In this video I introduce the work of developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget proposed a stage-based theory for how we develop our cognitive abilities. Piaget viewed children like “little scientists” who were constantly testing and updating their knowledge structures, or schema, for how the world works. When encountering something new, children either assimilate this new knowledge into their existing schema, or they need to accommodate, modifying their schema in light of the new information.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video and the next few videos we’re going to take a look at cognitive development and this means we’re going to turn to the work of perhaps the most famous developmental psychologist and this is a Swiss biologist who became interested in cognitive development named Jean Piaget.

Piaget lived from 1896 to 1980 and here’s a picture of Piaget here. And he wanted to understand how we progress in developing our cognitive abilities and in order to assess this he asked questions to children. And what he found was that children would make predictable errors at certain ages. So children of a similar age would all make similar types of errors in their problem-solving and then suddenly they would stop making this error in a range of areas. And so this suggested to Piaget that we progress in a stage –based manner; that in a particular stage we will make a particular type of error, and then when we move to the next stage we’ll stop making that error in a number of different areas at once.

Now before we get to these specific stages of Piaget’s theory I want to talk about his overall view of how children acquire knowledge about the world. It’s often described as viewing children as “little scientists” and what this means is that children are always testing things, and they’re always trying to update their knowledge about the world. So Piaget believed that we build up structures for our knowledge and these structures are called schema. These are sets of cognitions and they help us to make sense of the world.

So he thought children are constantly interacting with new information that they’ve never experienced before and so they have to do something with this new information. And they can either fit it into the schemas that they’ve already built up; so they have schema for different things and they encounter something new and they might assimilate this new information into an existing schema. So this is the process of assimilation. Or they encounter something new that doesn’t fit into any of their existing schema, and this means they have to change their schema. They have to engage in what he called accommodation. They have to modify their schema in order to account for this new information. So we can think of it as these being the two main choices; we have something new that we’re going to encounter and then we either fit it into what we already know, we incorporate it or assimilate it, or we have to change what we thought we knew about the world in order to make sense of this. we have to modify our schema; we have to engage in accommodation.

So let’s look at a practical example of how this might work. Let’s imagine we have a child who has built up a schema for what a bird is. So the child sees a sparrow and mom says “that’s a bird” and the child sees a wren and mom says “that’s a bird” and so the child starts building this schema for what a bird is. And the schema might be that small flying things are birds. Now if the child encounters a pigeon that has never been seen before the child might see the pigeon and say “bird” and the mom will say “yeah, that’s right. That is a bird.” And in this case the child has assimilated. So they took this new thing they haven’t seen, a pigeon, and they said “well, this is a small flying thing, so it’s probably a bird” and that turned out to be the correct thing to do.

Now we could also imagine a situation where the child sees a bat and the bat, when the child sees the bat, the child says “bird” and mom says actually “no, that’s not a bird”. And now the child has to modify their existing schema about how the world works. They have to realize that not all small flying things are in fact birds. And so they’re going to have to make some adjustments to their schema and this means they’re going to accommodate in order to make sense of this new information. Ok, I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!