Activity 3.2 Cognitive Development

This video demonstrates a conservation problem that Piaget explains in one of four stages of development, the Preoperational Thinking stage that spans the age of 2 to 7.  A characteristic of this age, Piaget explains, is to think perceptively.  This is described as intuitive thinking, and in this instance the younger child perceives the taller, thinner glass as holding more liquid.  Children at this age lack “some specific logical abilities” and thus cannot reason that the amount of liquid has remained the same.  James describes a “native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age”.  In the first seven or eight years constructiveness is the instinct most active in children; children accumulate knowledge when they physically experience the world.  In adolescence they exhibit more abstract thought, and in late adolescence they ponder abstract human relations.