Early research made the assumption that a child's relationship with their primary caregiver, in most cases the mother, plays a significant role in the development of a child and may result in distress and psychological disorders in case of maternal depravation....
Psychology
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Psychological stages
The turning point for the study of childhood development was Jean Piaget, an Italian/Swiss Psychologist, who proposed that both intellectual growth and socialization are driven by cognitive processes in the mind, rather than external influences such as teaching or...
Stages of cognitive development
Piaget presented the theory that children develop cognitive ability in four distinct stages. In the first stage, babies are fascinated by the outside world. They explore everything around them and make sense of their environment through touch, taste, smell, sound,...
Development of concept of self
An indispensable factor noted in Piaget’s stages of cognitive development is growing awareness about the external world and how one fits into it. From birth, a child is completely egocentric, and as they grow they learn to control their behavior to explore objects...
The child as scientist
Piaget‘s theory that cognitive development proceeds in distinct stages imply that children need to learn certain things before they can proceed to the next level. Each stage builds upon what came before. Accordingly, education should follow a progression of stages,...
The child as apprentice
Following Piaget's theory, it is now widely believed that the mental activities of infants differ significantly from those of older people. In addition, many psychologists and educators believe that there is an age-related developmental progression. However, not...
Cultural and historical development
After the so-called ‘cognitive revolution' in the 1950s, and the rise of the social sciences, the idea of learning became central to the study of human development. Jerome Bruner, who worked closely with Jean Piaget, suggested that the child develops both in isolation...
Stages of psychosocial development
Cognitive psychology was one of the influences on the development of ideas about child development in the second half of the twentieth century. Erik Erikson’s theory of psychological development was based more on Sigmund Freud’s theories of psychosexual development...
Moral development
Piaget explained the developmental sequence of moral thinking as follows: A child starts out with egocentrism, then moves through a period of egocentric development, until he reaches mature egocentricity. During his adolescent growth spurt, he begins to develop a...
Social learning theory
Although the theories of behavioral and developmental psychologists have greatly influenced educational thinking, the area of moral development has been dominated by the ideas of operant conditioning. The conventional wisdom was then that a sense of moral rights and...
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Filter models
Broadbent explained the ways our brains ignore certain types of information, and how we learn to selectively focus on certain channels of information. We can choose what we pay attention to, and we can decide whether we care about the meaning of the information we...
Different kinds of memory
Memory continues to play an important role in cognitive science today, especially with the work of the Canadian psychologist Endel Tulving, who proposed that human beings store memories in two distinct ways: short-term (STM) and long-term (LTM). However, because the...
Recalling memories
Cognitive psychology’s approach to the study of mental processing was largely based on the notion of information storage and recall, and the connection between them. Endel Tulving demonstrated how memories can be categorized by our minds into different stores and can...
Seven sins of memory
Although we remember a lot throughout our lifetimes, our brain is often a let down when it’s time to recall these memories. Daniel Schacter calls the deviation in our memory recalls as ‘seven sins of memory’. This may be due to transient factors: that memories fade as...
Unreliable memories
What Schacter called ‘the sin of suggestibility’, has particular relevance in the law. Cases often rely heavily on evidence obtained from victims and witnesses, but we remember events less than reliably. American psychologist Elizabeth Loftus showed in experiments...
Free Course in Semiology
A completely and truly free course on Semiology (Semiotics). Learn about the meaning of signs, how and why did the field emerged. What is the relationship between the street signs and the signs that we use every day - words.
