Important stages of a child's cognitive development. Sample test questions. When does cognitive development begin?

Although parents understand that their child's physical growth is accompanied by changes in his or her intelligence, they often have difficulty imagining what those changes are. Modern psychologists' views on these changes have been greatly influenced by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980), widely recognized as the most influential thinker of our century. Before Piaget, two approaches dominated in psychological ideas about the cognitive development of a child: in one, based on the principle of biological maturation, an exclusive role belonged to the “natural” component of development; in another, based on the principle of learning And environmental influences, almost exclusive preference was given to the “acquired” component. Piaget approached the problem differently, focusing on the interaction between the child's naturally maturing abilities and his interactions with his environment. In this section we will give brief overview Piaget's theory of stages of development, and then consider criticism of this theory and some more recent approaches. We will also discuss the work of Russian psychologist Vygotsky, whose ideas about cognitive development, first published in the 1930s, have received renewed attention from scientists in recent years.

<Рис. Дети часто с таким же удовольствием играют с пустыми коробками, как и с игрушками, которые в них лежали. Пиаже считал, что дети действуют как «любознательные ученые» и экспериментируют с объектами своего окружения, чтобы посмотреть, что из этого выйдет.>

Stages of development according to Piaget

Partly as a result of his observations of his own children, Piaget became interested in the relationship between the child's naturally maturing abilities and his interactions with the environment. Piaget saw in the child an active participant in this process, and not a passive “recipient” of biological development and stimuli imposed from outside. In particular, according to Piaget, the child should be considered as a scientific researcher conducting experiments on the world to see what happens (“What can you feel if you suck the ear of a teddy bear?”; “What happens if I move my plate?” over the edge of the table?").

As a result of these mini-experiments, the child builds “theories” - Piaget called them diagrams - about how the physical and social worlds work. When encountering a new object or event, the child tries to understand it in the language of a pre-existing schema (Piaget called this the process of assimilation: the child tries to assimilate the new event to a pre-existing schema). If the old schema turns out to be inadequate for its assimilation of a new event, then the child, like a good scientist, modifies it and thereby expands his theory of the world (Piaget called this process of remaking the schema accommodation) ( Piaget & Inhelder, 1969).

Piaget's first work as a graduate student psychologist was an intelligence "tester" based on Alfred Binet, the inventor of the IQ test. IQ (first letters of words intellectual quotation - intelligence quotient. - Note transl.) (see Chapter 12). But then Piaget discovered that he was more interested in children's incorrect answers than in their performance on an intelligence test. Why do children make mistakes like this? How does their thinking differ from adults? He began to closely observe his own children while they played; at the same time, he often asked them simple scientific and moral questions and asked them to explain how they arrived at their answers. Based on his observations, Piaget became convinced that the development of children's ability to think and reason goes through a number of qualitatively different stages of child growth. He identified 4 main stages in cognitive development and a number of substages in each of them. The main stages and their main characteristics are given in table. 3.1.

Table 3.1. Stages of cognitive development according to Piaget

The ages indicated are average. It can vary considerably depending on intelligence, cultural background and socioeconomic factors, but the order of these is assumed to be the same for all children. Only given here general characteristics stages, and in each of them Piaget described a number of more detailed substages.

Sensorimotor stage. Noting the close relationship between physical activity and perception in infants, Piaget designated the first two years of life as the sensorimotor stage. During this period, infants are busy discovering the connection between their actions and their consequences. They learn, for example, how far to stretch to pick up an object; what happens if you push a plate of food over the edge of the table; and also that the hand is a part of the body, but the manger railing is not. Through countless “experiments,” infants begin to form a concept of themselves as something separate from the outside world.

An important discovery at this stage is the concept of object permanence - the awareness that an object continues to exist even when it is not accessible to the senses. If you cover a toy with a rag that an 8-month-old baby is reaching for, he immediately stops reaching and loses interest. He is not surprised or upset, does not try to find the toy - in general, he acts as if it had ceased to exist (Fig. 3.3).

Rice. 3.3. Object permanence. If a toy is hidden behind a screen, the infant acts as if it no longer exists. From this observation, Piaget concludes that the child has not yet mastered the concept of object permanence.

In contrast, a 10-month-old baby actively searches for an object hidden under a rag or behind a screen. This older child understands that an object exists even though it is not visible, that is, he has grasped the concept of object permanence. But even at this age, the search is limited. If such a child has once already managed to find a toy hidden in a certain place, he will continue to look for it there, even if he saw an adult hiding it in a new place. This child simply repeats the action that once led him to receive the toy, and does not look for it where he last saw it. Until about a year old, a child cannot consistently search for an object where it disappeared before his eyes for the last time - regardless of what happened in previous attempts.

Preoperative stage. At the age of approximately 1.5 to 2 years, children begin to use speech. Words, like symbols, can represent objects or groups of objects, and one object can represent (symbolize) another. So, during play, a 3-year-old child can handle a stick as if it were a horse and ride it around the room; a wooden cube can be a car for him, one doll a dad, and another a child.

Although children aged 3-4 years can think symbolically, their words and images do not yet have a logical organization. Piaget calls the stage of cognitive development, which falls between the ages of 2 and 7 years, preoperational, since the child does not yet understand certain rules, or operations. An operation is a procedure for mentally separating, combining, or otherwise transforming information in a logical manner. For example, if water is poured from a tall, narrow glass into a short, wide one, adults know that the amount of water has not changed because they can do the reverse operation in their minds: they can imagine how the water is poured from the short glass back to the tall one, thereby arriving at original condition. A child at the preoperational stage of cognitive development has a rather weak or absent understanding of reversibility and other mental operations. Therefore, Piaget believes, children at the preoperational stage have not yet comprehended the principle of conservation - the understanding that the amount of a substance remains constant, even if its form changes. They cannot understand that when water is poured from a high glass to a low one, the amount of water is conserved, that is, it remains the same when it is poured from a high glass to a low one.

The lack of a concept of conservation is also illustrated by an experiment in which a child is given plasticine to make a ball of it equal in size to another ball of the same material. Having done this, the child says that they are “the same.” Then the experimenter leaves one ball as a standard, and rolls the other into an elongated shape like a sausage, and the child watches all this. The child can easily see that the plasticine has neither decreased nor increased. In a similar situation, children aged about 4 years old say that these two objects no longer contain the same amount of plasticine: “The longer one has more,” they say (Fig. 3.4). Most children under 7 years of age do not consider that there is an equal amount of plasticine in both the long object and the first ball.

Rice. 3.4. Concept of conservation. A four-year-old girl admits that both plasticine balls are the same size. But when one of the balls is rolled into a long, thin shape, she says it contains more plasticine. And until she is 7 years old, she will not say what is in these objects different shapes the same amount of plasticine.

Piaget believed that the main feature of the preoperative stage is the child's inability to maintain attention on more than one aspect of a situation at the same time. Thus, in the task of maintaining the amount of plasticine, a child at the preoperative stage cannot concentrate simultaneously on the length and thickness of a piece of plasticine. Similarly, Piaget believed that pre-operational thinking is dominated by visual impressions. Change appearance A piece of plasticine affects the child more than the less obvious, but more significant characteristics - mass and weight.

What small child relies on visual impressions is clear from the conservation of quantity experiment. If you place two rows of checkers in parallel, one opposite the other, a small child correctly answers that these rows have the same number of checkers (Fig. 3.5). If checkers from one row are collected in a pile, a five-year-old child says that where there is a straight row, there are more checkers, although not a single checker was taken. The visual impression of a long row of checkers outweighs the quantitative equality that was obvious when the checkers stood in rows opposite each other. In contrast, a 7-year-old child believes that if the number of objects was equal before, it should remain equal. At this age, quantitative equality becomes more important than visual impression.

Rice. 3.5. Quantity conservation. When the checkers are correctly arranged in two rows of seven, most children answer that there are equal numbers in both. When one row is then collected into a compact pile, children 6-7 years old say that there were more of them in the original row.

Another key characteristic of the preoperative stage child development, according to Piaget, is egocentrism. Children in the preoperational stage of development are not aware of points of view other than their own - they believe that everyone else perceives the world around us just like them ( Piaget , 1950). To demonstrate this fact, Piaget came up with the “three-slide problem.” The child is allowed to walk around a table on which three slides of varying heights are built. When the child stands on one side of the table, on the other side of the table in different places a doll is placed (so she sees the three slides differently than a child). The child is asked to choose a photo that matches what the doll sees. Children under 6-7 years of age choose a photo that matches their own vision of three slides ( Piaget & Inhelder, 1948/1956).

Piaget believed that egocentrism explains the rigidity of thinking at the preoperative stage. Because young children cannot appreciate points of view other than their own, they are unable to revise their schemas to take account of changes in environment. Hence their inability to produce reverse operations or consider conservation of quantity.

Stages of operations. Between 7 and 12 years old children master various concepts saving, and also begin to perform other logical manipulations. They can arrange objects based on one characteristic, such as height or weight. They also develop mental image about the sequence of actions. A five-year-old child can find the way to a friend's house, but he won't be able to tell you how to get there, and he won't be able to draw it with a pencil on paper. He finds the road because he knows where to turn, but he does not have a general picture of the route. In contrast, 8-year-old children can easily draw a path map. Piaget calls this period the stage of concrete operations: although children use abstract terms, they can only do this in relation to concrete objects, that is, to those objects that are directly accessible to their senses.

Around this time, the third stage of Piaget’s understanding of morality begins. The child begins to realize that some of the rules are social conventions, collective agreements, and that they can be arbitrarily accepted or changed if everyone agrees. The child's moral realism also undergoes a change: when making a moral judgment, he now gives weight to "subjective" factors such as a person's intentions, and views punishment as a human choice rather than an inevitable, divine punishment.

At approximately the age of 11-12 years, children come to the forms of thinking of adults and become capable of purely symbolic thinking. Piaget called this a stage formal transactions. In one of the tests of formal operational thinking, the child must determine what determines how long it will take for a pendulum to swing back and forth (i.e., its period of oscillation). The child is given a length of rope suspended by a hook and several weights that can be attached to the lower end. He can change the length of the rope, change the weight of the load he connects and the height from which he releases the load. Unlike children, who are still at the stage of concrete operations and, when experimenting, change some variables, but without a system, adolescents, even with average abilities, put forward a number of hypotheses and begin to systematically test them. They reason like this: if a certain variable (weight) affects the period of oscillation, then the result of its influence will become visible only if one variable is changed and all others are left unchanged. If that variable doesn't affect swing time, they eliminate it and try another one. Consideration of all possibilities - drawing a conclusion on each hypothesis and confirming or refuting it - is the essence of what Piaget called thinking at the stage of formal operations.

Criticism of Piaget's theory

Piaget's theory is a huge intellectual achievement; it revolutionized the way we think about children's cognitive development and has inspired countless researchers for decades. Piaget's observations regarding the sequence of cognitive development are supported by many studies. However, newer and more sophisticated methods of testing the mental performance of infants and preschoolers show that Piaget underestimated their abilities. As we noted above, in order for a child to successfully solve many of the problems designed to test stage theory, he actually needs to master several basic information processing skills: attention, memory, and knowledge of specific facts. And it may turn out that the child actually has the ability required of him, but cannot solve the problem because he does not have other skills that are also necessary, but not essential for this task.

These points have become clear in studies of object permanence - the awareness that an object continues to exist even when it is outside the field of sensory perception. We have already said above that if a baby under the age of 8 months is shown a toy and then it is hidden in front of his eyes or covered with a rag, he behaves as if it no longer exists and does not try to look for it. But even after 8 months of age, a child who has already managed to repeatedly find a toy hidden in one place continues to look for it in the same place, even after he has seen that an adult has hidden it in a new place.

Note, however, that to successfully perform this test, the child must not only understand that the object still exists (i.e., know about object permanence), but also remember where it was hidden, and show some physical action that would show that he is looking for it. Because Piaget believed that early cognitive development was determined by sensorimotor activity, he did not seriously consider the possibility that the child knows that an object still exists but is unable to express this in search behavior - that is, that mental development may outstrip motor abilities .

This possibility has been explored in a number of studies where the child was not required to actively search for the hidden object. As shown in Fig. 3.6, the device consisted of a screen attached at one end to the table top. In the initial position, the entire screen lay on the table. As the child watched, the screen was slowly turned in the opposite direction, like a drawbridge, to a vertical position of 90 degrees, then turned further to a full semicircle of 180 degrees and again laid flat on the table. Then the screen was turned in the opposite direction - towards the child.

Rice. 3.6. Testing object permanence. Children are shown a rotating screen until they can't stop looking at it. The box is placed where the screen can hide it, and then children see either a possible event (the screen rotates until it appears to collide with the box and then returns to its original position) or an impossible event (the screen appears to pass through the box). Children paid more attention to the impossible event, indicating that they knew about the existence of the box hidden behind the screen (adapted from Baillargeon, 1987).

When this rotating screen was shown to the infants for the first time, they looked at it for almost a full minute, but after repeated trials they lost interest and turned their attention elsewhere. At this moment, a brightly colored box appeared on the table, behind where the screen was mounted; it would not have been visible if the screen had been raised vertically (in fact, the children did not see the real box, but its reflection). After this, as shown in Fig. 3.6, children were shown either a possible event or an impossible one. One group of infants saw the screen rotate from its initial position to the point where it would collide with the box; at this point the screen stopped and moved back to its original position. Another group saw the screen rotate to a vertical position and then continue to rotate further to the other side of a 180-degree arc, as if there was no box in its path.

The experimenters reasoned that if children believe that the box is still there even when the screen is hiding it, then they should be surprised that the screen passes through it - an impossible event - and then, therefore, they will look at the screen longer than otherwise. , when the screen seems to collide with the box before returning to its original position. This is exactly what happened. Even though the impossible event was perceptually identical to an event that they had already seen many times and had lost interest in, they found it more interesting than an event that was physically possible but which they had never seen before - like the screen stopping halfway through the other end of the arc and then changes direction ( Baillargeon, Spelke & Wasserman, 1985).

It should be noted that the children in this experiment were only 4.5 months old; they thus demonstrated knowledge of object permanence 4-5 months earlier than Piaget's theory would predict. When this study was replicated, it was found that some infants as young as 3.5 months also had knowledge of object permanence ( Baillargeon, 1987; Baillargeon & DeVos, 1991).

Piaget's conservation problems are another example of how, when one takes a closer look at the complex skills required to successfully complete a task, children are found to develop competence earlier than his theory predicts. For example, if the experimental conditions in a retention test are carefully chosen so that children's responses do not depend on their verbal ability (i.e., how well they understand what the experimenter means by the words "more" and “longer”), then even 3- and 4-year-old children exhibit knowledge of the conservation of number, i.e. they can distinguish between an essential feature (the number of elements in a set) and an unimportant one (features of the spatial arrangement of elements) ( Gelman & Gallistel, 1978).

In one study of conservation of quantity, two sets of toys were arranged in a line, one next to the other (as in Figure 3.5). The experimenter told the child that one row was his and the other was hers, and then asked the child to comment on the ratio of their numbers. For example: “Here are your soldiers, and these are my soldiers. Which is more: yours or mine - or theirs equally?” Having received the child's initial judgment, she arranged one row of toys more freely and repeated the question.

At first, 5-year-old children did not cope with the task of maintaining numbers and, as Piaget had previously predicted, they said that there were “more soldiers” in a long row. But then the experimenter introduced other conditions. She did not talk about these toys as individual soldiers and instead said: “Here is my army, and here is your army. Whose army is bigger: yours or mine - or are they the same? And after this simple change of words, most of the children were able to maintain the number and decided that the armies were the same size, although one of them was stretched out. When children were asked to interpret what they saw as a whole, put together, rather than as a collection of separate elements, unimportant perceptual transformations began to have less influence on their judgments of equality ( Markman, 1979).

Other studies have found various other factors that may influence the development of a particular operational mindset. For example, some cultural traditions may influence children's ability to solve problems developed by Piaget ( Rogoff , 1990). In addition, starting to attend school can help master these tasks ( Artman & Canan , 1993). This and other evidence suggests that specific operational reasoning may not be a universal developmental stage characteristic of the average childhood, but a product of the cultural environment, schooling, as well as specific formulation of questions and instructions ( Gellatly, 1987; Light & Perrett - Clermont, 1989; Robert, 1989).

Alternatives to Piaget's theory

All developmental psychologists agree that the results we have just seen pose a serious challenge to Piaget's theory and indicate an underestimation of children's abilities. However, there is no agreement on which alternative to choose.

Information approach. As we have noted, many of the experiments that challenge Piaget's views have been conducted by researchers who view cognitive development as a process of acquiring several discrete information-processing skills. Accordingly, they believe that standard tasks Piaget does not allow us to separate these several skills from the critical skill for the sake of identifying which these tasks were supposedly created. But further, supporters of the information approach differ among themselves about what does not suit them in Piaget.

For example, they did not agree on the main issue of whether to represent development as a sequence of qualitatively different stages or as a continuous process of change. Some believe that the principle of stages should be abandoned completely (for example: Klahr , 1982). Such scientists believe that quantum leaps in development are an illusion that arise because processing skills have been carelessly mixed in tasks assessing different stages; individual skills develop smoothly and continuously.

But some representatives of the information approach seem to be modernizing and expanding Piaget’s stage model itself; They believe that gradual changes in information processing skills actually lead to leaps and bounds in children's thinking (see, for example: Case , 1985). Such theorists are sometimes called "neo-Piagitists." Another group of neo-Piagistians agree that there are real stages in development, but they arise only within narrower spheres of knowledge. For example, a child’s speech skills, understanding of mathematics, social thinking, etc. - all this can develop in stages, but the development of each such area proceeds at its own pace, relatively independent of other areas (see, for example: Mandler, 1983).

Cognitive approach. Some developmental psychologists, who doubt the existence of qualitatively different stages of cognitive development, believe that after infancy, children and adults have the same cognitive processes and abilities, and their difference lies primarily in the fact that adults have a more extensive base knowledge. By knowledge here we mean not just a collection of facts, but a deep understanding of the organization of these facts in specific areas.

The difference between the facts themselves and their organization is well illustrated by a study in which a group of ten-year-olds competing in a chess tournament was compared with a group of college students who were amateur chess players. When asked to remember and recall a list of random numbers, the students far outperformed the ten-year-olds. But when they began to test the ability to reproduce real positions of chess pieces on the board, it turned out that 10-year-old chess masters did better than 18-year-old amateurs ( Chi , 1978). Thus, the significant difference between these groups was not different stages of cognitive development or differences in information processing abilities (such as memory capacity), but rather domain-specific knowledge. As ten-year-olds developed a deeper understanding of chess composition, they were able to organize and reproduce positions from memory by combining piece-by-piece information into larger meaningful units (for example, White's attack on the kingside) and eliminating implausible pieces' arrangements from consideration. In an earlier study that compared adult chess masters and adult amateurs, the results were similar. We will discuss solving chess problems by masters and amateurs in Chapter 9.

The age-related improvement in children's ability to solve Piagetian conservation problems may be due to an increase in their knowledge about the world, rather than to a qualitative shift in cognitive development. If, for example, a child does not know that mass or quantity is main characteristic and what exactly is meant when they say “more plasticine” or “more checkers”, then if only the appearance changes, he will quite likely decide that the quantity has changed. It is possible that the older child has simply already learned what is essential in determining the property “more.” If this hypothesis is correct, then a child who demonstrates a lack of understanding of conservation on one material may show it on another - depending on how knowledgeable he is in the given area.

This is supported by a study in which kindergarten children were told about a series of “surgeries” performed by doctors or scientists. Some operations changed the animal so that it became like another animal, and some so that it became like a plant (see photo of stimuli in Figure 3.7). The child was told, for example, that “the doctors took the horse [show the child a picture of the horse] and performed an operation, after which black and white stripes appeared all over the horse’s body. They cut her mane and braided her tail. They taught her not to neigh like a horse and to eat wild grass instead of oats and hay. They taught her to live not in a stable, but in the wilds of Africa. When they were done, the animal looked like this [shows a picture of a zebra]. When they were all finished, what did they get: a horse or a zebra?” ( Keil, 1989, b. 307).

Rice. 3.7. Testing understanding of conservation at an early age. Children are told that doctors or scientists worked on an animal until it looked like another animal (horse to zebra) or like a plant (porcupine to cactus). If the child agrees that an animal “really” became another animal or became a plant, then he has not yet learned the principle of conservation; if a child says that the animal “really” remains the same as it was in the original, it means that he has comprehended the principle of conservation.

With regard to the operation of transforming one animal into another, the majority of children did not show that they had the principle of conservation; approximately 65% ​​believed that the horse had actually turned into a zebra. But when it came to turning an animal into a plant, only about 25% decided that the porcupine actually became a cactus ( Keil , 1989). Special variations of this experiment showed that this result cannot be explained simply by the fact that the animal is more like an animal than a plant.

It is clear from such studies that in some situations preoperative children can ignore the most dramatic changes in appearance and follow the conservation principle because they know that an invisible but essential property of the object has remained unchanged. We will see a similar experiment in the next section on gender identity and sex-role behavior, where we will find out whether preoperative children believe that a girl can be turned into a boy or vice versa.

Sociocultural approaches. Piaget emphasized the role of the child's interaction with the environment, but by environment he meant the immediate physical environment. He considered the child as a natural scientist, who is faced with the task of revealing the true essence of the world and general rules logical and scientific thinking. The child’s location in the wider social and cultural context in fact, it is not taken into account in any way by Piaget’s theory. Even in his discussions about social and moral rules it is implied that there is a universal, logically “correct” way of understanding such rules, which the child strives to discover.

But not all knowledge is like that. Much to learn developing child, are special and conditional views on reality, accepted specifically in his culture; these are the expected roles of different people and different genders; these are, finally, the rules and norms of social relationships accepted in his culture. In such areas there are simply no absolutely reliable facts or “correct” views of reality that need to be comprehended. Thus, representatives of cultural anthropology and other social sciences, adhering to a sociocultural approach to development, view the child not as a natural scientist who seeks “true” knowledge, but as a cultural recruit who wants to become “one of our own” by learning to look at social reality through the prism of a given culture ( Bem, 1993, 1987; Shweder, 1984).

The origins of this view of cognitive development can be found in the work of the Russian school of Lev Vygotsky (1934-1986). Vygotsky believed that we develop our understanding and practical skills through a process that can be called apprenticeship: we are guided by more knowledgeable individuals who help us to increasingly understand the world around us and develop new skills. He also distinguished between two levels of cognitive development: the child's actual level of development, reflected in problem-solving abilities, and the level of potential development, determined by the type of problems the child can solve under the guidance of an adult or a more knowledgeable peer. According to Vygotsky, we must know both the actual and potential level of development of a particular child if we want to determine his level of cognitive development and provide him with adequate forms of teaching.

<Рис. Согласно Выготскому, понимание и опыт детей развиваются благодаря своего рода ученичеству, когда ими руководят более знающие индивидуумы. Например, ребенок более старшего возраста может помочь более младшему развить новые навыки.>

Because speech is the primary means of exchanging social meanings between people, Vygotsky viewed speech development as a central aspect of cognitive development; in fact, he considered mastery of speech as the most important aspect child development ( Blanck , 1990). Speech plays an important role in developing new skills and acquiring knowledge. When adults or peers help children learn to solve new problems, communication between them becomes part of the child's thinking. Later, children use their language skills to guide their actions, practicing new skills. Thus, what Piaget called egocentric speech, Vygotsky considered as essential component cognitive development: children talk to themselves to guide and guide their own actions. This type of self-instruction is called personal (internal) speech. You can see this process in children giving themselves instructions on how to do a task, such as tying their shoes, that they have previously heard from adults ( Berk, 1997).

Changes in a newborn's weight and height are easy to monitor. But it's not so easy to understand what's going on inside its brain as it develops.
The parts of the child’s brain that control body functions are fully formed and will not change. The baby can breathe, eat, etc. But those departments that are responsible for the child’s understanding of himself and the world around him will change and develop.
The newborn's brain is unable to fully use functions such as perception, thinking, remembering, speech and physical coordination. The process by which a child gradually learns to use these skills is called cognitive development.

When does cognitive development begin?

During the last weeks of pregnancy, did you relax by watching your favorite TV show? Don’t you think now that the child calms down at the first sounds of the musical intro for this program? If so, then he is showing you that he could recognize and remember even before he was born.
A few weeks after birth, the baby begins to understand that certain actions lead to certain results. But the ability to determine what action and what result will develop later.
Try tying a ribbon to your child's leg so that when he pulls it, he sets the mobile in motion. The baby will begin to jerk his leg more actively, but after a couple of days he will forget what he needs to do to make the mobile move. At link 721>six months, the baby will most likely remember what to do for a couple of weeks.
A child's ability to make connections between his actions and what follows is called recognition. A more complex skill related to memory is called recall. It represents the ability to think about something out of context. An example would be a situation in which a child thinks about his crib while sitting in a car seat.
The ability to reproduce rarely appears in children before six months. After six months, the child will begin to use actions as... The gesture with which a child shows his desire to be picked up is one of the very first such actions.
At about six months, your baby will likely stop putting toys in his mouth or banging them and begin to show that he understands that they can be handled in different ways: a car needs to be pushed, and a teddy bear can be hugged.

How to promote a child's cognitive development?

Much of a child's cognitive development occurs naturally, but you can help your baby through the process. Over the past 100 years, parents have become more conscious of their children's development. Now they are trying to take into account the physiological characteristics of the child’s brain development and, in accordance with this, help the child learn about the world. As a result, smarter children grow up.
Therefore, it is very important how you communicate with your child.
The child begins to explore the world around him immediately after birth. Your newborn will recognize your smell and voice. He likes to look at your face. He moves in time with your speech and repeats the movements of his lips. If you watch your child carefully, you will understand when he gives you signals that require your response.
Children learn new things through repetition. Therefore, play simple games with your baby<игры. Дайте ему возможность освоить игру и не жалейте времени, чтобы играть с ним вместе.
Toys that are correctly selected according to the child’s age are also useful. However, try not to buy too many toys, otherwise they will distract your child. If distracted, the child will not be able to concentrate on one thing.

When does a child develop comprehension skills?

Each child has his own pace of development. We provide general information about the stages in the development of understanding.

From birth to three months
The baby likes your ringing voice, so he turns towards its sound. If you stick your tongue out at him, he will repeat after you.
The child does not realize that certain actions lead to a certain result. At six weeks, he still does not understand that you exist even when you are not with him. Seeing you every time, he doesn’t even realize that you are the same person. He is not afraid of strangers and happily goes into everyone's arms.
Three to six months
Now the child understands that he can perform an action and get a result. He knows how to separate himself from the world around him. He realizes that even if two toys touch each other, they are not one.
The child learns to classify. Show your child six pictures of cats and watch how surprised he is when the seventh picture is a dog. Place two or three mirrors and sit with your child in front of them. He'll love looking at a few of your reflections. However, by five months, this may, on the contrary, upset him, since at this age he will already understand that there is only one mother.
By six months, the baby will happily reach for toys, hold them, bang them, etc. He distinguishes toys by shape, material and color. He understands that he has already seen the toy that he is now holding in his hands.

Seven to nine months
The child knows his name. He begins to feel shy about unfamiliar people and places.
The child knows how to make plans. For example, he may decide to crawl to his teddy bear or look under the table. Most likely, he already handles toys correctly: he knocks on the drum and stacks cubes.
You may notice that your child is repeating the actions you did the day before. If he learns something, like throwing a rattle out of his crib, he'll want to try it somewhere else. Please note - he will probably start throwing the spoon while sitting in the high chair. He doesn't know what hide-and-seek is yet, so if you hide a spoon, he probably won't look for it.

Nine to 12 months
The child reaches out to you, wants your affection and... He gets upset about this because he now realizes that you exist even when he can't see you. But if a child sees himself in a mirror, he does not understand that it is his own reflection.
The child makes sounds with meaning, which will then turn into his first words. His behavior seems more conscious and logical. And he is gradually getting better at guessing what will happen next.

12 to 18 months
With the help of words and actions, the child tries to tell you what he wants. It can also imitate someone else's actions, especially yours. He may even imitate the actions of yours that he observed a week ago. The child strives to participate in everything, for example, open the closet and empty the trash can. His mission is to explore the world around him!
When faced with a problem, a child tries to solve it first in one way and then in another. If something is lost or hidden, he is able to search for it methodically.

From 18 to 24 months
Now that the child is almost two years old, he begins to combine words. Sometimes he can think through something and solve a problem without resorting to trial and error. The child looks for things where he left them. He pretends and imitates.
Gentle and loving, your child may also be stubborn and inappropriate in his assessment of his skills. He can throw up in frustration.
In situations where he is scared, he may cling to you.
He still doesn’t mind other children playing with his toys, but at two years old he already takes them away. The child enjoys being around other children, but does not play with them unless they are older. The child cannot put himself in the place of another.
If he doesn't get hurt when he gets spanked or hit, he will think that others don't get hurt when they get hit. If he hits the chair, he will say that the chair hit him.
If at 18 months you leave a mark of lipstick on your child's forehead and sit with him in front of the mirror, he will begin to wipe it off the mirror. At 21 months, the child will understand that the reflection in the mirror belongs to him, and in a situation with lipstick he will wipe his forehead, not the reflection. A child's memory is also developing, so he will definitely notice if you miss a page from his favorite book.

How to help a child develop?

From the very beginning, you are your baby's favorite toy. Try to make the child laugh and gurgle, and then you will be on the right track. Keep in mind that your child is easily distracted. Too many activities means he won't be able to properly understand any of them.
There is no need to overload it by taking out all the toys at once. He will love it if you choose one toy that is most appropriate for his age. A child's development is unlikely to be helped by toys designed for older children, since only those that meet current needs are beneficial.
In between active games, offer your child quiet activities. Let your child decide when to stop. If you see that he is losing interest in a game or toy, give him a rest. Sometimes a child needs time and effort to achieve something. Give him the opportunity to try on his own first, without your help, but help him when he's ready to give up.
Trust yourself. Watch your child carefully, and then you will understand what is needed to help him develop. If you're thinking, “my kid would love this,” you're probably right. After all, you are an expert in everything that concerns your child.

What to do if a child is not developing as quickly as he should?

All children are different, so the development process also occurs differently. If a child is premature, he may master certain skills later than his peers.
If the child has had health problems, he may also be developmentally delayed. However, don't worry and rest assured that your child will be able to catch up if given enough time.
On average, a child begins to sit without support at seven months. By nine months, 90% can sit independently. If your baby is not able to sit by 10 months, consult your doctor.
At 13 months, a child will likely be able to produce 10 sounds or words. By 18 months, their number will increase to 50. But this is also individual, since all children are different. Sometimes boys who already understand many words find it difficult to reproduce them. If you think your child doesn't understand many words, ask your doctor to test his hearing.
Try not to stimulate your baby too much. He may withdraw into himself if he feels overloaded. Offer your baby simple games and toys one at a time.
Make yourself comfortable with your child. Look him in the eyes and talk to him. Give him time, encourage him. At the same time, remember that the child needs to try to do something on his own. The best lessons are the ones he learned himself.

Cognitive development (from the English Cognitive development) - the development of all types of mental processes, such as perception, memory, concept formation, problem solving, imagination and logic. The theory of cognitive development was developed by the Swiss philosopher and psychologist Jean Piaget. His epistemological theory provided many basic concepts in the field of developmental psychology and explores the growth of rationality, which, according to Piaget, means the ability to more accurately reflect the world around us and perform logical operations on the images of concepts that arise in interaction with the outside world. The theory considers the emergence and construction of schemas—schemes of how the world is perceived—during the “developmental stage,” a time when children learn new ways of representing information in the brain. The theory is considered "constructivist" in the sense that, unlike nativist theories (which describe cognitive development as the unfolding of innate knowledge and abilities) or empiricist theories (which describe cognitive development as the gradual acquisition of knowledge through experience), it posits that we self-construct our cognitive abilities through our own actions in the environment.

Stages of development of intelligence (J. Piaget)

According to Jean Piaget's theory of intelligence, human intelligence goes through several main stages in its development. From birth to 2 years, the period of sensorimotor intelligence continues; from 2 to 11 years - the period of preparation and organization of specific operations, in which a sub-period of pre-operational ideas (from 2 to 7 years) and a sub-period of specific operations (from 7 to 11 years) are distinguished; From the age of 11 to approximately 15, the period of formal operations lasts.

Period of sensorimotor intelligence (0-2 years)

From birth to two years, the organization of perceptual and motor interactions with the outside world gradually develops. This development goes from being limited by innate reflexes to the associated organization of sensorimotor actions in relation to the immediate environment. At this stage, only direct manipulations with things are possible, but not actions with symbols and ideas on the internal plane.
The period of sensorimotor intelligence is divided into six stages:
1. First stage (0-1 month)
At this age, the child’s capabilities are practically limited by innate reflexes.
2. Second stage (1-4 months)
Under the influence of experience, reflexes begin to transform and coordinate with each other. The first simple skills (primary circular reactions) appear. “For example, when a child constantly sucks his finger, no longer as a result of accidental contact with it, but due to the coordination of his hand and mouth, this can be called acquired accommodation.”
3. Third stage (4-8 months)
The child’s actions acquire a more pronounced focus on objects and events that exist outside and independently of him. Through repetition, movements are consolidated, initially random, leading to changes in the external environment that are interesting to the child (secondary circular reactions). “Motor recognition” of familiar objects appears, which is expressed in the fact that “the child, faced with objects or scenes that usually activate his secondary circular reactions, is limited to giving only a sketch of ordinary movements, but not actually performing them.”
4. Fourth stage (8-12 months)
The ability to coordinate secondary circular reactions arises, combining them into new formations in which one action (for example, removing an obstacle) serves as a means that makes it possible to carry out another - target - action, which means the emergence of undoubtedly intentional actions.
5. Fifth stage (12-18 months)
The child no longer only uses actions known to him as a means of achieving goals, but is also able to search and find new ones, varying the action already known to him and noting the difference in the result; Piaget calls this “the discovery of new means of achieving an end through active experimentation.” That is, here not only new coordinations of actions-means and actions-goals known to the child arise, but also new actions-means.
6. Sixth stage (after 18 months)
Unlike the previous stage, here the child is already able to discover new actions and means not through experimentation, but through internal, mental coordination - internal experimentation.

Period of preparation and organization of specific operations (2-11 years)

Sub-period of pre-operational ideas (2-7 years)
Here a transition is made from sensorimotor functions to internal - symbolic ones, i.e. to actions with ideas, and not with external objects. The symbolic function is “the ability to distinguish the designation from the signified and, as a result, the ability to use the first in order to remember or point to the second.” In infancy, although a child can perceive a sensory signal as a sign of an event that will follow it, he is not able to reproduce internally the sign of an event that is not actually perceived, which is not a specific part of this event.
Concepts called preconcepts at this stage are figurative and concrete, they do not refer to individual objects or classes of things, and are related to each other through transductive reasoning.
The child’s egocentrism is expressed in the inability to look at his own point of view from the outside, as one of the possible ones. The child is not able to make the process of his thinking the object of his thinking, to think about his thoughts. He does not seek to substantiate his reasoning or look for contradictions in them.
Children at this age are characterized by concentration (concentration) on one, the most noticeable feature of an object, and neglect in reasoning of its other features.
The child usually focuses on the states of a thing and does not pay attention to the transformations (or, if he does, it is very difficult for him to understand them) that transfer it from one state to another

Sub-period of specific operations (7-11 years)
Even at the stage of pre-operational ideas, the child acquires the ability to perform certain actions with ideas. But only during the period of specific operations do these actions begin to be combined and coordinated with each other, forming systems of integrated actions (as opposed to associative links). Such actions are called operations. Operations are “actions internalized and organized into the structures of the whole”; An operation is “any act of representation that is an integral part of an organized network of acts related to each other.” Every performed (actualized) operation is an element of an integral system of possible (potential) operations in a given situation.
The child develops special cognitive structures called groupings. Grouping is a form of moving equilibrium of operations, “a system of balancing exchanges and transformations that endlessly compensate each other.” One of the simplest groupings is the classification grouping, or hierarchical inclusion of classes. Thanks to this and other groupings, the child acquires the ability to perform operations with classes and establish logical relationships between classes, uniting them in hierarchies, whereas previously his capabilities were limited to transduction and the establishment of associative connections.
The limitation of this stage is that operations can only be performed with specific objects, but not with statements. Starting from 7-8 years old, “one can observe the formation of systems of logical operations on the objects themselves, their classes and relationships, which do not yet concern propositions as such and are formed only in relation to real or imaginary manipulation with these objects.” Operations logically structure the external actions performed, but they cannot yet structure verbal reasoning in the same way.

Period of formal operations (11-15 years)
The main ability that appears at the stage of formal operations is the ability to deal with the possible, with the hypothetical, and to perceive external reality as a special case of what is possible, what could be. Reality and the child’s own beliefs no longer necessarily determine the course of reasoning. The child now looks at the problem not only from the point of view of what is immediately given in it, but first of all asks the question about all the possible relationships in which elements of the immediately given can consist and be included.
Cognition becomes hypothetico-deductive. The child can now think in hypotheses (which are essentially descriptions of various possibilities), which can be tested in order to choose the one that corresponds to the actual state of affairs.
The child acquires the ability to think in sentences and establish formal relationships (inclusion, conjunction, disjunction, etc.) between them. At the stage of concrete operations, such relations could be established only within one sentence, that is, between individual objects or events, which constitute concrete operations. Now logical relations are established between sentences, that is, between the results of specific operations. Therefore, Piaget calls these operations second-stage operations, or formal operations, while operations within a sentence are concrete operations.
A child at this stage is also able to systematically identify all the variables essential to solving a problem and systematically go through all possible combinations of these variables.
A classic experiment demonstrates the abilities that appear in a child at the stage of formal operations. The child is given a bottle of liquid and shown how adding a few drops of this liquid to a glass with another liquid unknown to the child causes it to turn yellow. After this, the child receives four flasks with different, but colorless and odorless liquids, and he is asked to reproduce the yellow color, using these four flasks at his discretion. This result is achieved by combining liquids from flasks 1 and 3; You can come to this decision by sequentially sorting out, first one after another, all the liquids from the four flasks, and then all possible paired combinations of liquids. The experiment showed that such a systematic search of paired combinations is available only to a child at the stage of formal operations. Younger children are limited to a few combinations of liquids, which do not exhaust all possible combinations.

Studies of the period of formal operations after Piaget
There are also more recent studies of the stage of formal operations, complementing and clarifying the results of Jean Piaget.
Elements of formal operational thinking were discovered in intellectually gifted young children. On the contrary, some adolescents and adults do not achieve true formal operational thinking due to limited abilities or cultural characteristics. Thus, in one study of solving verbal problems requiring logical reasoning, a linear increase in the number of schoolchildren solving problems in accordance with the criteria of the formal operations stage was revealed from 4th to 12th grade (from approximately 10-15% to 80% respectively).
The transition to formal operations is not completely abrupt and universal, but is more specific in relation to areas of knowledge in which the teenager is especially competent.
The age at which a child reaches the stage of formal operations depends on what social class he belongs to.
Even teenagers and adults with high intelligence do not always solve problems at the level of formal operational thinking accessible to them. This can happen if the task seems too far from reality to the person, if the person is tired, bored, overly emotionally excited, or frustrated.

Literature

1 Piaget J. Selected psychological works. M., 1994.
2 Piaget J. Speech and thinking of a child. M., 1994.
3 Flavell John H. Genetic psychology of Jean Piaget. M., 1967.
4 Piaget, J. (1954). “The construction of reality in the child.” New York: Basic Books.
5 Inhelder B., Piaget J. The growth of logical thinking from childhood to adolescence. New York, 1958.
Piaget, J. (1977). The Essential Piaget. ed by Howard E. Gruber and J. Jacques Voneche Gruber, New York: Basic Books.
Piaget, J. (1983). "Piaget's theory". In P. Mussen (ed). Handbook of Child Psychology. 4th edition. Vol. 1. New York: Wiley.
Piaget, J. (1995). Sociological Studies. London: Routledge.
Piaget, J. (2000). "Commentary on Vygotsky." New Ideas in Psychology, 18, 241-259.
Piaget, J. (2001). Studies in Reflecting Abstraction. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
Seifer, Calvin "Educational Psychology"
Cole, M, et al. (2005). The Development of Children. New York: Worth Publishers.

Cognitive development is specific. It manifests itself in the form of baby movements. The child reacts to sounds, but he does not yet understand where exactly they are coming from. Psychologists advise mothers to paint their lips with bright red lipstick in the first months of a child’s life so that the baby is aware of the source of the sound and watches its movement. In the future, this will help the baby learn to speak, repeating the mother’s facial expressions. Newborn children do not distinguish between their mother and strangers, so they go into each person’s arms with equal joy. Also, children at this age tend to repeat light facial combinations (sticking out their tongue, smiling).

Three to six months

The child begins to understand that after every action he performs, the mother’s reaction follows. Of course, children take full advantage of this discovery. As soon as a child starts crying, his mother will immediately come to the rescue and eliminate the reasons for the crying.

9 to 12 months

The child is characterized by a feeling of attachment and longing. He will desire maternal love and affection. If the mother leaves, the baby will cry. At this time, he begins to make many sounds, which will later result in words.

12 to 18 months

At this time, the baby says his first words. He wants to touch, look, feel everything everywhere. A clear sign of this period is the child’s excessive curiosity and independent activity. Cognitive development lies in the fact that a child strives to understand the world around him in any way. The next point is the baby’s desire to imitate. He absolutely accurately copies the body movements of his closest relatives, and can also reproduce what he saw on TV or on the street.

From 18 to 24 months

A two-year-old child has difficulty combining words into sentences. So far this is not working out very well, since communication skills are poorly developed. Words for a child can only mean a specific object. All this is a weak manifestation of imagination, which will begin its active development closer to three years. The baby's memory is best developed during this period of time. If you read the same fairy tale to him every day and suddenly missed a page, the child will definitely notice this.

From 3 years onwards

After reaching the age of three, the child masters all mental functions. The further main task of parents is now to support the development of the baby.

Virtually every task that a person performs in everyday life includes some kind of intellectual or "cognitive" component. A person tries to remember a phone number or remember a list of things to buy at a grocery store; balance your checkbook; find the house of a friend you haven’t visited yet, using his description or using a map. Even when a person simply looks at his watch and finds out how much time is left before a meeting, thinking is at work - of course, mostly automatic thinking, but first I had to learn how to do it.

All of this activity is part of what is commonly called cognitive functioning, or intelligence. A one-year-old child does not know how to use a card, balance a checkbook, or take notes in a lecture. How do children acquire the ability to perform such operations? How can we explain the fact that not all children learn at the same pace or become equally proficient?

Answering questions like these is challenging because there are three very different perspectives on cognitive functioning and intelligence, each of which has led to distinct studies and interpretations. Connecting these three views is not an easy task, and there is no need to rush into it until each point of view has been considered separately.

Historically, the first approach to the study of cognitive development, or intelligence, focused on the basic idea that people differ distinctly in their intellectual skills: the ability to remember a grocery store grocery list, the speed with which they solve problems or learn new words, the ability to as Robert Sternberg says, “respond flexibly to problematic situations.” When we say that someone is “smart” or “very smart,” these are the skills we are referring to, and our opinions are based on the idea that we can rank people according to how “smart” they are. It was this idea that gave rise to intelligence tests, which were designed to simply provide a way to measure individual differences in intellectual skills or abilities.

This definition of intelligence as "level of ability" is also called the psychometric approach, which has been dominant for many years. But this approach has a weakness: it does not take into account the fact that intelligence develops. As children grow up, their thinking becomes more and more abstract and complex. If you give a 5-year-old child a list of products that you supposedly need to buy at the grocery store, it will be difficult for him to remember more than 2-3 names. He is also unlikely to use effective strategies to make things easier to remember, such as repeating a list or organizing the names of things into groups. An eight-year-old will remember more names and may repeat the list out loud or mentally on the way to the store.

Piaget's theory of cognitive development of personality

The fact that intelligence develops lays the foundation for the second direction in the study of cognitive development - the cognitive approach of Jean Piaget and his many followers. Piaget's research focused on the development of cognitive structures rather than intellectual abilities, patterns of development that are common to all children rather than individual differences.

These two approaches have existed side by side for decades, like neighbors who exchange smiles when they meet but never invite each other for coffee. However, in recent years, these two directions have acquired a common “friend” - an information approach to development, partly integrating the first two approaches.

Representatives of this third point of view believe that “intelligence is not an ability or property of the brain. Intelligence has no mental content. Intelligence is a process." According to this view, if we want to understand the essence of intelligence, we need to discover or find ways to measure the basic processes underlying cognitive activity. Once we have discovered these basic processes, we can ask questions about developmental processes and individual differences: Do these basic processes change with age? Do people differ in their speed or ability to use these processes? Information on individual differences in infants in the rate of habituation, or “recognition,” is an example of a group of studies stemming from this new theoretical model.

Each of these three perspectives conveys something useful and varied about intelligence, so it is necessary to consider all three models.

The key point is that assimilation is an active process. Firstly, a person assimilates information selectively. People do not absorb all experiences by acting like blotters; instead, they attend only to those aspects of experience for which schemata already exist.

For example, while listening to a lecture, you may try to write something down in a notebook or keep information in your head, but in fact you are only assimilating those thoughts that you can associate with your existing ideas or model.

For example, one five and a half year old child, playing with a set of flowers, made up 2 groups: one large group of primroses and a smaller group that included a variety of flowers. Piaget then had the following conversation with the child:

Piaget: If I make a bouquet of primroses, and you make a bouquet of all the flowers, which one will be bigger?

Child: Yours.

Piaget: If I collect all the primroses in the meadow, will there be any flowers left?

Child: Yes. (The child understands that there are other flowers besides primroses).

In these conversations with the child, Piaget always sought to understand how the child was thinking, rather than focusing on whether the child could arrive at the correct answer. So he used the "clinical method" in which he followed the child around, asking probe questions or creating special tests to reveal the child's logic. In the early days of Piaget's work, many researchers in the United States were critical of his method because Piaget did not ask every child the same questions. However, the results were so striking and often unexpected that they could not be ignored. As more precise experimental techniques were invented, researchers often concluded that Piaget's observations and discoveries were accurate.

Assimilation also modifies the perceived information because each assimilated event or experience includes certain characteristics of the schema into which the event or experience was assimilated. If you call a new sweater green, even if it is actually yellow-green, it will be remembered as greener and less yellow than it really is.

Accommodation.

An additional process is accommodation, which involves changes in schema that occur as a result of new information acquired through assimilation. A child who sees and feels a square object for the first time will reorganize his pattern of grasping the object, so that the next time he reaches for an object of this shape, his hand will be more accurately curved for the grasp. Thus, in Piaget's theory, the process of accommodation is key to developmental change. Through accommodation, a person reorganizes his thoughts, improves skills, and changes strategies.

Balancing.

The third aspect of adaptation is balancing. Piaget believed that the child always strives to obtain consistent information in order to be “in balance”, to acquire an understanding of the world that has a comprehensive meaning. This is similar to the actions of a scientist when he builds a theory based on some information. The scientist wants to build a theory that is confirmed by every observation and that has an internally coherent structure. When new experimental data coincide, the scientist assimilates it into the existing theory; if they do not match, he can simply discard the outlier data or make minor modifications to the theory. However, if enough inconsistent data accumulates, the scientist will have to discard his theory or change some basic theoretical understanding - any reaction will be a type of balancing.

An analogy with a road map would be appropriate here. Imagine that you've just moved to a new city and instead of buying a map, you're trying to navigate the area using only a hand-drawn map from your friend. While exploring a new city, you make adjustments to your map, make new drawings and notes. This revised map is a significant improvement over the original draft, but in the end you will find that it is unreadable and still has many serious flaws. So you start over and draw a new map based on the information you know. You keep the map with you, check it and draw on it until it contains all the correct data. The corrections and notes you make on your map are analogous to accommodation in Piaget's theory; the process of drawing a new map is an analogy of balancing.

Piaget believed that the child proceeds in a similar way, creating more or less internally consistent, consistent models or theories. However, since the infant begins with a very limited repertoire of schemas, the first "theories" or constructions that the child creates simply may not be adequate. These inadequacies, Piaget believed, induce the child to make periodic changes in his internal structure.

Piaget identified three particularly significant reorganizations - moments of balancing, each of them appears at a new stage of development.

The first refers to around 18 months, when the infant moves from the stage of dominance of sensory and motor circuits to the use of the first symbols.

The second moment of equilibration usually occurs between 5 and 7 years, when the child acquires a new set of meaningful schemas, which Piaget called operations. They represent more abstract and general mental operations, such as addition and subtraction.

The third main balancing occurs during adolescence, when the child understands that one can “operate” with ideas in the same way as with events or objects. These three basic equilibrations create four stages.

Sensorimotor stage – from birth to approximately 18 months.

Preoperative stage – from 18 months to approximately 6 years.

The stage of concrete operations is from 6 to 12 years.

Formal operations stage – from 12 years onwards.

Further it will become clear that cognitive development is much less staged in nature than Piaget originally assumed. Yet Piaget's stages have become an important basis for research in cognitive development for many decades. It is therefore worthwhile to follow the general structure of Piaget's stages, describing his understanding of each period and then highlighting contemporary research conducted within each specified age.

Piaget's idea of ​​the sensorimotor period

According to Piaget, the child is involved in a basic process of adaptation and tries to extract meaning from the world around him. It assimilates incoming information into the limited number of sensory and motor circuits with which it is born - visual, auditory, sucking and grasping circuits - and adapts these circuits to the experience it receives. Piaget believed that this moment serves as the starting point for the entire process of cognitive development, and called this primitive form of thinking sensorimotor intelligence.

According to Piaget's point of view, at first the child is completely in the power of the present moment, responding to all available stimuli. He does not remember events or things with which he has already interacted, and does not appear to plan or anticipate anything. Changes occur gradually during the first 18 months, when the child comes to understand that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight and when he is able to retain objects, actions and people in memory for a certain period. However, Piaget insisted that during this period the infant is not yet able to manipulate early mental images or memories and use symbols to replace objects or events. It is this new ability to manipulate internal symbols, such as words or images, that marks the beginning of the next stage, preoperational thinking, between 18 and 24 months of age. John Flavell made a very good generalization:

“the child demonstrates a completely practical, action-based perceive-act form of intellectual functioning; it does not reveal the contemplative, reflective, symbol-manipulating form that we usually imagine in connection with the cognitive domain. The infant “knows” in the sense of recognizing or anticipating familiar repeated objects and events and “thinks” in the sense of acting on them using the mouth, hand, eye and other sensorimotor tools in predictable, organized and often adaptive ways... This is a type of non-reflective intelligence that your dog relies on to exist in the world.”

The transition from the limited repertoire of schemas available to the newborn to the ability to use symbols occurs gradually, although Piaget identified six substages.

Each substage reflects some specific progress. Substage 2 is characterized by the emergence of coordination between vision and hearing, vision and movement towards an object, movement towards an object and sucking, which are the main ways 2-month-old children master the world. The term primary circular responses refers to many of the simple, repetitive actions that are visible at this stage and which, in infants, are focused on their own body. The child accidentally sucks his thumb, finds it pleasant and repeats the action. Secondary circular reactions in substage 3 differ only in that the child repeats some actions in order to trigger a reaction outside of his body. The baby coos and the mother smiles, so the baby coos again, apparently to make the mother smile again; the child accidentally knocks on the toys hanging above his crib, they move, then he repeats the hand movement, apparently with the intention of making the toys move again. These first connections between body movements and their external consequences are automatic, much like a form of operant conditioning. It is only at substage 4 that a real awareness of causal connections emerges, and at this stage the child really begins to carefully study the world.

This becomes even more noticeable at substage 5 with the appearance of tertiary circular reactions. In this pattern, the child does not simply repeat the original behavior, but tries to make changes. A baby in substage 5 may try several sounds or facial expressions to see if they will make mom smile, or try to move his hand in a different way or in a new direction to make toys move differently. At this stage, the child’s behavior is deliberate, experimental. However, Piaget believed that even at substage 5 the child does not have thinking.

Piaget's description of this developmental sequence, based in large part on detailed observations of his own three children, has prompted a number of studies, some of which confirm the general basis of his observations, but some of which do not. There is information that suggests that in many ways Piaget underestimated infants' ability to store, remember, and organize sensory and motor information. Studies of memory and imitation in infants lead to the same conclusion.