Piaget's Cognitive Analysis

There have been many theories developed concerning the development of cognition in children from birth with a majority ending at adolescence; however not many have been as influential, and perhaps as controversial, as Jean Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory. Piaget’s theory concerning children’s cognitive development works on a four stage process which primarily relates to the child’s ability to understand and assimilate new information and these four stages each relate individually to vague start/end within a developing child’s lifespan up until adolescence, where it is considered they are capable of hypothetical and deductive reasoning, and possibly beyond. However, there have been a multitude of criticisms made against his theory and …show more content…
However these claims made by Piaget may not be wholly true as some of the later stages may not be reached due to our own individual differences that develop from the culture we identify with and the social setting we find ourselves in (Vygotsky, 1978) further backing this idea that certain later stages are sometimes never accessed by some individuals as it has been found by Keating (1979) that 40-60% of college students were found to fail formal operation tasks, which Dansen (1994) further studied finding that one-third of adults ever got to the formal operation stage. As well as this, the theory has been heavily criticised for being ethnocentric, and thus not representative of the population on a whole, as he only used children from Western Europe in his samples; which were generally quite small samples. He even used his own children, who were still from western European culture, meaning the samples he used in many of his studies are biased and thus we are not able to generalize to the population at …show more content…
While at this stage Piaget promotes the idea that children develop object permanence at sub stage 6; which involves the child understanding that an object continues to exist when it is out of his/her visual range and so they do not search further for the object when it disappears and is surprised when it “reappears.” The problem with this is from Bower and Wishart (1972) who demonstrated within a lab environment studying 1-4 month olds a similar technique to Piaget’s blanket technique, but instead turning out the lights then filming the infant’s reaction with an infrared camera. This research showed that the infant continued to reach for the object for up to 90 seconds after it became “invisible” yet this does have its criticisms such as how the child was given up to 3 minutes to react in such time the child could of completed the task accidentally. Along this line of argument the Mehler and Dupoux (1994) added that the child could become distracted or simply lose interest as it’s been proven time and time again that they have a small attention span furthermore it could simply be that Piaget overestimated the

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