Cognitive Development

It's really interesting to see how people develop through time.

Piaget gives us a lot of information about cognitive development. He wanted to study children and understand how they learn information. He gives us insight into the concept of schemas. Schemas are a broad concept of a certain idea. Along with schemas come assimilation and accommodation. Through assimilation, children incorporate new information into their existing schema and through accommodation they change their framework.

Piaget maps out different stages of development:

Sensorimotor - this stage goes from birth until you're about 2 years old. During this stage your senses and motor skills develop and you have no language. Your memory also starts to develop - you recognize people and objects. You also develop object permanence and stranger anxiety.
Preoperational - this stages ranges from 2 to 6 years. Children use symbols to represent objects but doesn't reason logically. They're egocentric in this stage - they lack awareness of others, but they start to become aware of others.
Concrete operational - this stage ranges from 7 to 12 years. Children start to think logically - they recognize that there's a scientific way to approach the world. They have developed language and they can learn and express more rapidly. The child also understands conservation during this stage (which we'll get to later).
Formal operational - this stage ranges from 12 years to adult. They can reason abstractly and think in hypothetical terms. They have formal thought.

What I think is the most interesting is the conservation task. Like Mrs. Perl kept telling us about the boy last year in her psychology class that kept saying "they're so stupid" when a child couldn't complete the task - I kind of sympathize with him. It's really funny to watch because it seems so easy to us. It seems like it's just obvious, but the concept of conservation doesn't come until the concrete operational stage. Any age before that they're not able to understand this concept.

Is the little girl stupid because she doesn't know that they're the same? No. She doesn't understand conservation, so how would she know?

I think it gives us a nice perspective --- there are different levels of development. We've gone through the same stages that they have and we were once incapable of correctly answering the question in the conservation task as well. But this doesn't make us, or any child, stupid. They just aren't through with cognitive development yet.