Q.Discuss the cognitive changes taking place in a developing child.

A developing child's cognitive abilities change qualitatively as they pass through Piaget's stages — from the purely sensory, action-based thinking of infancy, through the symbolic but egocentric and easily-fooled-by-appearances thinking of early childhood, to the logical, reversible thinking of middle childhood, and finally the abstract, hypothetical reasoning of adolescence. …

As a child develops, their cognitive abilities change not merely in the quantity of what they know, but in the fundamental way they think — a distinction central to Piaget's theory of cognitive development, which describes children as active constructors of their own understanding of the world rather than passive recipients of information.

In infancy (the sensorimotor stage, roughly 0-2 years), the infant knows the world only through direct sensory experience and physical action — looking, touching, mouthing, grasping. A defining cognitive limitation of this stage is the initial absence of object permanence — a young infant behaves as though a hidden object has simply ceased to exist, and this understanding only develops gradually, with infants typically beginning to search for a partly-hidden object by around 8 months.

In early childhood (the preoperational stage, roughly 2-7 years), children make a major cognitive leap: the achievement of object permanence lets them use mental symbols to represent things that are not physically present, seen for example in children's symbolic drawings of people, animals, or houses. However, preoperational thinking has real limitations. Egocentrism means children can only see the world from their own point of view, and cannot yet appreciate someone else's perspective; this feeds into animism, where children attribute life and feeling to inanimate objects (blaming 'the road' for hurting them after a fall). Between about 4 and 7 years, in the sub-stage of intuitive thought, children ask constant 'why' questions to build a working sense of cause and effect. Preoperational thought also shows centration — attending to only one salient feature of a situation at a time — which is why a preoperational child will insist a tall, narrow glass holds 'more' juice than a short, broad one, even when both hold an identical amount, because they are focused only on the glass's height. …