Piaget's theory of cognitive development

A theory that children construct knowledge through stages of cognitive development, adapting their mental schemas through assimilation and accommodation.

Schema (psychology): An organized mental structure used to interpret information and guide action. Schemas are the structures children adapt as they encounter new experiences.
Cognitive development: Changes in how people perceive, think, remember, reason, and understand over time. Piaget's theory is one account of how these abilities change during childhood.
Three-mountain problem: A perspective-taking task in which children identify how a mountain scene looks from another viewpoint. Piaget used it to investigate egocentrism in preoperational thought.
Jean Piaget: Swiss psychologist whose research on children produced a stage-based theory of cognitive development. His observations and experiments underpin the theory's concepts and stages.
Information processing theory: An approach that explains cognition through processes such as attention, memory, and problem-solving. It models gradual changes in specific capacities rather than Piaget's broad stages.
Assimilation (psychology): The process of interpreting new experiences through existing mental structures. Piaget described assimilation as fitting experience into a schema already in use.
Preoperational stage: Piaget's stage in which young children use symbols but lack fully logical operations. It describes the reasoning that follows sensorimotor learning.
Piaget's conservation tasks: Experiments testing whether children recognize invariant quantity after visible transformations. These tasks supplied evidence for the transition to concrete operations.
Bärbel Inhelder: Swiss developmental psychologist who collaborated with Piaget on children's reasoning and adolescence. Her work helped develop studies of formal operational thought.
Core knowledge theory: The view that infants possess early, specialized systems for understanding domains such as objects and number. It challenges the idea that foundational knowledge is built chiefly through sensorimotor activity.

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