Objective 8| State Piaget’s understanding of how the mind develops, and discuss the importance of assimilation and accommodation in this process. Piaget proposed that children’s reasoning develops in a series of stages, and that children actively construct and modify their understanding of the world as they interact with it. They form schemas (concepts or frameworks for organizing experience).They thenassimilate (interpret) information by means of these schemas, or—if the information does not conform to the schema—they accommodate (adjust) the schema to incorporate the new information.
Objective 9| Outline Piaget’s four main stages of cognitive development, and comment on how children’s thinking changes during these four stages. In the sensorimotor stage (birth to age 2), children experience the world through their senses and actions. In the first six months, infants lack object permanence, or the awareness that things exist when out of sight. In the preoperational stage (age 2to about 6 or 7), children learn to use language and can represent things with words and images, but they are unable to reason logically. They lack a theory of mind and are egocentric, or have difficulty taking another person’s point of view (people with the disorder of autism also lack a theory of mind). Preoperational children have no concept of conservation—the understanding that things can change form but retain their mass, volume, or number. In the concrete operational stage (about age 7 to 11), children can think logically about concrete events, grasp analogies, and perform arithmetical operations. In theformal operational stage (12 through adulthood), they gain the ability to reason abstractly. Piaget viewed the ages connected with these stages as approximate, but the sequence as universal.
Objective 10| Discuss psychologists’ current views on Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.Contemporary research shows that formal logic plays a smaller part in cognitive development than Piaget believed, and that the development of cognitive abilities is more continuous, with stages starting earlier and less abruptly. Nevertheless, Piaget’s views about the sequence of development of children’s cognitive abilities have been supported repeatedly.
Objective 11| Define stranger anxiety. Stranger anxiety is the fear of strangers that infants begin to display at about 8 months of age. Children of this age have formed schemas for familiar faces, and they become distressed when faces do not match their schemas.