Excerpt on Piagetian Cognitive Development Stages

190 11 Stages of Cognitive Development e the reflexive stage mentioned above corresponds to what some post-Piagetan theorists have called the post-formal stage — Example: Using abstract lessons learned from building structures out of blocks to guide the construction of new ways to think and understand — “Zen and the art of blocks building” (by analogy to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [Pir84]). Piagetan Stages of Development Full self modification Penexive Deep understanding and control of self structures and dynamics Abstract reasoning and hypothesizing. Objective Formal detachment from phenomenal self Rich variety of learned mental representations and Concrete operations thereon. Emergence of phenomenal self. : Making sense and achieving simple goals in Infantile sensorimotor reality. No self yet. Fig. 11.1: Piagetan Stages of Cognitive Development More explicitly, Piaget defined his stages in psychological terms roughly as follows: e Infantile: In this stage a mind develops basic world-exploration driven by instinctive ac- tions. Reward-driven reinforcement of actions learned by imitation, simple associations be- tween words and objects, actions and images, and the basic notions of time, space, and causality are developed. The most simple, practical ideas and strategies for action are learned. e Preoperational: At this stage we see the formation of mental representations, mostly poorly organized and un-abstracted, building mainly on intuitive rather than logical think- ing. Word-object and image-object associations become systematic rather than occasional. Simple syntax is mastered, including an understanding of subject-argument relationships. One of the crucial learning achievements here is “object permanence” — infants learn that objects persist even when not observed. However, a number of cognitive failings persist with respect to reasoning about logical operations, and abstracting the effects of intuitive actions to an abstract theory of operations. e Concrete: More abstract logical thought is applied to the physical world at this stage. Among the feats achieved here are: reversibility — the ability to undo steps already done; conservation — understanding that properties can persist in spite of appearances; theory of mind — an understanding of the distinction between what I know and what others know (If HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013106