Who was Piaget:

Trained in biology

First published paper at age of 11

First Ph.D. thesis at age 20

Became interested in measuring intelligence which brought him to the study of psychology

Basics of Piaget's Theory

• Structuralist: Believed that child development did not depend on simply adding knowledge but on children learning qualitatively different ways of organizing that knowledge
• Stage Theorist: Development is not a gradual process but occurs in discrete stages, or sudden changes.
• Change involves adaptations, or which there were two types
• Assimilation: Making sense of things in terms of what you already know
• Accomodation: Changing what you already know in light of new information.

Piaget's Stages of Development

Sensorimotor Stage: A stage of development that goes from birth to about 18 months in which the infant is primarily concerned with mastering its sensory and motor patterns.

• Sensorimotor knowledge means knowing what things look like and knowing how to manipulate objects.
• Initially children lack object permanence. Object permanence is the realization that objects continue to exist even when they can't be seen.

1. From 0-4 months children will immediately lose interest if an object disappears behind a screen.
2. From 4-8 months children will begin to look for a toy train to appear on the other side of a tunnel and will uncover partially covered objects (but not completely covered objects)
3. From 8-12 months children will uncover fully covered objects but have difficulty with displacements, even that occur in their full view.
4. From 12-18 months can handle visible displacements but still may have difficulty with invisible displacements
5. After 18 months children can handle both visible and invisible displacements

• Bailargeon has shown that children have an object concept earlier than Piaget thought

Preoperational Thought involves symbolical representations but the inability yet to think in a coherent way about those representations

• Children show they understand the idea of representation, that one thing can stand for another

1. Understand pretense
2. Explosion of language learning

• Thinking lacks a system of rules. Thinking is unsystematic, inconsistent, disorganized and confused

1. Transductive reasoning: Rather than reasoning inductively or deductively children this age will reason from one specific to another specific. A dog has four legs, a horse has four legs, therefore horses are dogs.
2. Confusion about cause and effect

• Animism: Assumption that all things are alive. Rock gardens exist because the rocks like being close to each other. Dolls get lonely if you don't play with them.
• Artificialism: Inanimate objects do things for psychological reasons. Leaves fall to keep the ground warm, Flowers grow to make us happy.
• Appearance reality distinction: Children this age judge the world based on appearances.
• Centration: Child centers attention on particular characteristics of objects but cannot yet integrate both height and width for instance.
• Egocentric: Children at this age have difficulty imagining that other people have different perspectives than they do.

In this stage of development children begin to be able to think logically about a whole range to topics.

• Categories: Preoperational children when asked to sort objects tend not to form crisp logical categories. Now children are able to form such categories of concrete objects
• Class Inclusion: Children at this age can now recognize that one category can exist within another category. Pre-operational children who are shown a picture with 5 poodles and 2 collies and are asked, "Are there more poodles or dogs?" will say poodles. Concrete operational children will say dogs.
• Seriation: Seriation involves putting things in order by size, quantity or whatever. Children below this age have some problem with ordering large groups of objects. This seems to be because while the can make pairwise comparisons between objects they have trouble keeping track of the entire sequence
• Conservation: Piaget also believe children at this age finally come to master the concept of quantity. This involves two types of understanding.

1. One is they come to understand that changes on one dimension (height) may be compensated for by changes on another dimensions (width)

They also understand logically that its often the case that transforming something doesn't change the amount of its substance, in other words that quantities tend to be conserved (for instance pre-operational children when given the choice between a cookie and an identical cookie broken in two choose the broken cookie because "there's more".)

Formal operations includes thinking that not only makes use of logical operations but can apply those operations to abstract concepts.

• Hypothetico-deductive cognitive strategy: Formal operations children/adults approach problems by considering a range of alternatives and systematically try to decide between them.
• Combinatorial analysis: The ability to generate all possible combinations of a set of elements. This can be used in problem solving.

• Abstract reasoning: During this stage of development children start to think about abstract concepts like justice, truth, honor etc. They can also think about things like the meaning of their own lives. When asked to define abstract terms children and adults at this age tend to define them more abstractly. A concrete operational child might define religion as "going to church" a formal operations child or adult as "a state of mind", "a personal relationship" etc.

• Counterfactual Reasoning: Formal operational children can for the first time reason about states of the world that are contrary to fact. They can reason about what might have been or what might be in the future. This reasoning is important not only in problem solving but in regulating one's emotional life.
• Adolescent Egocentrism: Adolescents sometimes believe that if something is important to them it must be important to everyone else.

1. Imaginary Audience: The tendency of some adolescents to act as if they are on stage and the center of attention. A pimple on the chin becomes a big deal because everyone is noticing it.
2. Personal Fable: A belief in one's uniqueness and immortality. A belief that no one else has ever had experiences similar to the one's they are having. The belief in immortality can have tragic consequences as it can lead to reckless behavior.

 Basic Ideas

• People are driven by a kind of sexual energy called the libido.
• During different stages of development the libidal energy focuses on different parts of the body and people gain pleasure from stimulation of these parts of the body. The focus of libidal energy is called the erogenous zone. (From "eros" a word meaning sexual love)
• Fixation: In each stage of development the child has certain needs. Either failure to meet these needs or overindulgence of these needs will lead to a fixation on this stage and the child won't progress beyond that point in development. This results in psychopathology.
• A major part of development involves the emergence of three structures, the ID, Ego and Superego

• Oral stage begins at birth and the focus of libidal energy in this stage is the mouth. Infants not only gain nutrition by breast feeding or bottle feeding, they take pleasure in putting things in their mouths.

• The oral character who is frustrated at this stage, whose mother refused to nurse him on demand or who truncated nursing sessions early, is characterized by pessimism, envy, suspicion and sarcasm.
• The overindulged oral character, whose nursing urges were always and often excessively satisfied, is optimistic, gullible, and is full of admiration for others around him.
• The stage culminates in the primary conflict of weaning, which both deprives the child of the sensory pleasures of nursing and of the psychological pleasure of being cared for, mothered, and held.
• The stage lasts approximately one and one-half years.

• With the advent of toilet training comes the child's obsession with the erogenous zone of the anus and with the pleasure Freud believed the child derives from retaining or expelling feces.
• Toilet training produces a conflict between the id, which derives pleasure from expulsion of bodily wastes, and the ego, which represent the practical pressures to control the bodily functions.
• The child meets the conflict between the parent's demands and the child's desires and physical capabilities in one of two ways: Either he puts up a fight or he simply refuses to go.
• The child who wants to fight takes pleasure in excreting maliciously, perhaps just before or just after being placed on the toilet. If the parents are too lenient and the child manages to derive pleasure and success from this expulsion, it will result in the formation of an anal expulsive character. This character is generally messy, disorganized, reckless, careless, and defiant.
• Other children opt to retain feces, refusing to go when they're put on the toilet and gaining what Freud believed was the physical pleasure of feeling pressure of the built-up feces on his intestine. If this tactic succeeds and the child is overindulged, he will develop into an anal retentive character. This character is neat, precise, orderly, careful, stingy, withholding, obstinate, meticulous, and passive-aggressive.
• Successful toilet training is the ultimate resolution of this stage

• In the phallic stage libidinal energy is focused on one's own genitals.
• Freud claimed that at this stage young children fall in love with their opposite gendered parent and dream of killing their same gendered parent. In men this is called the Oedipus Conflict and in women its called the Electra Complex.
• Boys at this age become fearful that their rival (i.e. their father) will harm them and, having noticed that women and girls lack penises, become fearful that they will be castrated. This is the so called castration anxiety that Freud believed males experience at this age.
• Girls also notice that boys have penises and so become jealous of this, what Freud called penis envy. Girls thereby both come to love their fathers in a romantic sense but are also envious of them. And they blame their mothers for their apparent castration
• Children at this age resolve the conflict by repressing their sexual desires and by identifying and imitating their same gendered parent thereby vicariously possessing the object of their love.
• Repressing these desires leads to the development of the Superego. The superego is an internalization of the father or mother's prohibitions. Its what you might think of as a conscience.

• Children repress their libido in this stage and work instead on mastery of their environment

• In the genital stage, as the child's energy once again focuses on his genitals, but this time by pursuing heterosexual relationships (according to Freud).
• The less energy the child has left invested in unresolved psychosexual developments, the greater his/her capacity will be to develop normal relationships with the opposite sex.
• If, however, he remains fixated, particularly on the phallic stage, his/her development will be troubled

Psychosocial Crisis: According to Erikson each stage of development from birth to old age is accompanied by a crisis that needs to be resolved. Failure to resolve these conflicts successfully leads to problems later in life.
 

• Infancy
• Toddler
• Preschool
• Middle School
• Adolescence
• Young Adult
• Middle Adult
• Maturity

Pre-Conventional
Conventional
PostConventional

Kohlberg Dilemmas