Psihološka Obzorja (Jun 2000)
Cognitive development in the first year of life: a challenge to Piaget's theory
Abstract
Up to the eighties, the psychological interpretations of early cognitive development had been dominated by Piaget's theory of sensori-motor development, according to which infants' knowledge of the world is constructed through their actions upon the world. Older empirical findings also led to a conclusion that infants' basic concepts of objects and representations of objects develop relatively late during the infancy period. Searching for new answers to the old questions about infants' cognitive competence in the first year after birth, and when and how it is manifested in their behaviours, encouraged researchers to re-examine the existing knowledge about the milestones and the mechanisms of early cognitive development, as well as to use new research techniques, and revealed new empirical evidence. These show that infants are much more cognitively competent and that some of their cognitive capacities develop much earlier than Piaget suggested. In the article, some recent findings in the field of infants' development of knowledge about physical world are presented and discussed. Some fundamental points of Piaget's sensori-motor stage of development which were not supported by the recent empirical evidence are highlightened.
