Cognitive definition in child development: What Is Cognitive Development | Help Me Grow MN

Cognition | ECLKC

Cognition, or cognitive development, includes reasoning, memory, problem-solving, and thinking skills. Young children use these abilities to make sense of and organize their world. By the time children reach the preschool years, their cognitive skills have grown so much that they can engage in complex mathematical thinking and scientific reasoning.

Infants and toddlers play an active role in their own cognitive development by exploring and testing the world around them. Through these explorations and experiments, and with the support of parents, teachers, and other adults, infants and toddlers begin to understand basic mathematical, spatial, and causal relationships. More and more, infants and toddlers can rely on their developing memory to help them make sense of the world. All this activity in the first three years lays the foundation for the more complex cognitive skills children will build as preschoolers.

For preschoolers, cognitive development is presented as two different domains: Mathematics Development and Scientific Reasoning. This separation highlights the increasingly complex and more differentiated cognitive abilities of this age group. Mathematics Development in preschoolers refers to understanding numbers and quantities, their relationships, and operations, such as what it means to add to and take away. Mathematics also includes shapes and their structure, reasoning, measurement, classification, and patterns.

Scientific Reasoning is the emerging ability to develop scientific knowledge about the natural and physical worlds. Children begin to learn scientific skills and methods and continue developing reasoning and problem-solving skills. For preschoolers, scientific investigation includes making observations, recording them, talking about them, and analyzing them. Problem-solving and reasoning become more complex as preschoolers gain new abilities to ask questions and gather information.

To read more about this domain, visit the Interactive Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework.

The Cognition domain includes the following sub-domains:

Infants and Toddlers

• Exploration and Discovery
• Memory
• Reasoning and Problem-Solving
• Emergent Mathematical Thinking
• Imitation and Symbolic Representation and Play

Preschoolers

• Counting and Cardinality
• Operations and Algebraic Thinking
• Measurement
• Geometry and Spatial Sense
• Scientific Inquiry
• Reasoning and Problem-Solving

Effective Teaching Practices

The effective teaching practices that follow are grouped in three categories: Interactions, Environment, and Individualization. Examples of ways to support goals for children are provided by sub-domain. It is likely, however, that these practices will also support goals for children in additional domains and sub-domains. This is the nature of teaching and learning in the early years.

Home Visitors

Teaching practices in home visiting are the ways home visitors work with families to provide experiences that support their child’s development and learning, engage in responsive interactions, and use home as the learning environment. Home visitors:

• Facilitate parent-child interactions
• Engage parents in focusing on their child’s development
• Directly encourage parents to teach, talk, and interact with their child in responsive and warm ways
• Use family activities, routines, and materials in the home for learning
• Collaborate with parents to plan activities and experiences

Home visitors may consider using group care teaching practices in the “Know,” “Do,” and “Improve” sections during home visits and group socializations. They can engage with parents to identify, adapt, and use these practices or when appropriate, model the practices.

Sub-Domains: Infants and Toddlers

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Exploration and Discovery

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Memory

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Reasoning and Problem-Solving

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Emergent Mathematical Thinking

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Imitation and Symbolic Representation and Play

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Sub-Domains: Preschoolers

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Counting and Cardinality

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Operations and Algebraic Thinking

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Measurement

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Geometry and Spatial Sense

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Scientific Inquiry

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Reasoning and Problem-Solving

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Cognitive development

,  School Readiness

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National Centers:
Early Childhood Development, Teaching and Learning

Last Updated: July 27, 2020

Cognitive Development in Children | Advice for Parents

Cognitive development means the development of the ability to think and reason.

Children ages 6 to 12, usually think in concrete ways (concrete operations). This can include things like how to combine, separate, order, and transform objects and actions.

Adolescence marks the beginning development of more complex thinking processes (also called formal logical operations). This time can include abstract thinking the ability to form their own new ideas or questions. It can also include the ability to consider many points of view and compare or debate ideas or opinions. It can also include the ability to consider the process of thinking.

Typical Cognitive Changes During Adolescence

During adolescence (between 12 and 18 years of age), the developing teenager gains the ability to think systematically about all logical relationships within a problem. The transition from concrete thinking to formal logical operations happens over time.

Every adolescent progresses at their own rate in developing their ability to think in more complex ways. Each adolescent develops their own view of the world. Some adolescents may be able to apply logical operations to school work before they are able to apply them to personal problems.

When emotional issues come up, they can add an additional level of complexity for an adolescent’s cognitive reasoning. The ability to consider possibilities, emotions, and facts, may impact decision making, in positive or negative ways.

Some common features indicating growth from more simple to more complex cognitive development include:

Early Adolescence

During early adolescence, the use of more complex thinking is focused on personal decision making in school and home environments. This can include:

• Begins to demonstrate use of formal logical operations in schoolwork.
• Begins to question authority and society standards.
• Begins to form and verbalize their own thoughts and views on a variety of topics. These are usually more related to their own life, such as:
• Which sports are better to play
• Which groups are better to be included in
• What personal looks are desirable or attractive
• What parental rules should be changed

Middle Adolescence

The focus of middle adolescence often includes more philosophical and futuristic concerns. Examples may include:

• Often questions and analyzes more extensively
• Thinks about and begins to form their own code of ethics (such as, What do I think is right?)
• Thinks about different possibilities and begins to develop own identity (such as, Who am I?)
• Thinks about and begins to consider possible future goals (such as, What do I want?)
• Thinks about and begins to make their own plans
• Begins to think long term
• Begins to consider how to influence relationships with others

Late Adolescence

During late adolescence, complex thinking processes are used to focus on less self-centered concepts and personal decision making. Examples may include:

• Increased thoughts about more global concepts such as justice, history and politics
• Develops idealistic views on specific topics or concerns
• Debates and develops intolerance of opposing views
• Begins to focus thinking on making career decisions
• Begins to focus thinking on emerging role in adult society

Fostering Healthy Adolescent Cognitive Development

To help encourage positive and healthy cognitive development in the adolescent:

• Help adolescents in getting adequate sleep, hydration, and nutrition.
• Include adolescents in discussions about a variety of topics, issues, and current events.
• Encourage adolescents to share ideas and thoughts with adults.
• Encourage adolescents to think independently and develop their own ideas.
• Help adolescents in setting their own goals.
• Encourage adolescents to think about possibilities of the future.
• Compliment and praise adolescents for well-thought-out decisions.
• Help adolescents in reviewing any poorly made decisions.

Last Updated 12/2020

Reviewed By Amy Ramsey, MA, LPC, CCLS

Cincinnati Children’s has primary care services at locations throughout Greater Cincinnati.

Child Cognitive Development (GDP) – Psychologos

Although parents understand that their child’s physical growth is accompanied by changes in his intelligence, it is often difficult for them to imagine what these changes are. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) greatly influenced the opinions of modern psychologists about these changes.

Before Piaget, two approaches dominated the psychological conception of the child’s cognitive development: in one, based on the principle of biological maturation, the “natural” component of development played an exceptional role; in the other, based on the principle of learning and the influence of the environment, almost exclusive preference was given to the “acquired” component. Piaget approached the problem differently, focusing on the interplay between the child’s naturally maturing abilities and his relationships with the environment. In this section, we give a brief overview of Piaget’s developmental stage theory and then look at criticisms of this theory and some more recent approaches. We will also discuss the work of the Russian psychologist Vygotsky, whose ideas about cognitive development, first published in the 1930s, have received renewed scholarly attention in recent years.
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Children often enjoy playing with empty boxes just as much as with the toys they contain. Piaget believed that children act as “curious scientists” and experiment with objects in their environment to see what happens.

Piaget’s stages of development

Partly as a result of observing his own children, Piaget became interested in the relationship between the child’s naturally maturing abilities and his interactions with his environment. Piaget saw in the child an active participant in this process, and not a passive “recipient” of biological development and stimuli imposed from outside. In particular, according to Piaget, the child should be viewed as a research scientist conducting experiments on the world in order to see what happens (“What can you feel if you suck on the ear of a teddy bear?”; “What will happen if I move my plate over the edge of the table?”
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As a result of these mini-experiments, the child builds “theories” – Piaget called them schemas – about how the physical and social worlds work. Encountering a new object or event, the child tries to understand it in the language of an already existing schema (Piaget called this the process of assimilation: the child tries to liken the new event to a pre-existing schema). If the old schema proves inadequate to assimilate the new event, then the child, like a good scientist, modifies it and thereby expands his theory of the world (this process of schema modification Piaget called accommodation) (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969).

Piaget’s first work as a graduate psychologist was an intelligence “tester” based on Alfred Binet, inventor of the IQ test (the first letters of the words intellectual quotient) (see Chapter 12). But then Piaget found that he was more interested in children’s incorrect answers than their performance on an intelligence test. Why do kids make mistakes like this? How is their thinking different from adults? He began to closely watch his own children during the game; while often asking them simple scientific and moral questions and asking them to explain how they arrived at their answers. Based on his observations, Piaget became convinced that the development of children’s ability to think and reason passes through a number of qualitatively different stages of child growth. He singled out 4 main stages in cognitive development and a number of substages in each of them. The main stages and their main characteristics are given in table. 3.1.
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Table 3.1. Piaget’s stages of cognitive development

Sensorimotor stage

Noting the close relationship between motor activity and perception in infants, Piaget designated the first 2 years of life as the sensorimotor stage. During this period, babies are busy discovering the connection between their actions and their consequences. They learn, for example, how far one has to stretch to pick up an object; what happens if you push a plate of food over the edge of the table; and also that the hand is part of the body, but the railing of the manger is not. Through countless “experiments,” infants begin to form the concept of themselves as something separate from the outside world.
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At this stage, an important discovery is the concept of object permanence – the realization that an object continues to exist even when it is inaccessible to the senses. If you cover with a cloth a toy that an 8-month-old child reaches for, he immediately stops reaching out and loses interest. He is not surprised or upset, does not try to find a toy – in general, he acts as if it ceased to exist (Fig. 3.3).

Fig. 3.3. object persistence. If the toy is hidden behind the screen, the baby acts as if it no longer exists. From this observation, Piaget concludes that the child has not yet mastered the concept of object permanence. nine0007

In contrast, a 10-month-old child actively searches for an object hidden under a cloth or behind a screen. This older child understands that the object exists, although it is not visible, that is, he comprehended the concept of the constancy of the object. But even at this age, the search is limited. If such a child once managed to find a toy hidden in a certain place, he will continue to look for it there, even if he saw how an adult hides it in a new place. This child simply repeats the action that once led him to receive the toy, and does not look for it where he last saw it. Until about a year old, a child cannot consistently search for an object where it disappeared before his eyes for the last time, regardless of what was in previous attempts.
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Pre-operational stage

At about 1.5 to 2 years of age, children begin to use speech. Words, like symbols, can represent objects or groups of objects, and one object can represent (symbolize) another. So, during the game, a 3-year-old child can handle a stick as if it were a horse and ride it around the room; a wooden cube can be a car for him, one doll can be a dad and another a child.

Although children aged 3-4 can think symbolically, their words and images do not yet have a logical organization. Piaget calls the pre-operational stage of cognitive development between the ages of 2 and 7, because the child does not yet understand certain rules or operations. An operation is a procedure for mentally separating, combining, or otherwise transforming information in a logical way. For example, if water is poured from a tall, narrow glass into a low, wide one, adults know that the amount of water has not changed, because they can mentally do the reverse operation: they can imagine how water is poured from a low glass back into a tall one, thereby coming to original state. In a child at the preoperational stage of cognitive development, the concept of reversibility and other mental operations is rather weak or absent. Therefore, according to Piaget, children at the preoperational stage have not yet comprehended the principle of conservation – the understanding that the amount of a substance remains constant, even if its shape changes. They cannot understand that when water is poured from a high glass into a low one, the amount of water is preserved, that is, remains the same when it is poured from a high glass into a low one.
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The absence of a concept of conservation is also illustrated by an experiment in which a child is given plasticine to make a ball out of it, equal in size to another ball of the same material. Having done this, the child says that they are “the same”. Then the experimenter leaves one ball as a standard, and rolls the other into an elongated sausage-like shape, and the child observes all this. The child can easily see that the plasticine has neither decreased nor increased. In a similar situation, children around the age of 4 say that these two objects no longer have the same amount of plasticine: “There is more in a long one,” they say (Fig. 3.4). Most children under the age of 7 do not consider that there is an equal amount of plasticine in both the long object and the first ball.
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Fig. 3.4. The concept of conservation. A four-year-old girl admits that both plasticine balls are the same size. But when one of the balls is rolled into an elongated, thin shape, she says it has more clay in it. And until she is 7 years old, she will not say that these objects of different shapes have the same amount of plasticine.

Piaget believed that the main feature of the preoperative stage is the inability of the child to keep attention on more than one aspect of the situation at the same time. Thus, in the task of maintaining the amount of plasticine, a child at the preoperational stage cannot focus simultaneously on the length and thickness of a piece of plasticine. Similarly, Piaget believed that preoperational thinking is dominated by visual impressions. Changing the appearance of a piece of plasticine affects the child more than the less obvious but more significant characteristics – mass and weight. That the small child relies on visual impressions becomes clear from the quantity conservation experiment. If two rows of checkers are placed in parallel, one opposite the other, a small child correctly answers that there are the same number of checkers in these rows (Fig. 3.5). If, however, the checkers of the same row are piled up, the five-year-old child says that where there is a straight row, there are more checkers, although not a single checker was taken away. The visual impression of a long row of checkers outweighs the quantitative equality, which was obvious when the checkers stood in rows against each other. In contrast, a 7-year-old child believes that if the number of objects was equal before, then it should remain equal. At this age, quantitative equality becomes more significant than visual impression.
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Fig. 3.5. Saving quantity. When the checkers are correctly arranged in two rows of seven pieces, most children answer that they are equally divided there and there. When after that one row is collected in a compact pile, children 6-7 years old say that there were more of them in the original row.

Another key characteristic of the preoperational stage of child development, according to Piaget, is egocentrism. Children in the preoperational stage of development are not aware of other points of view than their own – they assume that everyone else perceives the world around them in the same way as they (Piaget, 19fifty). In order to demonstrate this fact, Piaget invented the “three hills problem”. The child is allowed to walk around the table, on which three slides of various heights are built. When the child stands on one side of the table, a doll is placed on the other side of the table in different places (thus, she sees the three slides differently than the child). The child is asked to choose a photograph that matches what the doll sees. Children under the age of 6-7 choose a photo that matches their own vision of the three slides (Piaget & Inhelder, 1948/1956).

Piaget believed that egocentrism explains the rigidity of thinking at the preoperational stage. Because young children cannot appreciate points of view other than their own, they are unable to revise their schemas to take into account changes in the environment. Hence their inability to perform inverse operations or take into account the conservation of quantity.

Stages of operations

Between the ages of 7 and 12, children learn various concepts of conservation and also begin to perform other logical manipulations. They can arrange objects by one attribute, such as height or weight. They also form a mental representation of the sequence of actions. A five-year-old child can find his way to a friend’s house, but he can’t tell you how to get there, and he can’t draw it in pencil on paper. He finds the way because he knows where to turn, but he does not have a general picture of the route. In contrast, 8-year-olds easily draw a path map. In Piaget, this period is called the stage of concrete operations: although children use abstract terms, they can do this only in relation to concrete objects, that is, to those objects that are directly accessible to their senses.
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Around the same time, Piaget’s third stage of understanding morality begins. The child begins to realize that some of the rules are social (Sociality is the ability to live in society, among people, solving one’s own problems and being useful to others. Two sides of sociality are zoological herding and rational human sociality. See →) conventions, collective agreements and that they may be arbitrarily adopted or modified if all agree. The moral realism of the child is also undergoing a change: now, when making a moral judgment, he gives weight to “subjective” factors, such as human intentions, and considers punishment as a human choice, and not as an inevitable, divine punishment.
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Approximately at the age of 11-12 children come to adult forms of thinking, become capable of purely symbolic thinking. Piaget called this the stage of formal operations. In one of the tests of formal operational thinking, the child needs to determine what determines how long the pendulum will swing back and forth (i.e., the period of its oscillations). The child is given a piece of rope suspended from a hook and several weights that can be attached to the lower end. He can change the length of the rope, change the weight of the connected load and the height from which he releases the load. Unlike children, who are still at the stage of concrete operations and change some variables while experimenting, but without a system, adolescents, even with average abilities, put forward a number of hypotheses and begin to systematically test them. They argue as follows: if a certain variable (weight) affects the period of oscillation, then the result of its influence will become visible only if one variable is changed, and all others are left unchanged. If this variable does not affect the swing time, they exclude it and try another one. The consideration of all possibilities – the development of a conclusion for each hypothesis and its confirmation or refutation – is the essence of what Piaget called thinking at the stage of formal operations.
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Criticism of Piaget’s theory

Piaget’s theory is a great intellectual achievement; it revolutionized the understanding of children’s cognitive development and inspired countless researchers for decades. Piaget’s observations regarding the sequence of cognitive development are supported by many studies. However, newer and more sophisticated methods of testing the mental performance of infants and preschoolers show that Piaget underestimated their abilities. As we noted above, in order for a child to successfully solve many of the problems created to test the theory of stages, he actually needs to master several basic information processing skills: attention, memory, and knowledge of specific facts. And it may turn out that the child actually has the ability required of him, but cannot solve the problem, because he does not have other skills that are also necessary, but not essential for this task. See →
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Alternatives to Piaget’s theory

All developmental psychologists agree that the results we are now seeing seriously challenge Piaget’s theory and point to an underestimation of children’s abilities. But there is no agreement on which alternative to prefer. See →

The development of moral judgments

In addition to studying the development of children’s thinking, Piaget became interested in how children’s moral judgments develop. He believed that children’s understanding of moral rules and social conventions should be consistent with their general level of cognitive development. Piaget based his first theories in this area on observations of how children of different ages play with glass marbles – then in Europe it was a popular game for many children. He asked them where the rules of this game came from, what they meant, and why it was important to follow them. Based on the answers, Piaget came to the conclusion that there are 4 stages in the development of children’s understanding of the rules. The first two of these are in the preoperational stage, which we discuss in this section (Piaget, 1932/1965). See →

Cognitive development of children 6-7 years old

Home / Activities for children / Cognitive development Information about the world accumulated by the age of 6 requires new opportunities from the child. The development of all kinds of thought processes, such as perception, memory, concept formation, problem solving, imagination and logic, is moving to a new level.

Indicators of harmonious cognitive development of children aged 6-7:

• Perception continues its development, becomes purposeful, analyzing and more meaningful.
  • The child is able to observe, examine, search;
  • Able to distinguish colors, size, shapes;
  • Knows how to navigate in space, distinguishes between directions (“down”, “up”, “to the other side”, the concepts of “right” and “left” are clearly formed).
• Thinking is still visual-figurative, but verbal-logical thinking is already being formed, that is, the ability to operate with words and understand the logic of reasoning is acquired (completely verbal-logical thinking is formed only by adolescence).
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• The child is able to establish cause-and-effect relationships (“was”, “became”, “will be”).

Some children aged 6-7 years have disorders in the formation of the cognitive sphere, such as:

• insufficient knowledge about the world around,
• difficulty in performing mental operations,
• difficulties in designating spatial and temporal relationships.
• difficulty in recognizing objects, perceiving figures from visual patterns (inverted pictures),
• carelessness,
• distractibility,
• inability to concentrate on the task,
• memory difficulties,
• underdevelopment of self-control,
• inability to independently raise questions and find solutions,
• unformed speech to the required level,
• insufficient vocabulary,
• pronunciation defects,
• predominance of play activity,
• low level of cognitive activity,
• lack of educational motivation,
• behavior regulation problems,
• inability to obey the rules.

Children 6-7 years old who have problems in the formation of perception, thinking, memory, attention, imagination, speech, require specialized assistance.

A set of classes with a neuropsychologist will help not only in the development of cognitive processes, but will definitely prepare the child for schooling.