Intellectual growth from birth to old age

Intellectual growth from birth to old age is now known as cognition. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (b. 1896) was the first to develop a method to study the way in which infants and children see and understand the world. He was also the first to offer the conclusion that these ways of seeing and understanding are quite different in the infant and child than they are in the adult. His was also the first account of the process of mental growth from infancy to adulthood. This paper will briefly discuss Piaget's theories as a way of leading into the work of Laurence Kohlberg and Erik Erikson. An analysis of Kohlberg's moral reasoning theories and Erikson's eight stages of human development theory will be rendered with a focus on adolescent social development.

Piaget believed that mental growth involves major qualitative changes. Previously, both the empiricists and nativists saw the child as being similar to the adult: the first saw him as an adult-in-training; the latter as an adult-in-miniature. Piaget used qualitative differences to try and map the orderly progression of human intellect as the child grows into an adult. Piaget argued that "mental development is characterized by qualitative changes." He proposed four main stages of intellectual growth whose overall thrust is toward an increasing emancipation from the here-and-now of the immediate concrete present to a conception of the world in increasingly symbolic and abstract terms (Gleitman, 1991, p. 549).

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Category: Psychology - I