Cognitive Development

11 Pages 2830 Words

ths showed knowledge of object permanence. This could be due to the fact that children today are more able and intelligent as a result of more stimulation, thus capable of doing tasks earlier than they would have forty years ago. Piaget believed that in this stage children use play to explore and manipulate the world around them.
Piaget’s second stage, the Pre-Operational, is sub-divided into early (2-4 years), and late (4-7 years). In the early stage children start to build on the capacity for symbolic thought and begin to acquire language skills (Piaget, 1954). Piaget elucidated that a child in this stage is egocentric, believing that everyone sees the world from his or her perspective. The most established experiment supporting this theory is the three-mountain scene that can be found in appendix Three. As well as this, Piaget believed children in the early pre-operational stage to display animism. This is the belief that inanimate objects are alive (Donaldson, 1987).
Children in the late Pre-Operational stage begin to grasp conservatio...