Cognitive development is a field in neuroscience and psychology that focuses on a child’s development with respect to information processing, conceptual resources, language learning, perceptual skill, and other aspects of the adult brain and cognitive psychology. Qualitative differences regarding how a child processes their experience and how an adult processes their experience in life are acknowledged. In short, it can be defined as the emergence of the ability to cognize, understand, and articulate a person’s understanding in adult terms. It is how a person thinks, perceives, and gains an understanding of their world via the relations between learning factors and genetics.
There are 4 main stages:
- Reasoning
- Intelligence
- Language
- Memory
These stages begin when the baby is about a year and a half old, when they start playing with toys, listening to their parents speak, watching tv, anything that catches their attention aids in their cognitive development.
Jean Piaget was a major force in establishing this field, who formed the “theory of cognitive development”. Piaget proposed 4 main stages:
- Sensorimotor
- Preoperational period
- Concrete operational period
- Formal operational period
Since the proposed them, many of Piaget’s theoretical claims have fallen out of favor. His description of the most prominent changes in cognition with age is generally still accepted today In recent years, alternative models have been developed, including neo-Piagetian and information-processing theories of cognitive development, that aim to integrate Piaget’s ideas with more recent concepts and models in cognitive and developmental science, social-constructivist approaches, and theoretical cognitive neuroscience.
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