Issue 4.2: Basic cognitive processes development

First of all we need to define the concepts needed to understand the cognitive process according to Piaget. First of all we have the scheme concept, which a structure that exists in our mind and helps us interpret and organize the information we receive. Secondly we have the assimilation, that is the process through which a child incorporates new knowledge to an existent scheme, that is, new knowledge that can fix with the previous one we already had. Finally the accommodation process happens when the new knowledge we receive cannot be fixed in any of our already existent schemes so we have to create a new one, for example when a child firs learn about numbers, he or she needs to create a new scheme, although when he or she will learn to add, he or she will just add the new knowledge to the number's scheme.

Piaget defines four stages of the cognitive development through which all kids are supposed to pass by. The cognitive process is the process through which all the kids interact with real life through stimulus. The first stage is the sensorimotor stage placed between 0 and 2 years old, which is the one in which students are not still aware of object permanence and when a baby for example throws a ball and in disappears from his visual camp, he cries because think that the ball has disappeared. The second stage is the preoperational stage, placed between 2 and 6 years old, and it's the one that bases its principles in child's egocentrism and failure on conservation tasks. To explain the first one we saw an experiment which clearly shows it, it was about showing to the kid a metal box and a skin bag, and the experimenter explain them a history, he shows them a puppet of a girl and said "this is Maria, and Maria take this ball and put it into the metal box", then he took a puppet of a boy and said "and this is Pau, and Pau takes the ball from the metal box and put it to the skin bag", then he went back to the girl's puppet and says "now Maria comes back to take the ball, where is she going to look for it?" all the kids said in the skin bag, because none of them thought that, although they knew that Pau had changed the ball of place, Maria didn't know it because she wasn't there when the action happened. They don't have this empathy skill because they still in the egocentric stage. The second idea, about the failure in conservation tasks can be seen in the comic below, what we can see there is that the kid doesn't understand that there is the same amount of mass in the big ball and in the three little balls because one is so much bigger that the others, he will learn it in the next stage.

The third stage is the concrete operational one and includes the years from 6 to 12. In this stage students start to success in the conservations and reversibility tasks but they cannot understand abstract actions, for example they can only believe in the thinks they see. As we can see in the image below the first kid says "I don't care what the hypothetical rules are. According to my concrete operational mind set, feathers can't break windows" and the next kid, which is placed in the fourth stage, called formal operational and placed from 12 years old,  had achieved the abstract thinking, and so he says "If rules states that feathers break windows, then feathers break windows. Ta dah! I'm logical and formal operational". The main difference between these two kids is that the first one doesn't understand the abstract part of the hypothesis, he can only see that the glass is very hard and strong and that the feather is all the opposite, his concrete operational mind doesn't allow him to look any further so he doesn't believe that the action of breaking a glass with a feather could be done. The second kid is able to do it because the abstract thinking is already well developed in his mind.

After explaining the basic stages from Piaget's point of view we need to discuss about the four basic cognitive processes, those that we find necessary to, later on, achieve activities such as acquiring a good language skills. The first cognitive process are the stimulus, which are the external stimulus that we transform in life experiences. The stimulus are very present and important in our cognitive development from our early ages, and not only cognitive because, for example, the first psychomotor action to all of the kids is responding to external stimulus (such as grabbing a finger that is been hold to us). The second one is the perception, which can be defined as the interpretation of the information we receive that we do. Most of the times we do a perceptive perception, which means that we perceive what we expect to see, that's the reason why we are able, most of the times, to communicate on a writing way, skipping some letters, we know more or less what the other person is going to say to us so we can understand the information he or she is giving to us although is not perfectly written. 

The third cognitive process is the attention the action through we focus ourselves in one specific task, the most important idea is that we need to be motivated to achieve it, or we won't be able to keep our senses concentrates and we'll get distracted very fast. Finally we have the memory, which is the process of memorizing the information we have acquired and it's divided in three parts, first, the codification of the information, which is related with understanding the information in order that we can memorize it; after that we have the storage which is the process in which we keep our information in our mind; and finally the retrieval which is the process through which we use the information we had previously memorized and we still remembering.