What Are the 3 Areas of Cognitive Development?
Preoperational thinking, concrete operation thinking, and inferential thinking are the three major areas of cognitive development. Each area of cognitive development develops at different rates, and each requires specific strategies to foster healthy growth. Listed below are some important facts about each area of cognitive development. Continue reading to learn more. You can also visit our blog to learn more about how you can support your child’s cognitive growth. Fostering curiosity, creativity, and intellectual inquiry is the best way to encourage cognitive development.
Sensorimotor intelligence
Children’s cognitive development goes through rapid growth from birth to two years old. Sensorimotor is the initial phase. It is when a child learns to interact with their environment. This is a critical time for the child’s development, as this first stage is essential for the subsequent stages. Children develop sensorimotor intelligence as they grow up and learn more about the world around their.
This stage aims to make objects permanent. Infants can identify objects even if they are not physically present. They also learn concepts of displacement and events. This stage also includes the ability to perceive object permanence, or the ability to know an object exists when it is out of sight. Infants might discover that a toy can be hidden if the parent covers it, while older children may actively seek it out when they find it.
Preoperational thinking
According to Piaget, preoperational thinking starts at two and a-half years of age. This is when children learn to manipulate and apply specific rules to physical objects. They also develop critical thinking skills. These skills will be used in the later stages of life, such as learning how to interpret other people’s actions. These stages are crucial in helping children to understand the world and develop a theory about mind.
The key aspect of preoperational thinking is that children make inferences based on perceptual salience – the present local context. If you ask your child to count how many blocks are in a row, they will be more likely to say there are more than three buttons. In addition, they cannot remember the general class of buttons, so they may answer the question incorrectly.
Concrete operational thinking
Cognitive development is broken down into three stages: preoperational, concrete operational, and formal. Preoperational includes the ability to reason, plan, and debate. The formal operational stage is marked by egocentrism and begins at about age 12 and lasts until adulthood. Concrete operational thinking is the ability to recognize constant attributes such as a mass water. A child can remember the order of the steps of a simple science experiment, but cannot rearrange them. Concrete operational stage is useful for tasks that require multiple steps such as writing.
The concrete operational stage is seven to eleven years long. It enables children to master reasoning and logic in concrete ways. Concrete is derived from the Latin “concrete”, which means tangible. These children are able to apply logic principles to physical problems and understand cause and effect. They can also reason about the size and distance. However, they are not yet ready to move beyond the concrete operational stage.
Inferential reasoning
This stage is marked in a profound change in the child’s thought process. This stage requires the child, in contrast to the previous two stages of reasoning, to make inferences based on observation. The previous stage was a deductive reasoning stage that used a generalized principle to predict an event. Children often have difficulties understanding logic in their heads and are unable answer logical queries.
Concepts are the units of thought. These concepts can be organized using theorems. Their acquisition and deployment requires the use of theoretical reasoning. Theoretical reasoning involves building theories. It involves learning about concepts, and then applying them in a specific situation. Concepts can be abstracted or concrete depending on their form. However, these two concepts may not be related. Here are some notable examples of an inference task: