The Concept of Cognitive Development

Psychologists have come up with different approaches to cognitive development. Cognition is the mental activity and behaviour that allows us to understand the world. It includes the functions of learning, perception, memory, and thinking; and it is influenced by biological, environmental, experimental, social, and motivational factors. Cognition is simply the act or process of knowing or perceiving.

Cognitive Development is the thought processes, including, problem-solving, and decision-making, from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. The cognitive process involves “changes in the child’s thinking, intelligence and language”. Cognitive theory is concerned with the development of a person’s thought processes. It also looks at how these thought processes influence how we understand and interact with the world. The foremost cognitive thinker was Jean Piaget, who proposed an idea that seems obvious now, but helped revolutionise how we think about child development: Children think differently than adults.

Historically, the cognitive development of children has been studied in a variety of ways. The oldest is through intelligence tests, such as the widely used Stanford, Binet Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test first adopted for use in the United States by psychologist Lewis Terman (1877-1956) in 1916 from a French model pioneered in 1905.

IQ scoring is based on the concept of “mental age,” according to which the scores of a child of average intelligence match his or her age, while a gifted child’s performance is comparable to that of an older child, and a slow learner’s scores are similar to those of a younger child. IQ tests are widely used in the United States, but they have come under increasing criticism for defining intelligence too narrowly and for being biased with regard to race and gender.