by Sabrina Ginesi

Created on: June 25, 2008

In this essay we are going to look at the topic area of cognitive development, which is concerned with how cognition changes i.e. the ways in which human thinking develops & changes. The two psychologists we are going to look at are Jean Piaget & Lev Vygotsky.
It is common knowledge that intelligence increases with age. Cognitive reasoning is primitive at birth & changes from infancy to adulthood. Additional experiences & extended cognitive development lead to more sophisticated & accurate analysis of the world. But the mechanics & extent of this change are not common knowledge & before the studies of Jean Piaget they were hardly even considered.

Piaget (1896 1980) was a Swiss psychologist who became a leading cognitive theorist in the 1930's. The fundamental question he asked was "How does a child's knowledge of the world develop?"
Lev Vygotsky (1896 1934) was a Russian psychologist & a contemporary of Piaget, though they never met. His work remained unknown for years because it was banned by Stalin & only came to view much later after his death & collapse of the iron curtain.
Piaget proposed that humans are innately programmed to adapt to their environment. This leads to developing the cognitive ability to understand / have a more accurate view of the world (knowledge). Piaget saw development as preceding learning & in some way genetically determined whereas Vygotsky saw learning as preceding development he accepted the general stages of development but rejected the underlying genetically determined sequence put forth by Piaget.

JEAN PIAGET
Piaget's central assumption was that children's cognitive abilities grow as a result of their active participation in the development of knowledge. Thus they construct their own understanding. In fact they continually construct more advanced understandings of the world. These "understandings" are in the form of structures he called schemas (i.e. the basic units of intellect). Schemas are frameworks that develop to help organise knowledge Looking at something is a looking schema, touching something is a touching schema, holding something is a holding schema. Therefore a scheme (schema) is the action of categorising rather than a category itself. A schema contains all your information, experience, ideas & memories about something. A baby, Piaget suggested, is born with very simple sensory schemas e.g. tasting, touching etc., as the child becomes a toddler the simple sensory schemas are combined with more complex mental schemas

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