Find anything from this website using our "Quick Finder" option at the bottom of this page or click here.
Cognitive Development
Cognitive development is the development of all mental activities-remembering, understanding, planning, categorizing, creating, problem solving, reasoning, attending, symbolizing and also fantasizing. As the list above could still be expanded without limits, cognition is the inner process and product of the mind that leads to knowing. Cognitive development is crucial for survival and this factor, is the one that makes human beings stand out from other living beings.
- Birth to 1 month:
- Newborn reflexes.
- Babies explore the world with limited motor skills such as sucking and head turning.
- Most of the explorations are by chance behaviors like accidentally putting the thumb in her mouth.
- Even in this early stage, infants have some idea about size and shape constancy. Research involving black and white cubes of different sizes has suggested that infants were able to understand sizes.
- Babies imitate adults' facial expressions and gestures even when they are as young as less than a month.
- 1-4 months:
- During this stage, babies explore the world through more coordinated motor abilities.
- Though there is limited anticipation of events.
- Babies have some awareness of object permanence.
- By this time, babies can imitate adults' expressions even after 24 hours.
- They can categorize perceptually similar stimuli.
- 4-8 months:
- The babies in this stage explore the world using well coordinated motor skills like reaching, grasping, banging and other manual behaviors.
- They can identify object by their shape, texture and color.
- During this stage, babies can imitate adults' actions on objects even after 24 hours.
- They begin to categorize objects by function and behavior.
- 8-12 months:
- In this stage, babies' behaviors are intentional and goal directed. It is common to see a 1 year old banging different objects again and learning from them.
- They exercise an improved anticipation of events.
- Problem solving abilities are increased that they can solve problems by analogy to other similar problems.
- They can find objects that are hidden in some location. But still, they cannot find an object hidden in a second location (B) after having found the object many times from first location (A). This is termed to as A-not-B search error.
- They can categorize many objects by function and behavior.
- 12-18 months:
- Toddlers can explore objects by acting on them in novel ways.
- They experiment with actions while solving problems.
- By this age, toddlers can find objects hidden in different locations (B) even if they are used to finding it in one particular location (A). In other terms, they perform A-B search successfully.
- They are able to imitate across changes in context and after one to several months.
- 18-24 months:
- Toddlers in this stage can solve problems at once without much experimentation with actions.
- They can also find an object which was displaced while out of sight. Consider showing an object to a toddler of this stage and moving it under a cover. Now, displace the object while under the cover, into another box. The toddler will be able to find the object even if it was moved into the box while under the cover.
- They can imitate everyday behaviors at any time. This is the stage where make-believe play begins. Remember toddlers less than 2 years age talking into toy phones or drinking from an empty cup?
- 2-4 years:
- During the third and fourth years, children show a dramatic increase in representational activity. Language, make-believe play etc will be developed greatly.
- They are able to have everyday, face-to-face communication and can understand others' perspective in simple situations.
- They can distinguish between moving living beings and other objects.
- They notice transformation and understand causes and effects.
- They can sort familiar objects into organized categories. They can also give explanations and characteristics of the individual categories.
- 4-7 years:
- It is during this age that children become increasingly aware that most cognitive processes are representational.
- They can explain logical events by replacing magical beliefs in fairy tales and other stories.
| Quick Finder: |