Cognitive Development

In today's class discussion, we learned about how our mind and body develop over the course of our lifetime especially when we are very young. There are four stages of growth according to Jean Piaget: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operations, and formal operations. The first stage is when you are born until you are two years old, then from two to six years old, then from six to 12 years old, and from then on to adulthood is the last stage. When you are a child you develop schemas and assimilate things with other relatively similar things that are not completely the same. For example, when a child sees a horse with four legs, he may call another animal he sees with four legs a horse as well. This clearly isn't correct, but it is how children classify things when they are very young. When I was little, I used to think that anything that spun around was a fan. I did this because the first word I learned was "fan" and when I saw it, it was obviously spinning around and around. I assumed that merry-go-rounds, and helicopters were fans because they did or had something that spun around. Later, I grew out of that phase and clearly realized that not everything that spun around was a fan. I moved on into the next phase, then eventually grew out of that phase, and so on until present day.