture after it appeared) at 3.5 months of age correlated significantly with visual reaction times 4 years later ( r = 0.51; Dougherty & Haith, 1997 ). In other research, measures of visual recognition memory at 7 months of age were significantly correlated with perceptual speed at age 11 years ( Rose & Feldman, 1995 ). Perhaps more compelling, measures of basic information processing in infancy, as assessed by visual recognition memory (usually determined by infants showing a preference for novel pictures) and rate of habituation (how quickly infants tire of attending to a repeated stimulus), have been found to correlate significantly with childhood IQ (e.g., Bornstein et al., 2006 ; Dougherty & Haith, 1997 ; Rose & Feldman, 1995 ; Rose, Feldman, & Wallace, 1992 ; see Bornstein, 1989 ; McCall & Carriger, 1993 ; Fagan & Singer, 1983 , for reviews), which tends to remain highly stable across childhood and into adulthood ( Bayley, 1949 ; Honzik, MacFarlane, & Allen, 1948 ).

The significant relation between mechanisms for basic information processing in infancy and childhood IQ has caused some theorists to propose these infant abilities, as tapped by recognition memory and habituation tasks, are the basis for intelligence, arguing that cognitive development can be best expressed as reflecting continuity of cognitive function with stability ( Fagan, 1992 ). That is, developmental changes in cognitive abilities are quantitative in nature (e.g., increases in speed of processing, working memory), with individual differences being stable over time. The origins of this stability seem to lie both within children themselves and their environments, as measures of both the home environment (e.g., aspects of mother–child interaction) and habituation rate independently predict childhood IQ (e.g., Bornstein et al., 2006 ; Tamis-LeMonda & Bornstein, 1989 ).

But cognition is multifaceted, and other aspects of children’s thinking do not show levels of stability over time. For example, although some aspects of memory, such as memory span and story recall, show moderate to high degrees of stability over childhood (between 4 and 10 years), the cross-age correlations for other aspects of memory, such as free recall and use of memory strategies, are quite low and usually nonsignificant ( Schneider & Weinert, 1995 ). In other research, cross-age correlations of performance on psychometric tests in infancy tended to be high when infants were within a Piagetian-defined stage (e.g., between 8 and 12 months, corresponding to Piaget’s substage of the coordination of secondary circular reactions) but low when measures were taken between stages ( McCall, Eichorn, & Hogarty, 1977 ). This suggests that when there is discontinuity of cognitive change (as reflected by qualitative changes in cognition as in stage theories such as Piaget’s), there is instability of individual differences.

Although some aspects of cognition show high levels of stability over childhood into adulthood, this does not mean that once some level of cognitive accomplishment has been established it is “permanent.” Rather, intellectual functioning once established must be maintained and in some circumstances can be drastically modified, either for the better or worse. The plasticity of cognition is perhaps best exemplified by research examining changes in IQ levels of children originally reared in stultifying institutions and later placed in intellectually stimulating foster or adoptive homes. Research dating back to the 1930s has demonstrated significant and long-lasting enhancements of IQs for such children (e.g., Beckett et al., 2006 ; Nelson et al., 2007 ; O’Connor et al., 2000 ; Skeels, 1966 ; Skeels & Dye, 1939 ; St. Petersburg-USA Orphanage Research Team, 2008 ; Windsor et al., 2011 ). Not surprisingly, the degree of recovery is related to the age at which children are removed from the deleterious environment and placed in supportive homes. For example, recent research examining the IQs of children removed from Romanian orphanages and placed in British adoptive homes revealed no deficits in IQ at ages 6 or 11 years for children adopted within their first 6 months ( Beckett et al., 2006 ). IQs were lower for children adopted at later ages, particularly those adopted after 24 months. However, the 11-year IQs (83) were higher than the 6-year IQs (77) for these late-adopted children, suggesting a catch-up effect for the children who experienced the longest deprivation.

One methodological problem has plagued all of these “natural experiments,” in that children are not randomly assigned to “institution” and “adoptive” conditions. Perhaps the brighter or more maturationally advanced children are more likely to be selected for adoption than less-advanced children, for example. This problem was overcome in a recent study by randomly assigning Romanian infants who had been abandoned at birth to either foster care or to continued institutional care. These infants were followed to 54 months of age and also compared to a group of never-institutionalized infants who were being reared by their biological families in Bucharest, Romania ( Nelson et al., 2007 ). Similar to other studies, Nelson and colleagues reported higher IQs for children in foster care than for those who remained institutionalized, with IQ levels of the foster children being higher the earlier they were removed from the institution (IQs at 0 to 18 months = 85.8; 18 to 24 months = 86.7; 24 to 30 months = 78.1; 30-plus months = 71.5). In fact, children placed in foster care after 30 months of age had IQs similar to those of children in the institutionalized group (72 vs. 73).

It is not surprising that the brains of once-institutionalized children show signs of dysfunction in structure and processing in several areas ( Chugani et al., 2001 ; Eluvathingal et al., 2006 ). Nelson (2007) proposed that the stimulus-poor environments in which these children spend their early lives fail to provide the species-typical experiences human infants have evolved to expect, including sensory stimulation, social stimulation from a caregiver, and language, among others. Nelson suggested that the normal process of selective cell death may go awry in these children, resulting in excess neurons and synapses being lost, most of which can never be replaced.

Institutionalization studies indicate that patterns of cognitive growth can be facilitated when children experience a change from a nonstimulating to a stimulating intellectual environment. Similar changes can also occur in the opposite direction, however, when the supportive environments responsible for the establishment of intellectual accomplishment are changed. For instance, infant and preschool enrichment programs provided intellectually stimulating environments for children at risk for mental retardation, usually through kindergarten. These programs typically resulted in significant gains in IQ and academic performance relative to control children who did not experience educational enrichment (e.g., Bradley, Burchinal, & Casey, 2001 ; Klaus & Gray, 1968 ; Ramey et al., 2000 ). However, with only a handful of exceptions ( Campbell et al., 2002 ; Reynolds et al., 1996 , 2011 ), the gains shown by children in these enrichment preschool programs dwindled with time, with average IQs and school achievement of children attending these programs being comparable to those of control children by fourth grade (see Barnett, 1995 ; Lazar et al., 1982 , for reviews).

The children who attended preschool enrichment programs did, of course, get smarter with age (i.e., showed gains in cognitive development); however, as they returned to their homes and schools, they lost the supportive environment responsible for establishing intellectual accomplishments, and thus lost their intellectual edge relative to control children. Not surprisingly, at-risk children who stay in compensatory education programs once they begin formal school continue to maintain an academic advantage over their peers, but these gains, too, diminish after the completion of the program (e.g., Becker & Gersten, 1982 ).

Human intellectual plasticity is one of our species’ greatest claims to fame (see the chapters by Markant & Thomas in this handbook, and the chapter by Maurer and Lewis on sensitive periods). It permits us to adapt to a broad range of environments and to perform complex cognitive tasks, such as reading and calculus, that our ancestors never faced. Homo sapiens ’ cognitive flexibility is as much a part of our evolved nature as is our upright stance. Human infants and children have strong dispositions/intuitive information-processing biases, but our species’ thinking is highly sensitive to context, and this is particularly true early in life, when developmental trajectories are put in motion. This plasticity early in life is afforded by humans’ slow-developing brain that permits children to adjust to a wide range of circumstances. From this perspective, cognition is always expressed in an environment (usually a social environment, see discussion below), and when the conditions supporting the expression of those intellectual abilities change, one can expect corresponding changes in patterns of cognitive development. This makes humans the most educable of animals—that is, able to learn through experience.

Cognitive Development Involves Changes in the Way Information is Represented, Although Children of Every Age Possess a Variety of Ways to Represent Experiences

Central to all major theories of cognitive development are age-related changes in how objects, people, and experiences are represented (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002 ; Bruner, 1966 ; Case, 1992 ; Fischer, 1980 ; Karmiloff-Smith, 1991 ; Piaget, 1983 ). Piaget’s stage theory is the classic example in which major changes in how children represent the world reflect qualitative changes in cognition. According to Piaget, infants during their first 18 months or so represent objects and events by means of self-produced action (including sensory “action” such as looking at things), termed sensorimotor intelligence. Beginning around their second birthdays, children are able to represent objects and events symbolically, as reflected by their use of language, mental imagery, deferred imitation, and symbolic play, among other expressions of the symbolic (or semiotic) function. Although symbolic, the thinking of children in this preoperational stage (ranging from about 2 to 7 years) is intuitive and lacks logical operations, such as reversibility (e.g., a cognitive operation can be reversed, as in the case of subtraction, the effects of which can be reversed by addition). The thinking of children in the next state, concrete operations (ranging in age from about 7 to 11 years), although logical, is limited, as the stage name denotes, to concrete entities; abstract reasoning comes on line beginning around 11 or 12 years of age with the advent of formal operations .

Piaget’s stage theory has served as the jumping-off point for other theories proposing developmental differences in representational abilities (e.g., Case, 1992 ; Fischer, 1980 ; Fischer & Bidell, 1998 ; Pascual-Leone, 1970 , 2000 ). It has been critiqued widely (e.g., Brainerd, 1978 ; see papers in Brainerd, 1996 ), and I will not provide a detailed examination of this influential theory here. Rather, I devote most space to what is perhaps the most studied and controversial transition reflected in Piaget’s theory, the change from sensorimotor to symbolic representation. The advent and widespread use of symbolic representation marks a major milestone in cognitive development, and although humans may not be the only species capable of representational thought (see, e.g., Parker & McKinney, 1999 ), the extent to which humans apply such thinking differentiates us from all other species.

As I noted, Piaget believed that the symbolic function was expressed via children’s language, mental imagery, deferred imitation, and symbolic play, among others, each emerging around 18 to 24 months of age. For example, although children typically speak their first words around 10 months of age, they usually don’t put them into sentences until around 18 months, and Piaget (1962) observed, and others confirmed (e.g., Kaye & Marcus, 1981 ), that children display deferred imitation (copying the actions of a model some significant time after observing the behavior) late in the second year of life. However, more recent research indicates that infants show signs of symbolic representation much earlier than Piaget proposed when simplified and age-appropriate tasks are used.

Perhaps the best-documented case of infants displaying symbolic representational abilities much earlier than Piaget proposed is for deferred imitation (see Bauer, 2007 , and the chapters by Bauer and Meltzoff & Williamson in this handbook for reviews). Although infants’ ability to imitate multistep actions increases with age, infants as young as 9 months old will imitate simple actions for up to 5 weeks (e.g., Carver & Bauer, 1999 ); 6-month-olds have been shown to imitate simple behaviors after a 24-hour delay ( Collie & Hayne, 1999 ); and preverbal toddlers have shown evidence of deferred imitation for as long as 1 year (e.g., Bauer, 2002 , 2007 ; Bauer et al., 2000 ). Other research indicates that infants in their first year of life may be able to add and subtract small quantities (e.g., Wynn, 1992 , discussed earlier) and may possess some precocious problem-solving strategies based on analogical reasoning ( Chen, Sanchez, & Campbell, 1997 ; Willatts, 1990 ), and newborns have been shown to copy facial expressions (e.g., Meltzoff & Moore, 1977 ) and integrate information from multiple senses (e.g., Meltzoff & Borton, 1979 ). These and other findings lead Meltzoff (1990 , p. 20) to conclude that “ in a very real sense, there may be no such thing as an exclusively ‘sensorimotor period’ in the normal human infant ” (italics in the original).

Although there are alternate interpretations of some of the findings purported to reflect infant representational abilities (e.g., infant “addition” may actually be the result of perceptual, not conceptual, processes, Clearfield & Westfahl, 2006 ; neonatal imitation may have a communicative and/or affiliative function and is not related to the imitation observed later in infancy, Bjorklund, 1987 ; Byrne, 2005 ), most contemporary theorists concur that representational cognition does not suddenly appear around children’s second birthdays, but rudimentary abilities are seen late in the first and early in the second year of life.

Representing Others as Intentional Agents

In addition to evidence from studies of deferred imitation in infancy (see Bauer, 2007 ), representational competency in infancy is supported by research examining children’s understanding of seeing both themselves and other people as intentional agents —as beings whose behavior is based on what they know and what they want, and who act deliberately to achieve their goals (i.e., they do things “on purpose”; see Bandura, 2006 ; Tomasello & Carpenter, 2007 ).

On the surface, viewing others as intentional agents may not appear to be a major intellectual accomplishment, but it serves as the basis for human social cognition, which includes social learning and teaching, the foundation for culture—the nongenetic transmission of information between generations. Although the first signs of intentional representation appear late in the first year, children’s understanding of others as intentional agents develops over childhood, culminating in the ability to pass false-belief tasks around 4 years of age, the benchmark for attaining theory of mind (see the chapter by Astington & Hughes in this volume 2).

The earliest sign of infants’ understanding of others as intentional agents is seen in shared (or joint ) attention , which involves a triadic interaction between the child, another person, and an object ( Tomasello & Carpenter, 2007 ; Tomasello et al., 2005 ). For example, parents often draw children’s attention to an object by pointing or gazing at the object, a form of referential communication , which indicates that the “pointer” understands that he or she sees something that the observer does not. Despite parents’ actions, infants do not engage in shared attention until about 9 months of age, although they do display some biases toward social stimuli from birth. For example, newborns orient to human faces and learn to seek their mothers’ faces ( Feldman & Eidelman, 2004 ), and by 3 or 5 months infants can recognize self-produced biological motion ( Bertenthal, Proffitt, & Cutting, 1984 ) and turn to look in the same direction of another person ( Tomasello et al., 2005 ).

Beginning around 9 months of age, infants will gaze in the direction adults are looking or pointing, engage in repetitive interaction with an adult and an object, imitate an adult’s action, and point or hold up objects to another person (see Carpenter et al., 1998 ; Tomasello, 1999 ). Shared attention and related abilities increase over the next year. For example, 12-month-olds will point to objects and events that others are unaware of ( Liszkowski, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2007 ); between 12 and 18 months infants learn to use where others are looking to inform their own attention ( Brooks & Meltzoff, 2002 ) and to point to objects to direct an adult’s attention to something he or she is searching for ( Liszkowski et al., 2006 ).

Although shared attention may seem to reflect a low-level form of representation, it may be unique to humans. For example, although chimpanzees and even monkeys will follow the gaze of another individual in some contexts (e.g., Bering & Povinelli, 2003 ; Bräuer, Call, & Tomasello, 2005 ) and point out things to other individuals (e.g., Leavens, Hopkins, & Bard, 2005 ), there is little evidence that chimpanzees engage in shared attention (e.g., Herrmann et al., 2007 ; Tomasello & Carpenter, 2005 ).

The importance of seeing others as intentional agents can be seen in social learning. The most sophisticated forms of social learning, including teaching, require that the observer not only copy significant aspects of a model’s behavior, but also understand that the model has a specific goal, or intention, in mind. That is, behavior is not copied just for the sake of reproducing the actions of another individual, but to achieve some specific outcome. This is seen early in the second year of life. For example, 14- and 18-month-old infants will copy the behavior an adult intended to perform (e.g., pulling the ends off a dumbbell), even if the adult failed to complete the action (e.g., Meltzoff, 1995 ; see also Carpenter, Akhtar, & Tomasello, 1998 ). In fact, preschool children will generally reproduce most of an adult model’s actions even if all the actions are not necessary to achieve a goal ( Gardiner, Greif, & Bjorklund, 2011 ; Horner & Whiten, 2005 ; Nagell, Olguin, & Tomasello, 1993 ; Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010 ). For instance, in one study 3- and 4-year-old children were shown a transparent puzzle box and an adult demonstrated a series of three actions, two of which were necessary and one of which was not, to retrieve a gummy bear from inside the box ( Horner & Whiten, 2005 ). Children copied all of the adult’s actions, even those that were obviously irrelevant for attaining the goal. One interpretation of findings such as these is that young children may believe that all of an adult’s actions are goal-directed, making imitation of those actions a reasonable course to take ( Lyons, Young, & Keil, 2007 ).

Although chimpanzees and the other great apes clearly engage in sophisticated forms of social learning, passing information from one generation to the next, the minimal criterion for culture (e.g., van Schaik et al., 2003 ; Whiten, 2007 ; Whiten et al., 1999 ), they tend not to engage in true imitation (understanding the model’s goal and copying most behaviors to achieve that goal) as young children do. Rather, they are more apt to engage in emulation , attaining the same goal as the model but using different, and sometimes more effective, actions in doing so (e.g., Call, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2004 ; Horner & Whiten, 2005 ; Nagell et al., 1993 ). Thus, despite being apparently able to represent the goals of a model, chimpanzees seem not possess the same degree of recognition of other beings as intentional agents as human preschoolers do, perhaps accounting for the greater effectiveness of social learning in humans than in great apes.

Another major representational change in understanding others as intentional agents seems to occur around 4 years of age when children can pass false-belief tasks. Much before this time, children have great difficulty attributing a false belief to others. For example, if a 3-year-old knows that a cookie, originally hidden in a cupboard, has been moved to a jar, he or she believes that another person, although not privy to the change in location, will also know the correct whereabouts of the cookie (e.g., Baron-Cohen et al., 1985 ; Wimmer & Perner, 1983 ). Although performance on false-belief tasks is affected by task characteristics and by basic-level processes such as executive function (e.g., Flynn, O’Malley, & Wood, 2004 ; Henning, Spinath, & Aschersleben, 2011 ; Hughes & Ensor, 2007 ; see the chapter by Carlson, Zelazo, and Faja in this handbook), 3-year-olds seem to truly lack the conceptual/representational competence to solve such tasks that most 4-year olds possess ( Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001 ).

Representational Insight

Most aspects of mental representation and symbolic functioning would seem to require the knowledge that one entity can stand for something other than itself, termed representational insight ( DeLoache, 1987 ; DeLoache & Marzolf, 1992 ). This can be seen in how children interpret pictures or photographs. In one study, children between 9 and 19 months of age in the United States and the Ivory Coast were given photographs of objects to inspect ( DeLoache et al., 1998 ). Most of the youngest children treated the photos as if they were real objects, sometimes even trying to pick them off the page. In contrast, most of the older children pointed at the depicted objects rather than trying to manipulate them, realizing they were representations of things.

In other studies, researchers showed children scale models or photographs of rooms, including the location of a hidden toy. Children were then given the opportunity to find the toy in a “real” room (e.g., DeLoache, 1987 ; DeLoache & Marzolf, 1992 ; Kuhlmeier, 2005 ; Suddendorf, 2003 ). Somewhat surprisingly, children were first able to use the photograph as a cue to where the toy was hidden in the real room (at around 2.5 years of age), but only later were able to find the object when a scale model was used (about 3 years of age). One explanation for this pattern was that the scale model was an interesting object itself, making it difficult for children to treat it as a representation for something else, or what DeLoache (2000) referred to as dual representation . In support of this explanation, when the model was made less interesting (e.g., by having children look at it through a window), 2.5-year-old children were able to use it to find the toy in the real room ( DeLoache, 1991 ).

Implicit/Explicit Representation

One distinction frequently made in cognitive psychology is that between implicit and explicit cognition. Implicit cognition refers to cognition without awareness, whereas explicit cognition refers to cognition with conscious awareness. Generally, human infants and all nonhuman animals may be limited to implicit cognition (but see Bjorklund & Rosenberg, 2005 , for discussion of possible explicit cognition in chimpanzees), and the evolution of conscious awareness, with a well-developed sense of self, has been proposed to be essential for evaluating the causes of one’s behavior and the behavior of others—that is, treating other people as intentional agents ( Bering & Bjorklund, 2007 ). Although implicit cognition may lack the important ingredient of self-awareness, it can be quite sophisticated, as reflected by the knowledge spiders have for building webs, birds have for building nests, or people have for complicated motor tasks, such as skiing down a twisting slope.

Karmiloff-Smith (1991 , 1992 ) developed a theory of representational redescription in which implicit representations are transformed, or redescribed, into various forms of explicit cognition. According to Karmiloff-Smith, redescription permits children to use their representations more flexibly, including taking one piece of information (watching mother as she points in the distance) and making some inferences (perhaps she wants me to look at the object she’s pointing at). With redescription , knowledge that was once implicit becomes explicit, allowing children to generate new insights by reflecting on what they already know.

As with other aspects of cognitive development, there seems not to be a definitive point in time before which self-awareness is not present and after which it is. Perhaps the classic demonstration of self-awareness is mirror self-recognition , in which children realize that it is themselves and not another child that they see in the mirror. Children “pass” this task, usually by pointing to a mark on their face that was surreptitiously placed there rather than pointing at the mirror, around 18 months of age (e.g., Brooks-Gunn & Lewis, 1984 ; Nielsen, Suddendorf, & Slaughter, 2006 ), as do chimpanzees, orangutans, and a few gorillas ( Gallup, 1979 ; Suddendorf & Whiten, 2001 ), dolphins ( Reiss & Marino, 2001 ), elephants ( Plotnik, de Waal, & Reiss, 2006 ), and magpies ( Prior, Schwarz, & Güntürkün, 2008 ). However, when researchers placed stickers on children’s heads, most 2- and 3-year-old children failed to reach for the stickers when shown photographs or videos of themselves (e.g., Povinelli, Landau, & Perilloux, 1996 ; Povinelli & Simon, 1998 ), suggesting that children’s sense of self develops gradually over the preschool years, as their ability to deal with different modes of representation (mirrors, photos, videos) develops (see also Skouteris, Spataro, & Lazaridis, 2006 ; Zelazo, Sommerville, & Nichols, 1999 ).

Other research suggests that some aspects of self-awareness and explicit cognition develop much earlier. For example, as I mentioned previously, infants as young as 9 months old display deferred imitation (see Bauer, 2007 ), which has been proposed to be a nonverbal form of explicit memory. This is seen in studies of adults with hippocampal damage, who are unable to acquire new explicit knowledge but can learn new implicit knowledge. For instance, when given a mirror-drawing task (trace figures while watching one’s hand in a mirror), patients with hippocampal damage don’t remember performing the task from day to day (explicit memory) but nonetheless improve their performance as a result of practice (implicit memory) ( Milner, 1964 ). When these patients are given deferred-imitation tasks similar to those used with infants (observe a novel behavior and then reproduce it a day later), they behave much as they do on verbal explicit memory tasks—they are unable to remember seeing the task performed and fail to reproduce the modeled behavior ( McDonough et al., 1995 ).

Children of all ages beyond infancy (and perhaps during) have both implicit and explicit representations available to them, and operations involving both systems are used in processing information. However, tasks that tap mostly explicit representations show larger development differences than tasks that tap mostly implicit representations (e.g., Billingsley, Smith, & McAndrews, 2002 ; Newcombe et al., 1998 ). For example, in one study, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children saw a series of pictures and were asked to identify them or to answer some questions about them (for example, “What would you use an X for?”) ( Hayes & Hennessy, 1996 ). Two days later children were shown a series of fragmented pictures, some of which they had seen earlier and some of which were new. The initial picture in each series was substantially degraded and gradually more detail was provided until children identified the picture. Children were also asked if they remembered each picture from 2 days ago. Recognition memory, a measure of explicit cognition, improved with age; however, children of all ages identified the fragmented “old” pictures (i.e., those they had seen with less detail provided) earlier than the fragmented “new” pictures, a measure of implicit memory. This effect held regardless of whether children remembered seeing the pictures 2 days earlier or not.

Infants and children often display greater cognitive competence on tasks when their knowledge is assessed by implicit rather than explicit measures ( Keen, 2003 ). For example, in a false-belief task, after a piece of cheese is moved from its original container to a new one, children were asked where Sam, who saw where the object was hidden initially but did not see it moved, will look. Most 3-year-olds stated, erroneously, that Sam will look for the cheese in the new location. This is a measure of explicit representation. However, when 3-year-olds were asked this question, they first gazed at the original location, where Sam saw the cheese being hidden ( Clements & Perner, 1994 ; Clements, Ruffman, & McCallum, 2000 ). Looking behavior is a nonverbal and implicit measure, and when it is used as an indication of children’s knowledge, it appears that even 3-year-olds understand (at least implicitly) the possibility that others can hold a false belief.

Other research using infants’ implicit looking behavior (e.g., increasing looking time to an unexpected event, such as a screen that continues to descend when its trajectory should be stopped by an object) indicates that babies possess knowledge of physical objects, such as object permanence ( Baillargeon, 1987 ), months earlier than observed by Piaget using more explicit reaching behaviors as measures (e.g., reaching and retrieving a covered object). Other research using similar looking-time measures has shown that 5- and 6-month-old infants realize that items that are unsupported will fall ( Baillargeon, 1994 ; see Baillargeon, 2008 ; Spelke & Kinzler, 2007 , for reviews). In contrast, 2-year-old children fail to show this knowledge when explicit searching behavior is used as a measure ( Berthier et al., 2000 ; Hood, Carey, & Prasada, 2000 ). For example, after watching a ball dropped onto a stage behind a screen and seeing the resting ball on the floor, 2- and 2.5-year-old children watched as the experimenter placed a cup on the floor of the stage, a shelf over the cup, and then a second cup on that shelf ( Hood et al., 2000 ). The screen was then replaced and the ball dropped again. If the children understood the solidity of objects, as 6-month-old infants presumably do, they should search in the cup on the top shelf. Most 2.5-year-old children did so (93%), but only 40% of the 2-year-old children searched in the top cup, suggesting that, when using explicit measures, their understanding of solidity was tenuous. These and other findings (see Keen, 2003 ) suggest that implicit knowledge develops before explicit knowledge, and we must be cautious when we state that infants or children either possess, as reflected by implicit knowledge, or don’t possess, as reflected by explicit knowledge, a particular concept.

Dual-Process/Representation Theories of Cognitive Development

The implicit/explicit distinction just discussed suggests that children have multiple ways of representing information. Such theories are often referred to as dual-process theories , and most theorists postulate that people have (at least) two basic ways of representing information (e.g., implicit vs. explicit; experiential vs. analytic; exact, verbatim traces vs. inexact, “fuzzy” traces) and that there are developmental differences in how children use these various forms of representation (e.g., Barrouillet, 2011 ; Brainerd & Reyna, 2002 , 2005 ; Klaczynski, 2009 ). One dual-process theory that has been widely applied to children’s cognition is fuzzy-trace theory (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 1993 , 2002 , 2005 ). Brainerd and Reyna propose that people represent experiences on a fuzzy-to-verbatim continuum . At one extreme are verbatim traces , which are elaborated, exact representations of recently encoded information. At the other extreme are fuzzy traces , or gist, which are vague, degenerated representations that maintain only the sense or pattern of recent experiences.

Although people of all age process information along the entire continuum, young children are biased to represent experiences in terms of verbatim traces, with this bias shifting in middle childhood. This has implications for children’s performance on a host of tasks, because verbatim and fuzzy traces are processed differently. For example, verbatim traces are more likely to be forgotten and are more susceptible to output interference than fuzzy traces. Although space prevents me from providing a detailed description of research performed following fuzzy-trace theory, it has been applied to a wide range of domains within cognitive development, including memory (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2005 ), arithmetic (e.g., Brainerd & Gordon, 1994 ), and reasoning (e.g., Reyna & Farley, 2006 ), and has generated a number of counterintuitive predictions that have been confirmed by research. For example, under some circumstances, children’s false memories (e.g., remembering an event that didn’t happen) are more resistant to forgetting than true memories (e.g., Brainerd & Mojardin, 1999 ; see Brainerd & Reyna, 2005 ). This was predicted premised on the fact that correct recognition is based, in part, on literal, or verbatim, memory traces. Because there are no verbatim memory traces for falsely remembered events, they are based solely on the more durable fuzzy traces. As a result, true memories are more likely to be forgotten than false memories.

Representation has been one of the most investigated and theorized-about aspects of cognitive development. Counter to Piaget’s original proposal, children, beginning in infancy, have multiple ways of representing information, although their ability to mentally represent people, objects, and events increases in sophistication over infancy and childhood. The ability to represent the intentions of other people, a form of social cognition, may be of special significance, for with it children can represent the goals of other people and are able to learn through observation and direct teaching, permitting the acquisition of knowledge and skills that were foreign to our ancestors. In fact, many theorists propose that humans’ exceptional intelligence, which affords scientific, artistic, and technological accomplishments, is derived from our social intelligence, evolved for cooperating and competing with fellow conspecifics (e.g., Alexander, 1989 ; Dunbar, 1995 , 2010 ; Geary & Ward, 2005 ; Humphrey, 1976 ), and the result of the confluence of a big brain, an extended juvenile period, and living in socially complex groups (e.g., Bjorklund, Cormier, & Rosenberg, 2005 ; Dunbar, 1995 ). Human representational ability is seemingly unique in the animal world. Although hints of representational thought can be seen in other big-brained animals, including the great apes (e.g., Herrmann et al., 2007 ; Whiten, 2007 ), dolphins (e.g., Bender, Herzing, & Bjorklund, 2009 ; Krützen et al., 2005 ), and elephants (e.g., Plotnik et al., 2006 ), no other species makes use of symbolic representation to the extent that humans do. Although I’ve emphasized that there does not seem to be a single point in development when we can say children “have” representational thought versus when they do not, the change of thinking between the mainly sensorimotor infant and the child who possesses language and theory of mind is substantial, giving the appearance, if not the reality, of a stagelike transformation in cognition.

Children Develop Increasing Intentional Control over Their Behavior and Cognition

The purpose of cognition is to solve problems. Although adult human minds can ponder esoteric questions concerning the meaning of existence, cognition evolved to help animals solve the problems they encounter in everyday life. The ability to solve problems increases with age, and one important issue for developmental psychologists concerns the degree to which children of different ages can intentionally guide their problem solving. Much research on this topic has addressed the use of strategies , usually defined as deliberate, goal-directed mental operations that are aimed at solving a problem (e.g., Harnishfeger & Bjorklund, 1990 ; Pressley & Hilden, 2006 ). However, central to using strategies and intentional control of behavior is self-regulation , the ability to guide not only one’s problem solving but also one’s emotions (e.g., Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004 ; Posner, Rothbart, & Sheese, 2007 ).

Several basic-level cognitive abilities are involved in self-regulation, which collectively are referred to as executive function ( Jones, Rothbart, & Posner, 2003 ; Wiebe, Espy, & Charak, 2008 ; Zelazo, Carlson, & Kesek, 2008 ). Executive function refers to the processes involved in regulating attention and in determining what to do with information just gathered or retrieved from long-term memory. It plays a central role in planning and behaving flexibly, particularly when dealing with novel information. It involves a related set of basic information-processing abilities, including working memory , the structures and processes used for temporarily storing and manipulating information; selectively attending to relevant information; inhibiting responding and resisting interference; and cognitive flexibility, as reflected by how easily individuals can switch between different sets of rules or different tasks (see Garon, Bryson, & Smith, 2008 ; McAuley & White, 2011 ; Zelazo et al., 2008 ). In this section, I review the development of various aspects of executive function and then look briefly at children’s development of strategies, topics that will both be examined in more detail later in this handbook (see the chapters by Rueda & Posner; and Carlson, Zelazo, & Faja).

The Development of Executive Function

Executive function seems to include at least three factors—working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility—each of which develops. Working memory is measured by performance on working-memory span tasks. Working-memory span can be contrasted with the more familiar measure of memory span , found on the Stanford-Binet and Wechsler IQ tests. Memory span is typically measured by asking children to recall in exact order a list of items that are presented at a rate of about 1 per second. In contrast, in working-memory span tasks, children are asked to perform simple cognitive operations in addition to remembering the items. For example, in a counting-span task children may see arrays of blue circles and yellow triangles and be asked to count the number of circles. Children must then recall the number of circles in that array and in each prior array. Both memory and working-memory span show regular increases with age, with working-memory span usually being about two items less than a child’s memory span (e.g., Alloway, Gathercole, & Pickering, 2006 ; Case, 1985 ; Dempster, 1981 ).

One popular account of working memory and its development was presented by Baddeley and Hitch ( Baddeley, 1986 ; Baddeley & Hitch, 1974 ), who proposed that working memory consists of a central executive that stores information and two temporary systems, one for coding verbal information called the articulatory , or phonological , loop , and another for coding visual information, referred to as the visuospatial scratch pad , or visuospatial working memory . Developmental differences in verbal memory span are primarily due to age differences in the articulatory loop. Age differences in the rate of decay of verbal representations held in the articulatory loop and/or the rate that that information can be rehearsed contribute to developmental differences in memory and working-memory span (see Cowan & Alloway, 2009 ). Support for this contention comes from research reporting a relationship between the speed with which individual words can be articulated and memory span. Researchers have found reliable age differences in speed of processing , with younger children taking more time to process information and make decisions than older children ( Kail & Ferrer, 2007 ; Miller & Vernon, 1997 ). With age, children are able to read or say words at a faster rate, and memory span increases accordingly (e.g., Chuah & Maybery, 1999 ; Hulme et al., 1984 ). When adults’ speed of processing is slowed down to be comparable to that of 6-year-olds (e.g., by making them remember digits using a foreign language), their memory and working-memory spans are similarly reduced to be comparable to those of 6-year-olds (e.g., Case, Kurland, & Goldberg, 1982 ).

The relationship between speed of enunciating individual items and memory span is nicely illustrated by some cross-cultural research. For example, Chinese-speaking children have longer memory spans than English-speaking children ( Chen & Stevenson, 1988 ; Geary et al., 1993 ), and this is related to the fact that the digits 1 through 9 can be articulated more rapidly in Chinese than in English. A similar effect has been found for bilingual Welsh children, who have longer digit spans in English, their second language, than in Welsh, their first language. This counterintuitive effect is attributed to the fact that number words can be articulated more rapidly in English than in Welsh ( Ellis & Hennelley, 1980 ).

Children’s familiarity with the to-be-remembered items also affects span length (e.g., Dempster, 1981 , 1985 ). For example, in a much-cited study, Chi (1978) reported that a group of 10-year-old chess experts had longer memory spans for game-possible positions on a chessboard than a group of adults who knew how to play chess but were not experts. However, their greater memory span was limited to their area of expertise; the adults had longer memory spans than the children for digits (see also Schneider et al., 1993 ). Memory and working-memory span, then, should not be viewed as absolute limits of children’s information-processing abilities, but rather they are influenced by factors including the speed with which individual items can be processed and children’s knowledge for the to-be-remembered information.

Yet there is evidence that there may be some absolute limits in how much information children of different ages can hold in working memory ( Cowan et al., 1999 , 2011 ). For example, Cowan and his colleagues (1999) evaluated age differences in span of apprehension ( Sperling, 1960 ), which refers to the amount of information that people can attend to at a single time. The span of apprehension of adults is about four items, compared to memory span, which is 7 ± 2 items. In the study by Cowan and colleagues, first- and fourth-grade children and adults heard series of digits over headphones, which they were to ignore, while simultaneously playing a video game. Occasionally and unexpectedly, however, they were asked to recall, in exact order, the most recently presented set of digits they had heard. The average span of apprehension increased with age: about 2.5 digits for first graders, about 3.0 for fourth graders, and about 3.5 digits for adults. Cowan and his colleagues interpreted these significant age differences as reflecting a true developmental difference in the capacity of the short-term store that serves as the foundation for age differences on memory-span tasks.

Individual differences in children’s working memory are related to a host of higher-order cognitive abilities. For example, working memory correlates moderately with IQ (see Fry & Hale, 2000 ) and is significantly associated with the speed and accuracy of arithmetic computation (e.g., Adams & Hitch, 1997 ; Zheng, Swanson, & Marcoulides, 2011 ), reading comprehension (e.g., Daneman & Blennerhassett, 1984 ; Daneman & Green, 1986 ), writing ability (e.g., Swanson & Beringer, 1996 ), and the use of arithmetic (e.g., Berg, 2008 ) and memory strategies (e.g., Lehmann & Hasselhorn, 2007 ; Woody-Dorning & Miller, 2001 ). Children with math (e.g., Geary et al., 1991 ) and reading (e.g., Gathercole et al., 2006 ; Swanson & Jerman, 2007 ) disabilities have smaller working memories than nondisabled children, and children with precocious mathematical skills have higher levels of executive function (e.g., working memory, inhibition) than typically devleoping children ( Johnson, Im-Bolter, & Pascual-Leone, 2003 ; Swanson, 2006 ).

A second basic-level ability included in executive function is inhibition , which refers to the ability to prevent making some cognitive or behavioral response. Researchers have proposed that children’s abilities to inhibit preferred or well-established responses plays an important role in cognitive development (e.g., Bjorklund & Harnishfeger, 1990 ; Dempster, 1992 ; Diamond & Taylor, 1996 ; Harnishfeger, 1995 ). Related to inhibition is resistance to interference ( Dempster, 1993 ), which refers to “susceptibility to performance decrements under conditions of multiple distracting stimuli” ( Harnishfeger, 1995 , pp. 188–189). Resistance to interference is seen in dual tasks, when performing one task (watching television) interferes with performance on a second task (comprehending a story one is reading), or in selective attention, when one must focus on “central” information (reading a story) and ignore “peripheral” information (the plot of a television sitcom).

Inhibition and the ability to resist interference increase with age. For example, in Piaget’s A-not-B object permanence tasks, infants much younger than about 12 months continue to search at location A, where they had retrieved a hidden object several times previously, despite seeing it hidden at a new location (B). One factor hypothesized to be related to performance on this task is infants’ ability to inhibit their previous correct responses, which improves over the latter part of the first year ( Diamond, 1985 ; Holmboe et al., 2008 ).

Inhibition abilities continue to develop over childhood and adolescence (see, e.g., Kochanska et al., 1996 ; Luria, 1961 ) and are assessed by a variety of simple tests. For instance, in the tapping task children must tap once each time the examiner taps twice and tap twice each time the examiner taps once; in the day-night task , children must say “day” each time they see a picture of the moon and “night” each time they see a picture of the sun; and in Simon Says , children must perform an action only when Simon says so (“Simon says, touch your nose”). These tasks require children to inhibit a prepotent response and execute another, and individual and development differences are found on these and other tasks (e.g., Baker, Friedman, & Leslie, 2010 ; Diamond & Taylor, 1996 ; Sabbagh et al., 2006 ). More complicated tasks, appropriate for older children and adolescents, include variants of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task, in which participants sort cards by one dimension (e.g., shape of object), which is then switched to another dimension (e.g., color). The number of perseverative errors (i.e., continuing to sort by the previously correct category) is used as a measure of inhibition (e.g., Chelune & Baer, 1986 ).

Children’s performance on inhibition and resistance to interference tasks is associated with a host of higher-level cognitive abilities, including false-belief tasks assessing theory of mind (e.g., Sabbagh et al., 2006 ), selective attention (e.g., Ridderinkhof, van der Molen, & Band, 1997 ), selective forgetting (e.g., Harnishfeger & Pope, 1996 ; Lehman et al., 1997 ), incidental learning (e.g., Schiff & Knopf, 1985 ), and intelligence (see Harnishfeger & Bjorklund, 1994 ; McCall & Carriger, 1993 ). Behavioral inhibition has also been identified as the principal cause of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; Barkley, 1997 ).

A third basic-level component hypothesized to be involved in the development of executive function is cognitive flexibility , as reflected by the ability to shift between sets of tasks or rules (e.g., Garon et al., 2008 ; Zelazo et al., 2003 ). Many of the tasks used to assess inhibition abilities also require children to shift, or change, between a set of rules. For example, in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task participants must switch from following one rule (it’s the shape of the object that’s important) to another (it’s the number of objects on a card that’s important). Relatedly, Zelazo and his colleagues have argued that the development of executive function involves the increasing ability to formulate and maintain rules, as illustrated on simplified “shifting tasks,” in which children must change from following one criteria (sort by color) to another (sort by shape) ( Zelazo et al., 2003 , 2008 ).

Developmental differences in executive function have been related to age-related differences in brain development, particularly the frontal lobes (see Zelazo et al., 2008 ). For example, myelination of neurons, which promotes a faster rate of neuronal processing, is not fully developed in the frontal cortex until adolescence or young adulthood (see Lenroot & Giedd, 2007 ; Yakovlev & Lecours, 1967 ). There is substantial research with infants (e.g., Bell, Wolfe, & Adkins, 2007 ) and older children and adults (e.g., Luna et al., 2001 ) pointing to the frontal lobes as the locus of inhibitory control. For example, neuroimaging studies reveal relations between infants’ performance on A-not-B object-permanence tasks and frontal lobe activity (e.g., Baird et al., 2002 ; Segalowitz & Hiscock, 2002 ), and young children’s performance on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task is similar to that of adults with frontal lesions ( Chelune & Baer, 1986 ). Research by Luna and colleagues (2001) found that inhibition abilities develop gradually between the ages of 8 and 30 years and are associated with activity in the frontal cortex. However, rather than showing a linear relation between age and brain functioning on inhibition tasks, they reported that the prefrontal cortex was more active on these inhibition tasks in adolescents than in either children or adults.

Most accounts of executive function hold that the various processes are domain-general in nature. That is, developmental and individual differences in working memory and inhibition influence children’s performance on a host of tasks in a similar way (e.g., Case, 1992 ). Despite this, one should not expect executive function to be uniform across all tasks, as differences in motivation and knowledge base will influence levels of children’s performance on different tasks, and some aspects of executive function are likely domain-specific in nature. For example, although reading comprehension seems to be associated with a domain-general set of processing resources, the relation between working memory and writing ability appears to be specific to that domain only ( Swanson & Berninger, 1996 ).

Developmental changes in working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility are all related to one another and to changes in neurological development, particularly the frontal cortex. Few higher-level cognitive tasks can be performed without adequate control of one’s attention, and it is difficult to emphasize too much the importance of executive function to the development of higher-level cognition and to the regulation of one’s emotions and behaviors. Some have even speculated that the evolution of executive function may have been an important component in the emergence of the modern human mind (e.g., Geary, 2005 ). The abilities to inhibit inappropriate behavior, resist distraction, and control one’s actions in general are critical to effective function in any social group, as well as for activities such as hunting, preparing meals, or constructing tools, among many others. These abilities are better developed in humans than in other primates and in older children than in younger children, and may be a key to understanding both human cognitive development and evolution.

Becoming Self-Directed Learners: Strategy Development

Once children have sufficient cognitive and behavioral self-control, they can reflect on the problems they face and approach them strategically. Strategies are usually defined as deliberately implemented, nonobligatory (one doesn’t have to use them to perform a task), mentally effortful operations that are aimed at solving a problem and are potentially available to consciousness ( Harnishfeger & Bjorklund, 1990 ; Pressley & Hilden, 2006 ). Children become self-directed learners by using deliberate information-processing operations to achieve specific goals that could not be achieved “without thinking” (i.e., automatically or with implicit cognition).

It should not be surprising that children become better problem solvers with age. What is important is the way in which they become better problem solvers. As I mentioned in the previous section , children’s strategy use is affected by processes such as working memory and inhibition (e.g., Lehmann & Hasselhorn, 2007 ; Woody-Dorning & Miller, 2001 ). However, even young preschool children use simple strategies in some contexts. For example, 18- and 24-month-old children playing a modified game of hide-and-seek looked at the hiding location of a toy or repeated the toy’s name during a delay period between the time the toy was hidden and they were permitted to search for it ( DeLoache & Brown, 1983 ; DeLoache, Cassidy, & Brown, 1985 ). With age, the sophistication of children’s strategies increases. For example, preschool children perform simple addition problems by counting on their fingers; they use counting strategies that involve enunciating all numbers in each addend (e.g., for 5 + 3 = ?, saying “one, two, three, four, five…six, seven, eight,” called the sum strategy ), later using counting strategies in which only the numbers in the smaller addend are enumerated (e.g., for 5 + 3 = ?, saying “five…six, seven, eight,” called the min strategy , because the minimum number of counts is made), to retrieving the answer directly from memory (e.g., for 5 + 3 = ?, saying “eight” immediately after the problem is posed) (see Ashcraft, 1990 ). Use of increasingly sophisticated strategies with age is observed for most other complex cognitive tasks, including memory (see Bjorklund, Dukes, & Brown, 2009 ), problem solving and reasoning (see DeLoache, Miller, & Pierroutsakos, 1998 ), attention (see Miller, 1990 ), and reading (see Garner, 1990 ), among others.

However, it would be misleading to believe that strategies develop in a stagelike fashion, with a less sophisticated strategy being replaced by a more sophisticated one. Rather, children of all ages have multiple strategies available to them at any one time. The number of strategies available to a child increases with age, as does the effectiveness of the modal strategy that is used on any particular task. This is best reflected by Robert Siegler’s (1996 , 2006 ) adaptive strategy choice model . Using Darwin’s metaphor of natural selection as a guide, Siegler proposes that children generate a broad range of strategies to solve a particular class of problem and then select among those strategies. Depending on the child’s goals and the nature of the task, some strategies are selected and used frequently, whereas others that are less effective are used less often and eventually decrease in frequency (and may eventually go “extinct”). Early in development or when a child is first learning a new task, relatively simple strategies “win” most of the time. With practice and maturation, children use other, more effortful (i.e., requiring more mental effort and greater executive control) and effective strategies.

Siegler conceives of development as occurring via as a series of overlapping waves, with the pattern of those waves changing over time. Thus, extending the example of the development of addition strategies, individual preschool and early school-age children actually use multiple strategies that vary with age (older children make greater use of the more sophisticated strategies; see Siegler, 1996 ), specific problems (fact retrieval is more apt to be used on doubles, e.g., 5 + 5 = ?, Siegler & Shrager, 1984 ), and context (e.g., children used less sophisticated strategies in the context of a game using dice than when given problems in a standard format; e.g., Bjorklund & Rosenblum, 2002 ). Multiple and variable strategy use has been found for children for a wide range of tasks, including arithmetic (e.g., Alibali, 1999 ), memory (e.g., Coyle & Bjorklund, 1997 ), spelling (e.g., Kwong & Varnhagen, 2005 ), scientific reasoning ( Schauble, 1990 ), and conservation ( Church & Goldin-Meadow, 1986 ), among others (see Siegler, 1996 , 2006 ).

Children’s strategy use is influenced by a host of factors in addition to executive function, two important ones being knowledge base and metacognition . Knowledge base refers to how much children know about the problems they’re trying to solve. Children over a broad age range for a wide range of tasks use strategies more effectively when they have detailed knowledge for the to-be-processed information. The principal reason for this relationship seems to be that having an extensive knowledge base results in faster processing of information within that domain (e.g., the domain of chess, soccer, or developmental psychology), which in turn results in more efficient processing (see Bjorklund, Muir–Broaddus, & Schneider, 1990 ; Kee, 1994 ). As an example, consider a free-recall task in which children are given lists of words from different categories to remember. Some category members are typical exemplars of their category (e.g., orange, banana, pear for FRUIT), whereas others are atypical category members (e.g., raisin, melon, grapefruit ). Children are more likely to use one or more strategies and to remember more words when recalling the more familiar and more categorically integrated sets of typical items than atypical items (e.g., Best, 1993 ; Schneider, 1986 ; Schwenck, Bjorklund, & Schneider, 2007 ). In general, children’s world knowledge increases with age, and as it does their strategic performance on a host of tasks increases with it.

Metacognition refers to one’s knowledge of one’s cognitive abilities. For each type of cognition there is a corresponding type of metacognition—for example, meta-attention, metamemory, and metalinguistics. Both cognition and metacognition increase with age and are usually (but not always) correlated with one another ( Schneider & Lockl, 2002 ). When problem solving is governed by the use of goal-directed strategies, task performance is considerably enhanced by knowing how well one is doing (i.e., monitoring task performance, procedural metacognition ) and by assessing which strategies will be most effective and when (i.e., declarative metacognition ) ( Schneider & Lockl, 2002 ). This has been found for a host of cognitive domains, including scientific reasoning (e.g., Kuhn et al., 1988 ), arithmetic (e.g., Carr & Jessup, 1995 ), attention (e.g., Miller & Weiss, 1981 ), and memory (e.g., DeMarie et al., 2004 ), among others, although positive relations between cognitive and metacognitive performance are often not found until late childhood (e.g., Hasselhorn, 1990 ; Lange et al., 1990 ), unless simple tasks that involve metamemory questions that are highly related to task performance are used ( Schneider & Sodian, 1988 ). When children are provided metacognitive training, their use of strategies tends to increase, particularly for older children (e.g., Ghatala et al., 1986 ; Ringel & Springer, 1980 ).

The relationship between cognitive performance, strategies, and metacognition is a multidirectional one (e.g., Schneider & Bjorklund, 1998 ). Children’s tendency to use and be aware of the availability and effectiveness of cognitive strategies is related to their level of conceptual development, executive functioning, and familiarity with the materials and tasks. Even very young children use strategies effectively in some situations, but will fail to use them, or use them and fail to enhance task’s performance, in other situations. The latter phenomenon has been referred to as utilization deficiency ( Miller, 1990 ) and has been found for a variety of strategies, including selective attention (e.g., DeMarie-Dreblow & Miller, 1988 ), memory (e.g., Bjorklund et al., 1994 ), reading (e.g., Gaultney, 1995 ), and analogical reasoning (e.g., Muir-Broaddus, 1995 ), among many others. Children who do not use a strategy spontaneously can often be trained to do so, often with increases in task performance (e.g., Flavell, 1970 ; Gelman, 1969 ; see Harnishfeger & Bjorklund, 1990 , for review).

Like most aspects of cognitive development, it is not possible to specify a time in development when children are astrategic and a time when they become strategic. A child who fails to use a strategy on one task may do so given a slightly different context or set of instructions, or a different set of materials. Children’s cognitive functioning is influenced by a host of both endogenous and exogenous factors, and, depending on the amount and type of support children receive for performing a given task, they may display substantial cognitive competence or incompetence. Despite this variability, one can conclude with confidence that children’s problem solving becomes increasingly strategic with age; they have a broad selection of strategies to choose from, and they become more effective with age in their selection and monitoring of problem-solving strategies.

Cognitive Development Is Constructed Within a Social Context

Humans are a social species, and human development can be properly understood only when the influence of social relations and the broader social/cultural environment are considered. Development always occurs within a social context, culturally shaped and historically conditioned, although the specific details of a child’s social environment can vary widely.

This is no less true of cognitive development as it is of social and emotional development. Although the great bulk of cognitive-development research has been conducted in laboratories or quiet rooms in children’s schools, and the topics of study have often been divorced from children’s everyday lives, children’s developing cognitive skills are used to solve everyday problems, and they “learn” to think by interacting with their social environment (see Gauvain, Beebe, & Zhao, 2011 ; Cole, 2006 ; Rogoff, 2003 ; Vygotsky, 1978 ; see the chapter by Gauvain in this volume 2). Acquiring a full understanding of cognitive development requires examining both distal (e.g., evolutionary) and proximal, or immediate (e.g., role of parents, peers, neuronal development) influences. Included in both the distal and the proximal levels of causation is the social environment. First, the opportunities and tools that a culture provides will obviously have an immediate impact on children’s thinking (e.g., learning to read). But many of these tools are products of the sociohistorical context in which a culture developed. The traditions, tools, and languages spoken have deep cultural roots that can influence a child’s intellectual development.

Cultural Contexts for Learning

In all cultures, parents, teachers, siblings, and peers influence children’s cognitive development both by serving as a source of problems (much of humans’ considerable intelligence is used to deal with conspecifics) and by guiding their problem solving. Vygotsky’s (1978) concept of parents and other more cognitively sophisticated people working with children in the zone of proximal development is well known to developmental psychologists and reflects the routine interactions parents and others have with children that fosters cognitive change. Learning is most apt to occur when parents provide children with the appropriate degree of scaffolding ( Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976 ), giving neither too little nor too much help with a particular problem. There are cultural and individual differences in the assistance adults give children in solving daily problems, and children learn much about “how to think,” not through explicit teaching by adults, but through what Rogoff (1998 ; Rogoff et al., 1993 ) calls guided participation , “the process and system of involvement of individuals with others, as they communicate and engage in shared activities” ( Rogoff et al., 1993 , p. 6).

Different cultures (and subcultures) construct different experiences for their children, and this has consequences for both what and how children learn. For example, children living in traditional societies are more attentive to what adults do as opposed to what adults say to them, and thus develop a keener ability to learn through observation than children from schooled societies (e.g., Mejia-Arauz, Rogoff, & Paradise, 2005 ; Morelli, Rogoff, & Angelillo, 2003 ). In one study, children of traditional Mexican heritage whose mothers had only basic schooling (on average, a seventh-grade education) and children of Mexican or European background whose mothers had a high-school education or more observed a woman creating origami figures ( Mejia-Arauz et al., 2005 ). When they were later asked to make their own figures, children of traditional Mexican heritage were less likely to request information from the “Origami Lady” than children of the more educated mothers. These findings are consistent with the observations that these “traditional” children pay more attention to the actions of adults and learn more through observation, rather than seeking instructions from adults or learning through verbal instructions (see Cole, 2006 ).

Other research suggests that general cultural perspectives influence some basic aspects of cognitive development. For example, East Asian cultures are proposed to promote a holistic approach to reasoning, whereas Western cultures are hypothesized to promote a more analytic style ( Nisbett et al., 2001 ). Such differences have been hypothesized to affect how children learn to allocate their attention, with East Asians socialized to divide their attention between objects and events in their environments and Westerners socialized to focus their attention on key features of objects ( Duffy & Kitayama, 2007 ). For example, when Japanese and American adults were shown a picture of a box with a line drawn in it and then asked to draw a line in a larger box that is either of the same absolute length or the same relative length as the line in the smaller box, robust cultural differences were found: Japanese adults were more accurate performing the relative task, whereas American adults were more accurate performing the absolute task ( Kitayama et al., 2003 ). This cultural pattern is found as early as age 6 ( Duffy et al., 2009 ; Vasilyeva, Duffy, & Huttenlocher, 2007 ); however, both American and Japanese 4- and 5-year-olds made more errors on the absolute task ( Duffy et al., 2009 ), suggesting that young children from both cultures initially have an easier time dealing with relative information, but, depending on cultural practices, sometime around 6 years of age, some children (in this case, Americans) become socialized to focus their attention, whereas others (in this case, Japanese) become socialized to divide their attention.

Some everyday practices of parents in Western culture serve to prepare their children for life in a schooled and literate society. For example, children attending Western schools are frequently asked questions for which adults already know the answers. They also are asked to learn and discuss things that have no immediate relevance—knowledge for knowledge’s sake. We take such practices for granted, but such context-independent learning is foreign to many cultures, and we are mostly unaware of how evolutionarily novel formal education practices are for our species. Despite the novelty of such practices, children do not enter school totally unprepared for such experiences. For example, Western parents of young children frequently prompt them to name objects or to recall recent events (e.g., “What did we do today? Who did we see? Did you cry? Yes? Who else was there?”) ( Gauvain, 2001 ; Rogoff, 1990 ). In addition to preparing children for the type of discourse they will experience in school, such shared remembering helps children learn how to remember and communicate memories; learn about themselves, which contributes to the development of the self-concept; learn about their own social and cultural history; and learn what is worth remembering. It also promotes social solidarity ( Gauvain, 2001 ).

Sociohistorical Influences

According to Vygotsky (1978) , cultures provide the tools of intellectual adaptation that children learn to use to think and solve problems. These tools include such things as computers, alphabets, abacuses, books, number systems, music, art, and other cultural inventions specifically designed to foster learning and communication, but also more implicit devices that can influence thinking, such as the language spoken and how it represents concepts. Concerning language, something as simple as how a language expresses its numbers can affect important aspects of quantitative development. For instance, we saw earlier that differences in the time it takes to articulate the digit words (one, two, three, etc.) influences digit span (e.g., Geary et al., 1993 ). Differences in how languages name number words have also been shown to be related to aspects of mathematical development. For example, the first 10 digit words have to be memorized in all languages (e.g., one, two, three; eins, zwei, drei ; yee, uhr, shan , in English, German, and Chinese, respectively), but once the teen decade is reached languages differ in terms of how much new vocabulary must be learned and the extent to which one uses the base-10 number system for enunciating number words. For instance, in Chinese numbers from 11 to 19 follow a simple rule: the Chinese word for 10 is shi and the numbers 11 through 19 are made by taking shi and adding the appropriate digit (11 = shi yee , or “ten one”; 12 = shi uhr , or “ten two”; 13 = shi shan , or “ten three,” and so on). In contrast, many of the words denoting the numbers from 11 to 19 in English are arbitrary (e.g., eleven, twelve, thirteen, fifteen), and even for “regular” numbers, the decade name is stated second (nine teen ), unlike numbers beginning with twenty, in which the decade term is stated first (e.g., twenty-one; thirty-two). As a result of these differences, Chinese children learn to count to 20 before English-speaking children, although there are no cultural differences in learning to count to 10 and in counting to 100 once children learn to count to 20 ( Miller et al., 1995 ). Similarly, German children have difficulty when learning how to convert spoken numbers to numerals, because, in German, the decade term follows the unit term (for instance, 42 is said zweiundvierzig , or “two-and-forty”); as a result they frequently invert the order of the numerals (for example, writing “24” instead of “42”) ( Zuber et al., 2009 ).

Other cultures have a limited way of expressing quantities. For instance, the Amazonia languages of the Pirahã and Mundurukú have no number words for quantities larger than five ( Gordon, 2004 ; Pica et al., 2004 ). Adults from these cultures can perform tasks involving small quantities easily, but their performance deteriorates rapidly when attempting tasks with larger quantities. In contrast, Pirahã children who learn Portuguese are able to perform arithmetic calculations with larger quantities, bolstering the interpretation that it is the language’s ability to represent numbers that is responsible for the pattern of numerical thinking in these cultures ( Gordon, 2004 ).

Natural selection has provided humans with a unique nervous system that develops in a species-typical way in all but the most deprived environments. As such, it is easy to think of cognitive development as something that “just happens,” pretty much the same way for children worldwide. Yet intelligence is also rooted in culture, and understanding how cultural practices and technological tools influence cognitive development helps us better comprehend the process of development and our role as adults in fostering that process. Cultural “explanations” for cognitive development do not provide alternative interpretations to those based on biology (e.g., neurological factors) or specific experience (e.g., how mothers talk to their babies); rather, cognitive development must be seen as the result of interacting factors, with the social environment being a critical ingredient in this mix.

Cognitive Development: A Mature and Developing Science

Nearly 20 years ago, a colleague specializing in social development asked me what had happened to cognitive development. It used to “lead the field,” he said, providing a framework for researchers in other areas of development, but now it seemed fragmented. The field was once united behind Piaget’s theory (or united in trying to refute Piaget’s theory), and this provided a framework nearly all psychologists could use to interpret children’s behavior and development. Information-processing approaches replaced Piaget’s account as the dominant metaphor for development, but shortcomings left the field without an overarching metatheory ( Bjorklund, 1997 ).

In the years since I had this conversation, I believe the field of cognitive development has gotten back on track. In place of the theoretical hegemony afforded by Piagetian or information-processing approaches, cognitive developmentalists adopted some principles, many of them based in developmental biology, that served to unify the field. Advances in brain research make it necessary for cognitive developmentalists to provide accounts that are at least not contradictory to what is known about how the brain works and develops (e.g., Lenroot & Giedd, 2007 ; Nelson, Thomas, & de Haan, 2006 ), and in some cases that are usefully informed by neuroscience, as in the case of executive function (e.g., Zelazo et al., 2008 ); new research in genetics points to the complex and bidirectional interactions between genes, environment, and development (e.g., Caspi et al., 2007 ; Rutter, 2007 ); and research and theory in evolutionary developmental biology and psychology (e.g., Bjorklund & Pellegrini, 2002 ; Gardiner & Bjorklund, 2009 ; Ploeger, van der Maas, & Rajimakers, 2008 ; West-Eberhard, 2003 ) make it clear that our ancestors also developed and that an appreciation of human phylogeny can help us acquire a better understanding of human ontogeny without the taint of genetic determinism that was once associated with evolutionary accounts of human behavior. Some researchers are fully aware of these influences on their science, whereas for others they serve as barely noticed background, but influence their thinking nonetheless.

Cognitive developmentalists are not of one mind about development, but they never have been, even when Piaget reigned. Contemporary cognitive-developmental science recognizes the significance of both lower-level and higher-level processes to children’s thinking, that the ontogeny of cognition has both biological and social origins, and that individual differences in cognition and its development are often associated with normative, age-related changes in thought. In brief, cognitive development happens at a variety of levels, and developmental scientists are becoming increasingly aware that we need to be cognizant of this and the interactions among the various levels to produce a true developmental science.

Questions for Future Research

How are patterns of neurological and behavioral/cognitive development coordinated and related?

How does the implicit knowledge/cognition of the infant and young child relate to the subsequent development of explicit knowledge/cognition?

Why do some forms of thinking come easily to children and others do not?

How do children gain intentional control over their thinking and problem solving?

What is the nature of representational change over infancy and childhood?

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115 Cognitive Development Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Cognitive development is a fascinating field of study that explores how our minds develop and change over time. It encompasses various aspects such as perception, memory, problem-solving, creativity, and language acquisition. When writing an essay on cognitive development, it is crucial to choose a topic that interests you and allows for in-depth analysis. To help you get started, here are 115 cognitive development essay topic ideas and examples:

The role of nature vs. nurture in cognitive development.

The impact of early childhood experiences on cognitive development.

The effects of bilingualism on cognitive abilities.

Piaget's stages of cognitive development: A critical analysis.

The role of play in fostering cognitive development.

The influence of technology on cognitive development in children.

The development of theory of mind in preschoolers.

The relationship between memory and cognitive development.

Strategies for improving cognitive development in infants.

The impact of nutrition on cognitive development in early childhood.

The effects of poverty on cognitive development.

The development of executive functions in adolescence.

The role of sleep in cognitive development.

The impact of music on cognitive abilities.

The effects of meditation on cognitive development.

The development of metacognition in children.

The influence of social media on cognitive abilities.

The effects of physical exercise on cognitive development.

The role of parenting styles in cognitive development.

The impact of socioeconomic status on cognitive abilities.

The development of attention in infants.

The effects of screen time on cognitive development in youth.

The role of pretend play in cognitive development.

The influence of cultural factors on cognitive abilities.

The development of moral reasoning in children.

The effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance.

The role of nutrition in cognitive decline in older adults.

The impact of educational programs on cognitive development.

The development of object permanence in infants.

The effects of video games on cognitive abilities.

The influence of peer relationships on cognitive development.

The role of creativity in cognitive abilities.

The effects of stress on cognitive performance.

The development of perspective-taking in children.

The impact of technology on cognitive decline in older adults.

The relationship between self-esteem and cognitive abilities.

The effects of trauma on cognitive development.

The role of language acquisition in cognitive development.

The influence of cultural biases on cognitive abilities.

The development of problem-solving skills in children.

The effects of social isolation on cognitive performance.

The impact of sleep disorders on cognitive abilities.

The role of gender stereotypes in cognitive development.

The effects of nutrition on cognitive decline in older adults.

The development of spatial reasoning in children.

The influence of socioeconomic disparities on cognitive abilities.

The effects of video game violence on cognitive development.

The role of creativity in overcoming cognitive biases.

The impact of chronic illness on cognitive performance.

The development of emotional intelligence in children.

The effects of substance abuse on cognitive abilities.

The influence of cultural diversity on cognitive development.

The role of technology in enhancing cognitive abilities.

The effects of trauma on cognitive decline in older adults.

The development of logical reasoning in children.

The impact of bilingual education on cognitive abilities.

The relationship between motivation and cognitive performance.

The effects of socioeconomic disparities on cognitive decline.

The role of storytelling in cognitive development.

The influence of cultural values on cognitive abilities.

The development of critical thinking skills in children.

The effects of social media addiction on cognitive abilities.

The impact of chronic stress on cognitive performance.

The role of gender identity in cognitive development.

The effects of physical health on cognitive decline in older adults.

The development of mathematical reasoning in children.

The influence of cultural stereotypes on cognitive abilities.

The effects of virtual reality on cognitive development.

The role of mindfulness in enhancing cognitive abilities.

The impact of traumatic brain injury on cognitive performance.

The development of moral judgment in children.

The effects of socioeconomic disparities on cognitive abilities.

The relationship between creativity and cognitive performance.

The effects of chronic illness on cognitive decline.

The role of technology in promoting cognitive development.

The influence of cultural traditions on cognitive abilities.

The development of divergent thinking in children.

The effects of social media on cognitive abilities.

The impact of chronic sleep deprivation on cognitive performance.

The effects of physical exercise on cognitive decline in older adults.

The development of scientific reasoning in children.

The influence of cultural norms on cognitive abilities.

The effects of virtual reality gaming on cognitive development.

The role of meditation in improving cognitive abilities.

The impact of neurodegenerative diseases on cognitive performance.

The development of empathy in children.

The relationship between curiosity and cognitive performance.

The effects of chronic stress on cognitive abilities.

The role of gender roles in cognitive development.

The influence of cultural practices on cognitive abilities.

The development of decision-making skills in children.

The effects of social media on cognitive decline in older adults.

The role of technology in shaping cognitive development.

The influence of cultural beliefs on cognitive abilities.

The effects of virtual reality therapy on cognitive development.

The development of emotional regulation in children.

The effects of chronic sleep deprivation on cognitive decline.

The impact of physical health on cognitive performance.

The development of scientific inquiry skills in children.

The effects of video game addiction on cognitive development.

The role of mindfulness in improving cognitive abilities.

The impact of traumatic brain injury on cognitive decline.

The development of social cognition in children.

These essay topic ideas offer a wide range of possibilities for exploring different aspects of cognitive development. Remember to choose a topic that aligns with your interests and allows for in-depth analysis. Have fun exploring the fascinating world of cognitive development!

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What Is Cognitive Psychology?

The Science of How We Think

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Steven Gans, MD is board-certified in psychiatry and is an active supervisor, teacher, and mentor at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Topics in Cognitive Psychology

• Current Research
• Cognitive Approach in Practice

Careers in Cognitive Psychology

How cognitive psychology differs from other branches of psychology, frequently asked questions.

Cognitive psychology involves the study of internal mental processes—all of the workings inside your brain, including perception, thinking, memory, attention, language, problem-solving, and learning.

Cognitive psychology--the study of how people think and process information--helps researchers understand the human brain. It also allows psychologists to help people deal with psychological difficulties.

This article discusses what cognitive psychology is, the history of this field, and current directions for research. It also covers some of the practical applications for cognitive psychology research and related career options you might consider.

Findings from cognitive psychology help us understand how people think, including how they acquire and store memories. By knowing more about how these processes work, psychologists can develop new ways of helping people with cognitive problems.

Cognitive psychologists explore a wide variety of topics related to thinking processes. Some of these include: 

• Attention --our ability to process information in the environment while tuning out irrelevant details
• Choice-based behavior --actions driven by a choice among other possibilities
• Decision-making
• Information processing
• Language acquisition --how we learn to read, write, and express ourselves
• Problem-solving
• Speech perception -how we process what others are saying
• Visual perception --how we see the physical world around us

History of Cognitive Psychology

Although it is a relatively young branch of psychology , it has quickly grown to become one of the most popular subfields. Cognitive psychology grew into prominence between the 1950s and 1970s.

Prior to this time, behaviorism was the dominant perspective in psychology. This theory holds that we learn all our behaviors from interacting with our environment. It focuses strictly on observable behavior, not thought and emotion. Then, researchers became more interested in the internal processes that affect behavior instead of just the behavior itself. 

This shift is often referred to as the cognitive revolution in psychology. During this time, a great deal of research on topics including memory, attention, and language acquisition began to emerge. 

In 1967, the psychologist Ulric Neisser introduced the term cognitive psychology, which he defined as the study of the processes behind the perception, transformation, storage, and recovery of information.

Cognitive psychology became more prominent after the 1950s as a result of the cognitive revolution.

Current Research in Cognitive Psychology

The field of cognitive psychology is both broad and diverse. It touches on many aspects of daily life. There are numerous practical applications for this research, such as providing help coping with memory disorders, making better decisions , recovering from brain injury, treating learning disorders, and structuring educational curricula to enhance learning.

Current research on cognitive psychology helps play a role in how professionals approach the treatment of mental illness, traumatic brain injury, and degenerative brain diseases.

Thanks to the work of cognitive psychologists, we can better pinpoint ways to measure human intellectual abilities, develop new strategies to combat memory problems, and decode the workings of the human brain—all of which ultimately have a powerful impact on how we treat cognitive disorders.

The field of cognitive psychology is a rapidly growing area that continues to add to our understanding of the many influences that mental processes have on our health and daily lives.

From understanding how cognitive processes change as a child develops to looking at how the brain transforms sensory inputs into perceptions, cognitive psychology has helped us gain a deeper and richer understanding of the many mental events that contribute to our daily existence and overall well-being.

The Cognitive Approach in Practice

In addition to adding to our understanding of how the human mind works, the field of cognitive psychology has also had an impact on approaches to mental health. Before the 1970s, many mental health treatments were focused more on psychoanalytic , behavioral , and humanistic approaches.

The so-called "cognitive revolution" put a greater emphasis on understanding the way people process information and how thinking patterns might contribute to psychological distress. Thanks to research in this area, new approaches to treatment were developed to help treat depression, anxiety, phobias, and other psychological disorders .

Cognitive behavioral therapy and rational emotive behavior therapy are two methods in which clients and therapists focus on the underlying cognitions, or thoughts, that contribute to psychological distress.

What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an approach that helps clients identify irrational beliefs and other cognitive distortions that are in conflict with reality and then aid them in replacing such thoughts with more realistic, healthy beliefs.

If you are experiencing symptoms of a psychological disorder that would benefit from the use of cognitive approaches, you might see a psychologist who has specific training in these cognitive treatment methods.

These professionals frequently go by titles other than cognitive psychologists, such as psychiatrists, clinical psychologists , or counseling psychologists , but many of the strategies they use are rooted in the cognitive tradition.

Many cognitive psychologists specialize in research with universities or government agencies. Others take a clinical focus and work directly with people who are experiencing challenges related to mental processes. They work in hospitals, mental health clinics, and private practices.

Research psychologists in this area often concentrate on a particular topic, such as memory. Others work directly on health concerns related to cognition, such as degenerative brain disorders and brain injuries.

Treatments rooted in cognitive research focus on helping people replace negative thought patterns with more positive, realistic ones. With the help of cognitive psychologists, people are often able to find ways to cope and even overcome such difficulties.

Reasons to Consult a Cognitive Psychologist

• Alzheimer's disease, dementia, or memory loss
• Brain trauma treatment
• Cognitive therapy for a mental health condition
• Interventions for learning disabilities
• Perceptual or sensory issues
• Therapy for a speech or language disorder

Whereas behavioral and some other realms of psychology focus on actions--which are external and observable--cognitive psychology is instead concerned with the thought processes behind the behavior. Cognitive psychologists see the mind as if it were a computer, taking in and processing information, and seek to understand the various factors involved.

A Word From Verywell

Cognitive psychology plays an important role in understanding the processes of memory, attention, and learning. It can also provide insights into cognitive conditions that may affect how people function.

Being diagnosed with a brain or cognitive health problem can be daunting, but it is important to remember that you are not alone. Together with a healthcare provider, you can come up with an effective treatment plan to help address brain health and cognitive problems.

Your treatment may involve consulting with a cognitive psychologist who has a background in the specific area of concern that you are facing, or you may be referred to another mental health professional that has training and experience with your particular condition.

Ulric Neisser is considered the founder of cognitive psychology. He was the first to introduce the term and to define the field of cognitive psychology. His primary interests were in the areas of perception and memory, but he suggested that all aspects of human thought and behavior were relevant to the study of cognition.

A cognitive map refers to a mental representation of an environment. Such maps can be formed through observation as well as through trial and error. These cognitive maps allow people to orient themselves in their environment.

While they share some similarities, there are some important differences between cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology. While cognitive psychology focuses on thinking processes, cognitive neuroscience is focused on finding connections between thinking and specific brain activity. Cognitive neuroscience also looks at the underlying biology that influences how information is processed.

Cognitive psychology is a form of experimental psychology. Cognitive psychologists use experimental methods to study the internal mental processes that play a role in behavior.

Sternberg RJ, Sternberg K. Cognitive Psychology . Wadsworth/Cengage Learning. 

Krapfl JE. Behaviorism and society . Behav Anal. 2016;39(1):123-9. doi:10.1007/s40614-016-0063-8

Cutting JE. Ulric Neisser (1928-2012) . Am Psychol . 2012;67(6):492. doi:10.1037/a0029351

Ruggiero GM, Spada MM, Caselli G, Sassaroli S. A historical and theoretical review of cognitive behavioral therapies: from structural self-knowledge to functional processes .  J Ration Emot Cogn Behav Ther . 2018;36(4):378-403. doi:10.1007/s10942-018-0292-8

Parvin P. Ulric Neisser, cognitive psychology pioneer, dies . Emory News Center.

APA Dictionary of Psychology. Cognitive map . American Psychological Association.

Forstmann BU, Wagenmakers EJ, Eichele T, Brown S, Serences JT. Reciprocal relations between cognitive neuroscience and formal cognitive models: opposites attract? . Trends Cogn Sci . 2011;15(6):272-279. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2011.04.002

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

124 Cognitive Development Essay Topics

🏆 best essay topics on cognitive development, ✍️ cognitive development essay topics for college, 🎓 most interesting cognitive development research titles, 💡 simple cognitive development essay ideas, 📌 easy cognitive development essay topics, ❓ questions about cognitive development.

• Piaget Theory of Cognitive Development
• Language and Child’s Cognitive Development
• Piaget’s vs. Vygotsky’s Cognitive Development Theories
• Impacts of Technology on Cognitive Development of Children and Adolescents
• Cognitive Development: Case Study on Student
• Piaget vs. Vygotsky: Theory of Cognitive Development
• Sex Education and Egocentrism: Cognitive Development
• Cognitive Development: Piaget’s Conservation Tasks The conservation tasks, which are actively presented in the video “A typical child on Piaget’s conservation tasks”, have a reflection and support of Piaget’s theory.
• Children Cognitive Development This paper will discuss the concrete operations stage of cognitive development by identifying the various crises that occur during this stage.
• Reading Interventions and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood Education Reading entails the use of touch or sight to take in symbols, signs, or letters and derive meaning from the signs and symbols.
• Cognitive & Emotional Development in Children In their study, Frick et al. empirically determined that maternal sensitivity and sustained attention are important predictors of emotional development in newborns.
• Cognitive Stages of Infant Development Cognitive development is the evolution of all the mental processes by which the individual receives information about the world around him.
• Cognitive Development from Modern Theoretical Perspective The present paper is devoted to the domain of human cognitive development and the way in which it is portrayed by the modern theory in the field.
• Bilingualism Effects on Cognitive Development Bilingualism enhances the cognitive processes and intellectual development of students according to Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s developmental theories.
• Cognitive Development Theories and Their Evolution This paper analysis the cognitive development concept with a lot of focus on the various theories, their evolution, and the associated developmental stages.
• Jean Piaget’s Developmental-Cognitive Position Jean Piaget’s Developmental-Cognitive Theory of Learning focuses on the observation and examination of a child’s cognitive development and its stages.
• Cognitive Changes in Human Development Cognitive development is part of human development and refers to the abilities of individuals to acquire thinking, problem-solving, concept understanding.
• Psychology: A Child’s Cognitive Development The child’s development process focuses on the child’s memory, development, problem-solving skill development, thoughts, and language development, and social and metacognition.
• Domain of the Cognitive Development This paper discusses the domain of cognitive development, including its definition, the overview of the most influential theories, and the suggestions for future research on the topic.
• Cognitive Development: Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s Theories When it comes to explaining the cognitive development processes, Piaget’s stage theory and Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of cognitive development are two major frameworks.
• Cognitive Development: Future Study’ Basis This paper is a basis for future study that will describe three theories that address the domain and the reasons for choosing this domain.
• Cognitive Development Theories by Vygotsky and Piaget Both cognitive development theories of Piaget and Vygotsky believe that learning is a continuous process, starting from birth until the death of a person.
• Cognitive Development: Piaget and Vygotsky In this paper, the discussion on what actions might be vital for me as a teacher to undertake to enhance the pupils’ development will be provided.
• Cognitive Development During the Middle Childhood Years Cognitive development is the gradual development of a child’s intelligence. At various stages, cognitive impairment, diseases at an early age, psychosocial and other factors can occur.
• Student Development Concept: Cognitive Development Researches carried out on student cognitive development. Various theories have been advanced by different scholars mostly in the field of psychology.
• Vygostsky’s Cultural Theory of Cognitive Development For Vygotsky, a central problem was to understand how infants who are initially impulsive, responding directly to environmental stimulation, gain control over interactions with their environments.
• Human Cognitive Development and Group Decision Making Process A meeting had been called among members of my immediate family to discuss how to take care of my ailing mother.
• Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development Children’s developmental milestones, according to Piaget, create effective conditions for meeting the psychological, social, and emotional needs of children.
• Cognitive Development and Cognitive Neuroscience Cognitive development investigates children’s development in various perspectives by utilizing cognitive neuroscience, a prominent step towards the understanding of human nature.
• Cognitive Development: Scholarly Sources Analysis This paper focuses on researching cognitive development and neuroscience questions by investigating and summarising five scholarly articles.
• Cognitive Development and Children’s Health The review of four articles in this paper shows that cognitive development may be predetermined by health-related problems like epilepsy, as well as extrinsic factors.
• Early Cognitive Development: Learning Experience The term knowledge is defined as the process through which people acquire knowledge and behavior. Skills and characteristics that people exhibit are acquired through learning.
• Puberty and Moral and Cognitive Development The gap between the onset of puberty and the process of cognitive maturation has widened over the years, which has become the reason for alarm among the scholars in several fields.
• Instruction Development for Students with Cognitive Disability The article describes several evidence-based practices that have been used over the years in trying to build more effective educational system for students with cognitive disability.
• Childhood Beauty Pageants and the High Risks for Negative Physical and Cognitive Development in Children
• The Cognitive Development Theories of Piaget and Bruner
• Adolescence: Physical and Cognitive Development
• Early Childcare and Cognitive Development: Evidence From an Assignment Lottery
• Childhood Play Behavior and Cognitive Development
• School Violence: The Mental Health, Social Cognitive Development
• Aging and Cognitive Development: Maintaining Mental Agility
• Factors Affecting Cognitive Development
• Cognitive Development: Multiple Intelligences
• Cognitive Development by Piaget and Vygotsky
• Adolescent Cognitive Development After Trauma
• Breastfeeding and Cognitive Development in the First 2 Years of Life
• Schema Theory and the Theory of Cognitive Development
• School Starting Age and Cognitive Development
• Vygotsky’s Cognitive Development Theory
• Mother’s Time Allocation, Child Care and Child Cognitive Development
• Cognitive Development: Information Processing
• Physical and Cognitive Development in Late Adulthood
• Reports About Cognitive Development in Adolescence
• Relation Between Nutrition and Child Cognitive Development
• Child Cognitive Development and Nutrition
• Classical Music and Cognitive Development
• Early Childhood Cognitive Development
• Social Learning Theory, Cognitive Development Theory
• What Are the Cognitive Development of the First Two Years
• Cognitive Development Through Play in Preschoolers
• Jean Piaget and the Theory of Cognitive Development
• How Does Neglect During Infancy Affect Cognitive Development
• Social, Emotional, and Cognitive Development
• Cognitive Development Activities for Children at Summer Camp
• Play Therapy and Cognitive Development in Children
• Piaget Separated Cognitive Development Into Four Stages
• The Information Processing Theory of Cognitive Development
• Risks for Child Cognitive Development in Rural Contexts
• The Five Stages That Can Influence Cognitive Development in Humans
• Cognitive Development and Psychosocial Development
• Childhood Cognitive Development and Exercise
• Language and Emotion: Cognitive Development or Social Construction
• Physical and Cognitive Development in Adolescence Assignment
• Insight for the Cognitive Development
• Comparing Age and Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
• Attachment Classifications and Cognitive Development
• Critically Analyse Two Theoretical Approaches to Cognitive Development
• Cognitive Rehabilitation and Cognitive Development
• Cognitive Development and Emotional Functioning
• Physical and Cognitive Development of Infants
• Children From Poor Families: Cognitive Development and Other
• Adolescent Cognitive Development for Parents
• The Child Cognitive Development Psychology
• Cognitive Development and Erikson’s Stages of Human
• Vestibular Activity and Cognitive Development in Children: Perspectives
• How Physical Activity Impacts Cognitive Development
• Syllogistic Reasoning and Cognitive Development
• Parenting Behaviors, and Children’s Cognitive Development in Low Income and Minority Families
• Cognitive Development and Chess Topics
• Musical Training Affects Cognitive Development
• Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory: Strengths and Weaknesses
• The Link Between Infant Toys and Their Implications on Cognitive Development
• Bilingualism and Cognitive Development on Children
• What Is Cognitive Development in Early Adulthood?
• How Does Hyperactivity Disorder Influence Cognitive Development?
• What Is Cognitive Development Theory?
• What Do Erikson and Maslow Say About Cognitive Development in Late Adulthood?
• How Does Cognitive Development Theory Affect Diverse Learners?
• How Did Piaget Test Kids’ Cognitive Development?
• How Does Environment Affect Cognitive Development in Adulthood?
• What Are the Similarities Between the Cognitive Development of Infants and Toddlers?
• How Does Gender Affect Cognitive Development?
• How Does Cognitive Development Affect Social Development?
• Is Cognitive Development the Same as Intellectual Development?
• How Does Cerebral Palsy Affect Cognitive Development?
• How Do Toys Help Cognitive Development?
• What Age Is Cognitive Development Complete?
• What Does Cognitive Development Mean in Psychology?
• How Does Bilingualism Affect the Cognitive Development of a Child?
• What Is the Relationship Between Cognitive and Moral Development in Adolescence?
• How Is Physical Development Related to Cognitive Development?
• Can Cognitive Development Be Trained?
• How Is Cognitive Development Connected to Childhood Mental Health?
• How Does Socioeconomic Status Affect Cognitive Development?
• How Do Board Games Help Cognitive Development?
• How Does Music Help Cognitive Development?
• What Is Delayed Cognitive Development?
• Is Cooperative Learning Used in Cognitive Development?
• How Does Social Interaction Affect Cognitive Development?
• What Is the Information Processing Theory of Cognitive Development?
• How Does Early Cognitive Development Affect Adult Learning?
• How Does Each Part of the Brain Affect Cognitive Development?
• When Did Piaget Publish His Theory of Cognitive Development?

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StudyCorgi . "124 Cognitive Development Essay Topics." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/cognitive-development-essay-topics/.

StudyCorgi . 2021. "124 Cognitive Development Essay Topics." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/cognitive-development-essay-topics/.

These essay examples and topics on Cognitive Development were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on December 27, 2023 .

Home — Essay Samples — Psychology — Developmental Psychology — Cognitive Development

Essays on Cognitive Development

Cognitive development is a cornerstone of psychological study, encompassing how we learn, think, and understand the world around us from childhood through adulthood. This fascinating field offers endless material for essays, particularly for students keen on unraveling the complexities of human intelligence and learning processes. A cognitive development essay provides a platform to delve into theories, research findings, and practical applications, enriching our understanding of the mind's evolution over time.

Delving into Cognitive Development Theories

Central to any cognitive development essay are the theories that have shaped our understanding of mental processes. Jean Piaget's stage theory, Lev Vygotsky's sociocultural perspective, and information processing theory are foundational concepts that offer diverse lenses through which to examine cognitive growth. Essays might explore these theories in depth, compare and contrast them, or apply them to real-world educational scenarios.

Topics for a Cognitive Development Essay

• Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development: Analyze the stages of cognitive development as proposed by Piaget , discussing how children progress from sensory-motor actions to complex abstract thinking.
• Vygotsky's Social Interaction Influence: Explore Vygotsky's idea that cognitive development is significantly influenced by social interactions and cultural context.
• Information Processing in Children: Examine how children process information differently at various developmental stages, focusing on memory, attention, and problem-solving skills.
• The Role of Play in Cognitive Development: Discuss the importance of play in developing cognitive abilities, referencing both historical and contemporary research.
• Neuroscience and Cognitive Development: Consider the latest neuroscience research and its implications for understanding cognitive development, including brain plasticity and critical periods.

Benefits of Using Cognitive Development Essay Samples

Essay samples on cognitive development can be invaluable resources for students, offering:

• A Framework for Structuring Essays: Samples provide a clear model for organizing thoughts, presenting arguments, and concluding findings.
• Diverse Perspectives and Ideas: By reviewing different essays, students can discover unique angles and approaches to the topic.
• Evidence and Citation Examples: Samples demonstrate how to effectively incorporate and cite academic research, a critical skill in essay writing.
• Inspiration for Original Thought: Engaging with a variety of essays encourages deeper reflection and original analysis, key for writing a standout essay.

Writing Tips for an Engaging Cognitive Development Essay

• Integrate Theory with Observation: Blend theoretical frameworks with observations or personal experiences to create a compelling narrative.
• Critically Evaluate Research: Go beyond summarizing research by critically evaluating study methodologies, findings, and implications.
• Highlight Contemporary Issues: Consider how modern technologies or societal changes impact cognitive development, offering a fresh perspective.
• Engage with Ethical Considerations: Address the ethical considerations in cognitive development research, particularly in experiments involving children.

The Significance of Cognitive Development Studies

Cognitive development essays not only reflect academic inquiry but also influence educational practices, parenting strategies, and therapeutic approaches. By understanding how cognitive processes evolve, we can foster environments that stimulate intellectual growth and accommodate the diverse needs of learners. Writing an essay on this topic challenges students to synthesize complex ideas, critique existing knowledge, and contribute to the ongoing dialogue on cognitive development.

Whether you're dissecting established theories, exploring cutting-edge research, or advocating for innovative educational policies, your cognitive development essay has the potential to illuminate the intricacies of how we learn and grow. Through careful research, thoughtful analysis, and creative thinking, students can produce essays that not only excel academically but also offer meaningful insights into the nature of human cognition.

Strengths/limitations of Social Cognition Theory

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Early Adulthood and Personality Development

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Cognitive Development Theory, Essay Example

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Contrastive analysis of cognitive development theories: J. Piaget – J. Bruner

Cognitive development focuses on different types of thinking processes (perception, memory, problem solving, imagination, logics, formation of notions) and their transformations in the process of growth. Scientists develop different theories of cognitive development; the influential theories of Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Jerome Bruner dominate the area. Their studies examine the factors invoking the emergence of intelligence, its development and measuring.  They try to determine the significance of genetics, experience, and environment for cognitive development, peculiarities of moral understanding. Nevertheless, the nature/nurture debate is still open for further investigations.

Numerous experiments and long-term observations let Jean Piaget prove that the cognitive development of a child depends straightly on the development of intellect. The core principles of his developmental theory are structures, assimilation and accommodation. “The coherent logical structures underlying children’s thought differ from those underlying adult thought” (Slee, 2002, p.142). Moreover, cognitive structures in different ages are not equivalent. The structures of infancy depend on actions, like reaching, sucking; the structures of older age attach to mental activity. Assimilation suggests the interaction of a child with the environment, while incorporating of new information takes place (like mouthing and tasting the objects). Accommodation appears when a child transforms the way of getting information about the environment, like learning that not every object tastes well (Slee, 2002, p.142). These processes lead to adaptation regarded as “equilibrium between assimilation and accommodation” (Piaget, 2001, p.6). The urge of equilibrium evokes development of cognitive abilities, which a child needs to adjust to emerging circumstances through the production of new structures. Piaget supposed that the latter form human intelligence. New experience motivates a child to create new structures to accommodate.  Thus, intelligence is regarded the system of adaptation to the environment, but not the scope of practical knowledge a man has. It is a result of accommodation and assimilation, as well as, the basis for these processes.

The theory of cognitive growth of Jerome Bruner concentrated on the role of innate mental abilities along with social and physical environment, and experiential factor (in contrast to Piaget). He underlines the crucial role of language and impact of culture constants on intelligence development, while J. Piaget ignores the external factors in analyzing the cognitive growth of children.  As Slee (2002) states, Bruner “places great emphasis on the child as a social being” and children competencies that are “greater than Piaget’s theory leads us to believe” (p.152).  The constructivist approach to teaching and learning serves the common ground for the views of J. Piaget and J. Bruner. Constructivists supposed cognition the product of mental construction, namely combination of new information and known. Both theorists explored learning as an active process, in which cognitive structure (or schema, or model) plays a major role.

Jean Piaget worked out the system of four age-related stages which a child passes in his cognitive development. The stages are characterized by specific mental operations (or systems) a child uses to interact with objects and events.

The first level of cognitive development is “sensori-motor ” (birth to 24 months), during which “the infant lack the symbolic function” (Piaget, 2000, p. 3) and intelligence employs motor activity, because in spite of multiple theories existing psychologists recognize intelligence before language. Motor abilities support further growth of intellectual abilities. By the end of the stage, a child gradually acquires the ability to represent objects. This transition bases on the concept of object permanence. It suggests that “a child recognizes the objects continue to exist even if they are no longer visible” (Weiten, 2008, p. 454).

Piaget pointed the weakness of the preoperational stage thought (2 to 7 years) by reason of being non-logical and egocentric. The stage relates to the use of symbols. Memory and the language skills are developing.

The start of the concrete operational stage (7 to 11 years) is connected with growth of cognitive operations. The ability of children “to perform operations only on images of tangible objects and actual events” stipulates the name of the period (Weiten, 2008, p. 455).

During th e formal operational stage (from 11 years), “youngsters graduate to relatively adult modes” of thinking (Weiten, 2008, p. 456).

The theory of Jerome Bruner was significantly influenced by the research of Piaget and Vygotsky. Though Bruner’s system bears some similarities with Piaget’s stage theory, they also have crucial distinctions. His theory is also based on a number of stages. Unlike Piagetian stages, associated with the level of thought, Bruner’s theory bases on the mode of human organization or the way, a child uses his mind. The system of Bruner encompasses a more narrow age limit and is applicable to infancy and childhood. The stage system of Piaget characterizes mental abilities from birth to adolescence and adulthood.

The first stage – enactive representation (birth to 18 months) – is similar to Piaget’s sensori-motor period.  Both psychologists acknowledge the leading role of physical actions for mental growth; they agree that child then learns the world through actions. The second stage is iconic representation (18 months – about 6 years) “emerges when a child is finally able to represent the world to himself by an image or spatial schema that is relatively independent of action” (Slee, 2002, p. 153). Unlike Piaget, Bruner supposed the iconic mode crucial in a child’s thinking.   The symbolic representation (about 6 years and onwards) lets a child learn the world and represent information through symbols (verbal symbols, numbers, music). Bruner compares this mode, in which “a child learns to represent the external world through symbols, established by simple generalization”, with preoperational stage of Piaget’s theory (Bruner, 1977, p.34).

The results achieved by both psychologists undoubtedly provide a strong background for classroom applications. Jean Piaget responded to the question when and how to teach, though did not explain in detail the practical application of his principles within classroom. His successors had to adjust the stage theory to the process of education. J. Bruner concentrated primarily on the practical aspects of education. These theoretical and practical approaches constitute the difference between the applications of the noted theories in the classroom.

Another distinction between the theories application is the role of teacher. In Piagetian system, teacher should be a facilitator, but not a tutor. Teacher should encourage self-motivation, apply tasks suitable for a child’s development, challenging tasks. Bruner regards the role of teacher as a supporter and guide in the process of education: simplify the task to needed level, motivate or encourage.

Both theories result in the selection of methods of methods suitable for the children of specific age. For example, in early childhood children apprehend personal example better than explanations. A teacher gives details of a game and then shows how to play like a participant. They also agree with the principle of feasibility of tasks given to children.

Bruner advises to give children models for imitation, it relates to the characteristics of the preoperational stage, during which children come to symbol use. Teacher may label the items in a classroom which they see and use.

Bruner, J. (1977). The process of education . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Piaget, J. (2001). The origin of intelligence in the child: Selected works . New York, NY: Routledge.

Piaget, J. (2000). The psychology of the child . New York, NY: Basic Books.

Slee, Ph. T . (2002). Child, adolescent and family development .  Cambridge, England: The Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge.

Weiten, W. (2008). Psychology: Themes and variations . Wadsworth, CA: Cengage Learning.

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Cognitive Development in the Teen Years

What is cognitive development.

Cognitive development means the growth of a child’s ability to think and reason. This growth happens differently from ages 6 to 12, and from ages 12 to 18.

Children ages 6 to 12 years old develop the ability to think in concrete ways. These are called concrete operations. These things are called concrete because they’re done around objects and events. This includes knowing how to:

Combine (add)

Separate (subtract or divide)

Order (alphabetize and sort)

Transform objects and actions (change things, such as 5 pennies = 1 nickel)

Ages 12 to 18 is called adolescence. Kids and teens in this age group do more complex thinking. This type of thinking is also known as formal logical operations. This includes the ability to:

Do abstract thinking. This means thinking about possibilities.

Reason from known principles. This means forming own new ideas or questions.

Consider many points of view. This means to compare or debate ideas or opinions.

Think about the process of thinking. This means being aware of the act of thought processes.

How cognitive growth happens during the teen years

From ages 12 to 18, children grow in the way they think. They move from concrete thinking to formal logical operations. It’s important to note that:

Each child moves ahead at their own rate in their ability to think in more complex ways.

Each child develops their own view of the world.

Some children may be able to use logical operations in schoolwork long before they can use them for personal problems.

When emotional issues come up, they can cause problems with a child’s ability to think in complex ways.

The ability to consider possibilities and facts may affect decision-making. This can happen in either positive or negative ways.

Types of cognitive growth through the years

A child in early adolescence:

Uses more complex thinking focused on personal decision-making in school and at home

Begins to show use of formal logical operations in schoolwork

Begins to question authority and society's standards

Begins to form and speak his or her own thoughts and views on many topics. You may hear your child talk about which sports or groups he or she prefers, what kinds of personal appearance is attractive, and what parental rules should be changed.

A child in middle adolescence:

Has some experience in using more complex thinking processes

Expands thinking to include more philosophical and futuristic concerns

Often questions more extensively

Often analyzes more extensively

Thinks about and begins to form his or her own code of ethics (for example, What do I think is right?)

Thinks about different possibilities and begins to develop own identity (for example, Who am I? )

Thinks about and begins to systematically consider possible future goals (for example, What do I want? )

Thinks about and begins to make his or her own plans

Begins to think long-term

Uses systematic thinking and begins to influence relationships with others

A child in late adolescence:

Uses complex thinking to focus on less self-centered concepts and personal decision-making

Has increased thoughts about more global concepts, such as justice, history, politics, and patriotism

Often develops idealistic views on specific topics or concerns

May debate and develop intolerance of opposing views

Begins to focus thinking on making career decisions

Begins to focus thinking on their emerging role in adult society

How you can encourage healthy cognitive growth

To help encourage positive and healthy cognitive growth in your teen, you can:

Include him or her in discussions about a variety of topics, issues, and current events.

Encourage your child to share ideas and thoughts with you.

Encourage your teen to think independently and develop his or her own ideas.

Help your child in setting goals.

Challenge him or her to think about possibilities for the future.

Compliment and praise your teen for well-thought-out decisions.

Help him or her in re-evaluating poorly made decisions.

If you have concerns about your child's cognitive development, talk with your child's healthcare provider. 

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Cognitive Development in Infancy and Toddlerhood Essay

People’s cognitive, physical, and social development is characterized by certain milestones that have been well-researched. The cognitive development of infants and toddlers is associated with the acquisition of basic knowledge and skills that enables the child to become comparatively independent during the first two years of their life. Some of the central concepts related to this matter include classical and operant conditioning, memory, attention, learning, language development, and the sensorimotor stage.

Diverse theories and approaches to the subject matter have been suggested. For instance, according to Piaget’s theory, the child develops in certain stages acquiring fundamental skills and knowledge (Paris et al., 2019).

During the first two years, the child mainly develops sensory-motor skills. This newly acquired knowledge includes reflexes, circular reactions, and scheme internalization, as well as early representational thought. Reflexes are automatic reactions to some stimuli, and the child’s active learning starts with these automatic movements and reactions. During the first four months, primary circular reactions occur, which encompasses reflexes turning into voluntary reactions, and the child is becoming more eager to engage with the body and different objects. Secondary circular reactions (8 to 12 months) involve diverse movements and interactions with objects as the child can grab things and manipulate them at a basic level. Tertiary circular reactions include more complex behavioral and cognitive patterns. For example, the child learns about gravity through throwing, pushing objects, and pouring substances.

During the second year of their life, children learn to apply different mental strategies to continue their learning and solve problems. Language development starts at this stage when children actively learn how to express certain ideas. As an illustration of this development, children learn new words and use them, participate in pretend games, learn how to take things from shelves, open doors, or even use devices. By the age of two, children are able to speak using phrases and sentences, complete rhymes, build towers, follow instructions, and so on. Vygotsky stressed that interactions with peers and adults were instrumental in helping children to go through all developmental milestones.

All these skills are acquired in the course of learning that involves children’s exposure to conditioned (sounds or instructions) and unconditioned (pin or food) stimuli that result in conditioned (learned behavior) or unconditioned (reflexes) responses. Operant conditioning is the process of learning behaviors as a response to certain consequences (Paris et al., 2019). Researchers identify two types of conditioning, reinforcement and punishment, and both types can be positive and negative. Reinforcement increases behavior, while punishment decreases certain behavioral patterns.

Memory and attention are other important concepts associated with child development. Explicit memory is linked to facts, events, concepts, and encompasses the active mental activity of a person who wants to recall something (Paris et al., 2019). Episodic memory relates to events and moments in a person’s life. A person often experiences the functioning of episodic memory when going to a place they once visited. Implicit memory is unconscious and acquired through multiple repetitions. Short-term memory refers to the ability to remember information for a short period of time, and long-term memory is the ability to hold data for a prolonged period of time. Attention is the ability to concentrate on a stimulus, and it is instrumental in transferring information from short- to long-term memory along with practice and repetition. The concepts mentioned above can help in understanding the major peculiarities of child cognitive development during the first two years of life.

Paris, J., Ricardo, A., & Rymond, D. (2019). Child growth and development . College of the Canyons.

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1. IvyPanda . "Cognitive Development in Infancy and Toddlerhood." September 9, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/cognitive-development-in-infancy-and-toddlerhood/.

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IvyPanda . "Cognitive Development in Infancy and Toddlerhood." September 9, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/cognitive-development-in-infancy-and-toddlerhood/.

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What is Beck’s Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

This essay about Beck’s Cognitive Behavioral Therapy sheds light on its transformative approach to mental health. Founded by Dr. Aaron T. Beck, this therapy focuses on the present, emphasizing the interplay between thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Through techniques like cognitive restructuring and behavioral activation, individuals challenge distorted thinking patterns and reengage with life’s joys. Collaborative and pragmatic, CBT offers a structured path to healing, empowering individuals to navigate challenges with resilience and clarity.

How it works

Within the expansive landscape of psychotherapy, Beck’s Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) emerges as a guiding beacon, offering a structured path towards mental well-being. The brainchild of Dr. Aaron T. Beck, a visionary psychiatrist hailing from the esteemed halls of the University of Pennsylvania, this therapeutic approach revolutionized the field in the 1960s. Unlike its predecessors, CBT eschews the labyrinthine corridors of past traumas, opting instead to illuminate the present through the lens of cognition, emotion, and behavior.

At its essence, Beck’s CBT hinges on a fundamental truth: the power of thoughts to shape our reality.

It’s akin to navigating a maze, where each thought serves as a signpost directing our emotions and actions. Yet, just as a map can lead astray, distorted thoughts can skew our perception of the world. Herein lies the crux of CBT – the art of identifying and rectifying these cognitive distortions, restoring clarity to the mental landscape.

Central to Beck’s therapeutic approach is the concept of cognitive restructuring, a process akin to renovating a dilapidated house. Through meticulous examination, individuals uncover the cracks in their cognitive foundation – the irrational beliefs and negative self-talk that mar their mental architecture. Armed with insight and determination, they set about refurbishing their cognitive abode, replacing faulty fixtures with sturdier alternatives. Thus, a once-bleak outlook transforms into a sanctuary of resilience and self-assurance.

Another cornerstone of Beck’s CBT is behavioral activation, a strategy akin to coaxing a dormant garden back to life. In the depths of depression, individuals often find themselves ensnared in a web of lethargy and apathy, withdrawing from activities that once brought joy. Through gentle encouragement and structured planning, CBT reignites the spark of motivation, prompting individuals to reengage with life’s myriad pleasures and pursuits. Like a gardener tending to tender shoots, therapists nurture this newfound vitality, fostering a garden of flourishing resilience.

Moreover, Beck’s Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is characterized by its collaborative nature, resembling a symphony where therapist and client harmonize in pursuit of a shared goal. Together, they traverse the labyrinth of the mind, unraveling its mysteries and charting a course towards healing and growth. Through mutual trust and respect, they forge a bond that transcends the confines of the therapy room, empowering individuals to navigate life’s trials with newfound clarity and confidence.

In summation, Beck’s Cognitive Behavioral Therapy stands as a testament to the transformative power of the human mind. Through its fusion of insight and action, it offers a beacon of hope amidst the tumult of mental distress, guiding individuals towards a brighter tomorrow. In the dance of cognition and emotion, it unveils the latent potential within each individual, fostering a symphony of resilience and self-discovery. Indeed, within the confines of Beck’s CBT, lies a roadmap to liberation – a journey from darkness into the light.

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