Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget argued that children do not simply absorb information passively from their environment — they actively construct their own understanding of the world. As children grow, they take in new information and adapt their existing thinking to accommodate it, which gradually improves their understanding of the world around them. Piaget proposed that a child's mind passes through a sequence of distinct stages of thought from infancy through adolescence. Each stage is marked by a qualitatively distinct, age-related way of thinking — it is the different way of thinking, not simply the amount of information a child has picked up, that makes one stage more advanced than another, which is also why a much younger child thinks quite differently from an older one even on the same topic.

During infancy — Piaget's sensorimotor stage, covering roughly the first two years of life — the infant experiences the world directly through the senses and through action: by looking, hearing, touching, mouthing, and grasping objects. A young infant essentially lives in the present, and what is out of sight is, for them, out of mind. If a toy the infant has been playing with is hidden right in front of them, a young infant will react as if nothing at all has happened — they will simply not search for it, behaving as though the object has ceased to exist altogether. According to Piaget, children at this stage do not yet go beyond their immediate sensory experience — they lack object permanence, which is the awareness that objects continue to exist even when they are no longer being seen, heard, or touched. This awareness develops gradually: by around 8 months of age, infants typically begin to search for an object that has only been …