Page 34 - Demo

164 PILLAR 2 Development and LearningCognitive Development in Infancy and Childhood10-3 How does Jean Piaget%u2019s theory of cognitive development describe how children think at specific cognitive stages?Few people have had a greater impact on developmental psychology than Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (pronounced pee-ah-zhay). In 1920, Piaget was working on intelligence tests to determine the age at which children were likely to answer questions correctly. However, Piaget became interested in the incorrect responses children gave, cleverly realizing there was a lot to learn from wrong answers. Children at a given age were making remarkably similar mistakes.Over the next 50 years, Piaget26 advanced the belief that the way children think and solve problems depends on their stage of cognitive development. Cognitionrefers to all mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, and remembering. Children know less than you and I know, but they also think differently. Try to explain to a 3-year-old that you need a credit card to purchase an app for your phone and you%u2019ll get nowhere. However, an 8-year-old can understand that to purchase a $1.99 in-game option on Royal Match or Candy Crush Saga you need a credit card. Given your more advanced reasoning skills, that same 8-year-old will not stand much of a chance against you if you%u2019re playing a strategy game such as chess or Settlers of Catan.Piaget wrote that all people, even infants, regularly face and adapt to environmental challenges. We do so by developing schemas (sometimes called schemes), which are concepts or mental frameworks that organize and interpret information. As a toddler, for example, your schema for getting food may have been to pull on the pant leg of the nearest adult or to start crying. By now, you have countless schemas, covering topics ranging from how to start a car to which buttons you push on your remote to switch from Netflix to Prime Video. How did you develop all these helpful mental plans? Piaget%u2019s answer would be that you used two different experiences:%u2022 Assimilation%u2014interpreting your new experiences in terms of your existing schemas%u2022 Accommodation%u2014adapting your current schemas to incorporate new informationdevelopmental psychologyA subfield of psychology that studies physical, cognitive, and social change throughout the life span.cognition All mental processes associated with thinking, knowing, and remembering.schemas Concepts or mental frameworks that organize and interpret information.assimilation Interpreting new experience in terms of existing schemas.accommodation Adapting current schemas to incorporate new information.Two-year-old Jocelyn has learnedthe schema for dog from her picture books.Jocelyn sees a cat and calls it a %u201cdog.%u201dShe is trying to assimilate this new animal into an existing schema. Her mother tells her, %u201cNo, it%u2019s a cat.%u201dJocelyn accommodates her schema for four-legged animals and continues to modifythat schema to include different kinds of dogs and cats in the neighborhood.FIGURE 10.5 Assimilation and AccommodationThese experiences allow children to make sense of their worlds either by interpreting new information with existing schemas or by changing a current schema.JEAN PIAGET [pee-ah-zhay] (1896%u20131980) Pioneer in the study of developmental psychology who introduced a stage theory of cognitive development that led to a better understanding of children%u2019s thought processes. Patrick Grehan/Corbis/Getty Images%u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Do not distribute.