How Did Piaget View Cognitive Development Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

How Did Piaget View Cognitive Development - Essay Example How Did Piaget View Cognitive Development? Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was one of the leading developmental psychologists that mainly focused on the impact of environmental and social factors on human development, particularly cognitive development in children. His theories on how a child’s way of thinking grows and adapts through acquiring experiences through the process of interacting with nonliving things as well as by engaging in social interaction with other children or adults, was very much looked upon especially during the pre-war era. Most of the theories were to be tested as models for improving people’s learning in school or at work, but were not tested fully after World War II broke out. In theory, development can either be continuous or discontinuous. Continuous development is related to the human development through gradual progress from infancy to adulthood. Discontinuous development, on the other hand, occurs through a fixed sequence that has discrete and predictable stages. In Piaget’s view on cognitive development in humans, the trend is rather discontinuous, and that growth is seen as having specific, qualitatively different stages. Each stage then has particular information-processing approaches that would be based on memory and language skills acquired at a certain stage. Also, cognitive growth is stimulated by what a child perceives, and that the process of learning can be enhanced by letting the child experience and discover new things suitable for his or her age.