Building a Set of Mental Skills
Many parents tend to equate cognitive development with such learning milestones as starting to read, count or recite the alphabet. While the phrase does encompass such accomplishments, it means a great deal more besides. Simply stated, cognitive development is the growth of a child's basic mental skills - his ability to perceive and remember, to reason and imagine. It is the process by which a youngster acquires knowledge and understanding of the world around him, and also the way he learns to plan, anticipate and choose a course of action to meet the changing demands of that world. The process begins at birth and advances rapidly during the first few years, fucled by the richness of the child's surroundings and his ability to adapt to new situations.
To understand cognitive development, it helps to contrast the many ways in which adults acquire knowledge and the relatively few ways, at first, in which a baby can learn. Adults learn through experimentation, observation and imitation, as well as by asking questions, reasoning and using intuition. A baby starts out solely with instincts, then proceeds to
master all of the other learning skills step by step Think of your baby's mind as a system -- undeveloped at first - that absorbs, processes and transforms information and stimuli collected by the Because he annor use language to communicate and the senses, has few past experiences to serve as reference points, his thought processes are very simple to begin with. If it were possible to peer inside his mind, you would probably see a series of isolated visual images and unrelated sounds. Cognitive growth begins with the five senses and the inborn physical reflexes lexus among them sucking crying and grasping. As simple and primitive as these reflexes are, they are enough to start your infant learning He instinctively repeats and practices the few skills he has He roots for the breast, waves his arms and legs, and cries to express his needs. In doing so, he is brought face to face with the world around him. When he roots on his father's shoulder he does not find food, only affection and a scratchy chin. When he thrashes his arms in his cradle. he discovers the toys that you left to amuse him. His cries sometimes bring you to his bedside and sometimes bring unfamiliar faces -an aunt, perhaps, or a baby-sitter. He develops new ways of responding and new ways of thinking in order to cope with each new experience the fundamental pattern of cognitive growth.
Piaget's theories Much of what is known today about the ways children come to under of development stand the world stems from the work of Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist whose writings between 1923 and 1976 revolutionized the study of cognition. Piaget grew up in a society where young children were generally regarded as miniature adults, with mental processes that were scaled-down version of grown-up thinking But he began to question this view during his first job in Paris as a postgraduate student. Working as an intelligence tester for Alfred Binet, the grandfather of the modern day IQ test, Piaget became intrigued by the incorrect
learn.
sponses young children gave to certain test questions. He saw similari ties in the wrong answers given by children of the same age and won
dered about the mental patterns that produced those responses activities in minute detail, he proposed theories outlining the ways all children learn to adapt and organize their behavior. Piaget concluded, in essence, that children develop primarily by interacting with the world around them. He viewed children as intel lectually curious by nature, with an insatiable appetite for learning and a strong need to understand what they see, He believed that they learn by doing and that in their characteristically egocentric fashion - they can perceive the world only in the way they themselves have
In addition to his observations at Binet's laboratory school, Piaget began to study his own three children -Laurent, Jacqueline and Lucienne in play situations. After years of charting their day-to-day
experienced it Although some subsequent scholars have devel oped modified versions of Piaget's views and have taken different approaches to the subject of human learning. Piaget's theories remain at the core of modern cognitive studies.
Piaget saw learning as the product of a child's constantly adapting to the demands of the world, His model of cognitive growth is built around two
fundamental concepts, assimilation and accommoda tion. These he viewed as opposite but complementary parts of the process of adaptation. When a child encounters
something new, whether it is a bright light a strange face or a new kind of animal, he assimilates it that is, he adds it to the repertoire of things he already knows. At the same time, he is forced to change, or
accommodate his thinking and behavior to allow for the differences he finds in the new object. He must make the new information fit with his preconceived notions of the world and, if necessary, create a new mental category in which to store it. For example, a child who sees an elephant for the first time may think of it as a horse, because up to that point horses were the largest animals he had seen. When he observes that the elepha is not really like a horse but is a much larger animal with wide, floppy cars and an extraordinarily long nose, he accommodates this new information into his mental storehouse. He realizes that there are animals even bigger than horses, His notion of animals has changed: It still is not perfect, but it has been refined. He has pushed his mind a little further, taken another step in his mental development According to Piaget, knowledge is acquired in small steps like these, each of them giving the child new reference points for dealing with the next new experience.
This fluid process of assimilating and accommodating new information leads the child to form mental patterns - what Piaget called schemata.
