Theory Of The Cognitive Development Of Children example essay topic

Much of the intellectual history of psychology has involved the attempt to come to grips with the problem of mind and body and how they interact. While the philosophical distinction between mind and body can be traced back to the Greeks, it is due to the influential work of Ren Descartes, (written around the 1630's) that we owe the first systematic account of the mind / body relationship. When Descartes' friend and frequent correspondent, Marin Mersenne, wrote to him of Galileo's fate at the hands of the Inquisition, Descartes immediately suppressed his own treatise. As a result, the world's first extended essay on physiological psychology was published only well after its author's death.

In this essay, he proposed a mechanism for automatic reaction in response to external events. According to his proposal, external motions affect the peripheral ends of the nerve fibrils, which in turn displace the central ends. As the central ends are displaced, the pattern of interfibrillar space is rearranged and the flow of animal spirits is thereby directed into the appropriate nerves. This is the reason he has been credited with the founding of the reflex theory.

Descartes was the first to talk about mind / body interactions, and thus had a great influence in later psychologists and thinkers. He proposed that not only body can influence mind, but that mind could also affect body. Years later, the work of Nicolas Malebranche was probably the most influential provider of occasionalism. Occasionalism deals with the contradiction that if the nature of causality is such that causes and effects must have a necessary connection and be of a similar type, then mind / body interaction ism is unsound.

He argue that both of Descartes's ub stances, mind and body, are causally ineffective. His belief was that G'd is the one and only true cause. There is no influence of mind on body or of body on mind. "In order to retain the notion of God as the one true cause without sacrificing the idea of causality as operative in both the mental and the physical spheres, Benedictus de Spinoza abandoned Descartes' two-substance view in favor of what has come to be called double-aspect theory". Double-aspect theories are based on the notion that the mental and the physical are simply different aspects of one and the same substance. Nonetheless, he agreed with Descartes that the world of consciousness and that of extension are qualitatively separate.

He believed that substance, G'd, is the universal essence or nature of everything that exists. In other words he believed that mental incidents can determine only other mental incidents, and physical motions can determine only other physical motions, "mind and body nonetheless exist in pre-established coordination, since the same divine essence forms the connections within both classes and cannot be self-contradictory". These dual-aspect theories go went through a resurgence during the 19th century. Another view introduced by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was that of psychophysical parallelism, which holds on to both the dualism of mind and body and the notion of a regular correlation between mental and physical events. This view, however, avoids any assumption of an underlying mind / body connection. It believes that mind and body are so different, that they cannot affect one another.

They do, however, recognize the fact that every mental event is correlated with a physical event. During the 18th century, the problem of re-relating mind and body arose. George Berkeley talked about the view of immaterialism in which "he denies even the possibility of mindless material substance. For something to exist for Berkeley it must either be perceived or is the active mind doing the perceiving. From this perspective, there is no mind / body distinction because what we think of as body is merely the perception of mind. While Berkeley had few contemporary adherents, immaterialism was to resurface in the later 19th century in the guise of mind- stuff theory".

As the 19th century progressed, the problem of the relationship between mind and brain became increasingly present. This is palpable especially in texts after 1860. To a large extent, this directly reflected two major developments that converged to impress philosophers and psychologists with the centrality of the mind / brain problem. "The formal beginning of psychology as a modern science came in 1879 when Wilhelm Wundt founded, in Leipzig, Germany, the first laboratory devoted to experimental psychology".

Together with Hermann con Helmholtz and Gustav Fechner, they founded the school of psychology now labeled determinism. Determinism is based on the idea that behaviors have causes that can be investigated, and the causes of behavior are, to a certain extent, beyond the control of the individual. Determinism was proceeded by a school of psychology called structuralism, which focused on the structure or contents of the mind, and analyzed it in parts, in other words, events can be understood when broken down. Structuralism relied heavily on introspection. Edward Titch ener led this school of thought. "Structuralism represented the early development of psychology".

The American John Dewey developed the school of psychology called functionalism, which gave utmost importance to learned habits which enabled organisms to adapt to their environments and function effectively, believing that an organism's goal is to adapt. Since then, psychologists have taken different approaches such as the biological approach, the psychodynamic approach, and the cognitive approach, amongst many others. Psychology itself has grown in popularity and has been therefore analyzed to a fuller extent. An important issue directly related to the field of psychology is the development of an individual, which has been dealt with various approaches. Developmental psychology is "the branch of psychology that is concerned with the changes in physical and psychological functioning that occur from conception through an entire life span". Developmental psychologists study physical, mental, and social changes occurring throughout the life cycle.

Throughout life, there is never a period on which change does not occur. Something is always changing. Some psychologist view development as change is essentially continuous. Other psychologists view development as "a succession of reorganizations: behavior is different in different age-specific periods, such as infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Thus, while development itself is continuous, particular aspects of it are discontinuous". Because a great deal of who people are was determined since before they were born, in order to fully understand the development of an individual, we have to go back to the origin of that person, the time of conception.

As soon as a zygote has been formed, it contains genetic information "that will determine not only the physical make-up, but many of the psychological characteristics of the new individual. For that reason, the study of behavior properly begins with the study of mechanisms of heredity", which is why members of the same family have similar genes and traits, and why brothers and sisters will resemble each other as well as their parents. Genes are what make each of us a distinctive human being, and yet they are also what determines the characteristics that make us human beings, rather than any other species. What human beings have in common, nonetheless, is an orderly sequence of biological growth processes predetermined by our genes. This process is called maturation. The genetic growth tendencies are innate.

Although fraternal twins are no more alike genetically than ordinary siblings born at different times, their environments are more similar, and thus their development is more similar as well. All differences between identical twins are due to environmental factors. Everyday experiences shape human development and maturation. It is still under discussion, however, how much of behavior is due to heredity, and how much is due to the environment. The British philosopher John Locke believed neonates are born without any knowledge or skills, as though they were born with a blank tablet which, throughout life gets filled with experiences which shape development. "What directs human development, Locke claimed, is the stimulation people receive as they are nurtured by experience and education".

The French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought otherwise. "He argued the view that nature, the totality of predispositions and abilities we are born with, shapes development". People are noble savages corrupted by contact with society. Since then new discoveries have been made and contemporary developmental psychologists now acknowledge that both, heredity and the environment shape development and that neither one is sufficient alone. The epigenetic model, with which most psychologists agree with, states that "development is influenced by the forces of both nature and nurture". It is a result of the interaction of our genes and our past and present experiences.

In 1801 a young boy around the age of twelve was discovered in Aveyron, France. Animals had apparently raised this "wild boy". Because he was uncivilized, he became known as the Wild Boy of Aveyron. Children like him are called feral (meaning wild) children, and the majority of times they are "completely unable to cope with human society and usually die soon after they are recovered from the wild, either from human illnesses to which they have no immunity or dietary shock, or psychological trauma... Feral children are not the same as those tragic children raised in extreme isolation or locked in cupboards and cellar for years at a time by mentally disturbed parents".

Plasticity is "the capacity of a developing organism to be molded and shaped by the environment, nurture, and experience". Individuals themselves differ about the extent of plasticity. Plasticity differs as well according to different stages or periods in development. "Your heredity establishes you potential, but is your experiences that determine how, and how much of, that potential will be realized". Each person is an individual with his or her own developmental schedule and pattern, however it is convenient to group the occurrence of various developmental changes into stages. Nonetheless, one must not forget that there is no one specific point at which a task suddenly appears or disappears, because each area of development is continually interacting and influencing the others.

The basic stages of development are childhood, adolescence and adulthood, and sometimes late adulthood is considered a separate stage. Only recently has the neonate period of development been carefully examined and considered. In spite of this, there are some general principles of development. Development follows a predictable pattern with common characteristics such as the early physical development of infants. In babies development spreads downward from the head, which develops first, to the feet. The individual first develops general responses and then proceeds to specific responses.

A third characteristic of development is that it is a continuous process. A fourth principle is that some individuals have a different rate of development, and each stage has unique features, depending on the society and the period of development involved. The neonate is the newborn through the first two weeks to a month of life. Neonates, within a few hours of life, given certain stimulus are capable of various responses. Almost all of these behaviors "are reflexive-simple, unlearned, involuntary reactions to specific stimuli.

Many of these responses serve the purpose of helping to respond to a basic need". Because different psychologists name certain stages differently, Jean Piaget named the first stage the sensory-motor stage, which involves the neonatal stage as well as infancy. It is during this stage in which infants learn by concrete actions; they learn opposability. This "grasping" usually takes takes place between the age of three and five months. Opposability is of utmost importance in aiding the processes of the mind. The first schemes involve its senses, actions and abilities, in which opposability plays a major role.

"It seems that babies start to build up their knowledge of the world by observing relations between connected sensory events". It is in this manner that they learn to survive. Approaches for survival and / or success begin to develop in childhood. "Regardless of the rate of one's motor development, there are regularities in the sequence on one's development". Children grow very rapidly, both physically and cognitively and they develop certain intellectual abilities. It is during childhood that individuals acquire language skills, which are presumed to have been forming since infancy.

Human beings are presumed to be born with language learning abilities, and "social interaction motivates children to learn language so they can communicate with others". It is believed that learning abilities are innate because all individuals are born with vocal chords, and even as young as newborns, they already babble and make certain sounds. Children all over the world seem to go through similar steps of learning language. Reinforcers as well as punishes play a vital role in the development of language. "Piaget say the human mind as an active biological system that seeks, selects, interprets, and recognizes environmental information to fit with or adjust to its own existing mental structures". Jean Piaget greatly influenced the trying to successfully figure out a way to understand the mental processes (including the process of opposability) children go through to understand physical realities.

He named the mental structures or programs that guide developing sequences of thinking schemes. Although Piaget's theory has greatly influenced developmental psychology, since then more research has been made, and thus has caused some questioning of some of his basic ideas. "The two major criticisms of Piaget's theory are that (1) the borderlines between his proposes stages are much less clear-cut than his theory suggests, and (2) Piaget significantly underestimated the cognitive talents of preschool children". Another important disparagement is that his theory focuses solely on the development of children, and as we have already proven, development does not stop until the day we die. He also gives little consideration to the influence that language development has on an individual. He also did not elaborate much about the capacity of a child's memory.

Erikson, on the other hand, proposed a theory which he divided into eight stages of human development, his first stage beginning at age zero and the eighth stage referring to late adulthood. He too included the characteristics of cognitive development, however, he focused on much more than that. Also, "many of his observations had more of a cross-cultural basis than did Piaget's". Unlike Freud, Erikson decided to emphasize the social environment, and thus his theory is referred to as psychosocial. To Erikson, development is not so much periods of time, but a series of crises that need to be resolved. In whichever way these conflicts or crises are resolved affects greatly the development of the subsequent stages.

According to Erikson we "naturally go through the resolution of each conflict or crisis in order and that facing any one type of crisis usually occurs at about the same age for all of us". Piaget agreed that moral development is closely related to one's cognitive awareness, yet it was Lawrence Kohlberg who assembled a theory of moral development. The theory is based on standards of moral judgement. According to Piaget these cognitive abilities develop only as the child progresses through developmental stages. Kohlberg's theory is too divided into stages. He proposed three major levels of moral reasoning, or development.

According to Kohlberg, his three stages occur in that same order in all cultures. Development is closely related to socialization, because as we have discussed earlier, nurture, or the environment plays a major role in the development of an individual. Socialization the perceptual "process of shaping an individual's behavior patterns, values, standards, skills, attitudes, and motives to conform to those regardless as desirable in a particular society". Sexuality is closely related to socialization. Psychologists differ in their approaches towards development because the view it from distinct points of view. Piaget, for example, proposed a theory of the cognitive development of children, while Erikson proposed a theory based on the psychosocial development of individuals.

Although Kohlberg based his theory on Piaget's, his theory focused on moral reasoning.