Jean Piaget s Theory Of Cognitive Development - 2725 Words

Definition Jean Piaget Jean Piaget (1896 – 1980) was the first psychologist to make a systematic study of cognitive development. He wanted to answer the fundamental question of how does a child’s knowledge of the world change with age. In answering this question, Piaget made the assumption that the child is an active participant in the development of knowledge; constructing his/her own understanding. This idea, perhaps more than others, has influenced the thinking of all developmentalists who have followed Piaget. However, the hundreds of studies that have been done since Piaget’s original account of cognitive development have found a number of shortcomings in his theory. Even so, his basic assumption on cognitive changes from infancy to†¦show more content†¦For example; If a child picks up a toy and looks at it, he/she is using their â€Å"picking-up schema†, their â€Å"looking schema, and their â€Å"holding schema†. Piaget proposed that each infant begins life with a small set of simple sensory or motor scheme such as tasting, looking, touching, grasping, and hearing. He theorised that the infant objects as a thing that feels a certain way when touched, taste a certain way, or has a particular colour. Once the infant becomes a toddler, they begin to develop mental scheme as well such as comparing objects against each other, and categorising. In Piaget’s theory, the child gradually adds extremely complex mental schemas over the course of its development. These mental schemas include deductive analysis and systematic reasoning. Piaget theorised that people act on their own environment. He went on to state that humans have an inborn mental process called organisation which forces them to concoct generalisable schemas from specific experiences. An example of this would be when a child holds a spherical objects, the schema he/she constructs will be applied to all other similar objects. In Piaget’s theory, these schemas organise a child’s thinking according to categories that help children determine what kind of action to take in response to their environment. In Piaget’s theory, figurative schemas are mental representations of basic properties of objects in