Essays on Cognitive Development in Children

Consciousness, perception and memory are the aspects of cognition, the abilities which evolve with the growth and maturation of the organism. The first cognitive units and “schemes” for a child are the main features of an object perceived by the rapid acquaintance with it, like a dome as the hallmark of the Capitol in Washington. Images, as opposed to schemes, are more detailed. Children often have an eidetic imagination, in other words, they can “see” the object in detail within 45 seconds after it disappears from sight. This ability of children should not be confused with hallucinations. By the time the child goes to school, he/she is able to perceive the symbols, such as road warning signs, or letters of the alphabet. Then the general notions are being learnt combining specific separately existing objects. Finally, when the mind gains the ability to establish connections between different notions, it covers the rules, such as formal rules of mathematics and logic (Pruitt & Aacap, 2000; Muris, 2002).

There are many schemes of intellectual development of a child. A very important and reputable theory of cognitive development was proposed by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who considers the child’s mental development as a continuous process (Ault, 1977). Piaget discovered that the psyche of a child is arranged quite differently from an adult’s psyche. For example, children believe that if an object is moving, it’s alive, and that the name of an object is kind of “sitting” inside it. A child’s question “why?” is associated with the conviction that everything has its purpose. Giving a scientific answer to the child’s question “Why do stars shine?” means complete misunderstanding of the child. The children’s talk a lack of social orientation is noticeable: the children speak more in the presence of others than with to others. In contrast to the self-centered adults who become so by their own will, children are egocentric because they almost unable to put themselves in someone else’s position, or take someone else’s point of view (Ault, 1977; Schneider, 2006).

For babies “out of sight” literally means “out of mind”: an object not simply disappears from sight, it stops existing. The psyche of an infant is unable to perceive the constancy of the existence of things. A five-year-old child is already able to do this, but he/she still does not have the ability to create mental representations necessary to understand the constancy of mass or volume of the object after the apparent change of its shape. A child at the age of five (or less) does not realize that the amount of water transfused from a broad low glass in a narrow and tall, remains unchanged – he/she is sure that the volume of water increases. Children find it difficult to distinguish between appearance and reality (Muris, 2002). Piaget came to the conclusion that reality reaches an individual not from outside, but from within, through its own logic depending on the structure of the psyche. According to Piaget and other structuralists, the psyche is not a “tabula rasa” as the English philosopher J. Locke believed, it operates with the characteristics of the environment in terms of its structural development (Ault, 1977). An image of reality for a child is not a passive copy, but an active reconstruction of the world.