Developmental physchology - Essay Example

Jean Piaget Jean Piaget’s theory of the stages of cognitive development is best fitted to describe the sociocultural influence of human development. Piaget’s theory examines the intellectual development of individuals from the time they are born into adulthood. The theory examines the development of the thought process, judgment and acquisition of knowledge and is focused on how infants, children and teenagers develop these key intellectual skills in a particular sociocultural context that enables this development.

Piaget used the following age-related terms to describe the stages of development. There is the sensorimotor stage which corresponds to the time when a person is born until this individual is 18-24 months old. The preoperational stage, corresponding to the toddler age through age 7, followed by the concrete operational stage, which corresponds to ages 7-12. The final stage is the formal operational stage where the individual is between 12 years old to adulthood. Piaget notes that these dates are not concrete, but are relative to the individual, as some children may enter a stage before or after the average age, or some children may exhibit characteristics of two stages, that is, the present stage plus a previous stage or the present stage plus a future stage.

At each of these stages, Piaget theorizes that the individual interacts with the people and environment around him/her to a greater and greater extent. For example, in the sensorimotor stage, the infant is concerned with the present. They are aware of what they see, what they do and they are aware of the immediate environment, leading to immediate engagement. The infant has no experience with which to evaluate the present and so experiments. Slowly, in the latter stages of infancy, the infant exhibits specific goal oriented behavior in the hope of a reward, i.e., this is the beginning of learned behavior patterns.

As the infant becomes older, say 7-9 months, there is awareness that other persons/things exist independent of self. This is termed object permanence and indicates that the infant’s memory is beginning to develop. When the infant becomes more mobile (crawling/standing up/early walking), cognitive development increases. Language development is a sign of reaching the later phases of the sensorimotor stage.In the preoperational stage, things begin to have symbolic meaning, e.g., language becomes a symbol for a thing, activity, or person.

Language, memory and imagination begin to develop more. This means that the young child begins to understand the past, the present and the future, and imagination begins to take meaning. This ability is based on intuition as logic is in the early stages of development and understanding for the young child. The more complex concepts of time, cause/effect and comparison are not yet learned. In the concrete operational stage, the individual child starts exhibiting logical and concrete reasoning.

Thinking begins to be less in the make believe world and is related to external associations. Awareness of individuality is realized and understanding of the uniqueness of the way one thinks and feels, and the right to privacy in these matters, becomes a reality. As well, this age group begins to develop operational thinking.In the formal opertional stage, the individual can use symbols logically to express abstract concepts, e.g., science. Understanding of systematic behavior and the variables that exist to form this pattern of thinking, becomes part of the thought process.

The individual begins to understand and formulate theories and hypotheses, and is able to think of alternate possibilities. For Piaget, the individual’s cognitive development ends at this stage. The sociocultural influences of infancy, childhood and adolescence have provided the impetus for the individual’s cognitive development. In other words, the foundation is laid in these stages. Further intellectual development is, therefore, based on cummulative knowledge. Bibliography[Author].

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