Piaget Stages Of Cognitive Development Essay

The purpose of this paper is to use the habituation technique in young infants to evaluate one hypothesis derived from Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. I will compare 5-months olds in a task that involves possible and impossible outcomes. Piaget’s theory specifies the mental capabilities of children during this age. 1a. During the early stages of childhood, infants feel like foreigners in this massive world and depend on their senses and motions to aid them in comprehending what the world is and how it functions. In the early stages of sensorimotor, they experience the world through their five sense: touch, smell, sight, taste, and auditory. The dependency over these senses will follow them until they reach adulthood, where they will later view the world beyond their basic understandings

To illustrate, if a child were to be shown an object and the object is then hidden, if they show little to no interest in searching for the object this could mean they lack object permanence. Object permanence is believed to begin to emerge at the age of 8 months where infants slowly become cognitively capable of remembering things through familiarities and memories. Through the growth of memory, this could cause infants to become more curious and perceptive about their surroundings. 1c. Also around their 8 month mark, infants develop something called stranger anxiety, where infants undergo emotional distress when left alone with a stranger. This may vary from child to child depending on how attached they are to their parents. For instance, infants who exhibit secure attachment may be friendlier to strangers when the mother present but those who exhibit avoidant attachment may be apathetic towards the stranger and will play normally with them. Object permanence and stranger anxiety may emerge at the same time because both play a major role in familiarity. When a child feels anxious and uneasy around a stranger it’s mainly because they have no recollection of who they