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WHAT IS COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT? Cognitive development refers to the process of growth (and associated change) in intellectual/ mental abilities around thinking, reasoning and understanding. Within child development the focus is in terms of information processing, conceptual and perceptual skills development, brain development, memory, creativity and higher order thinking. A major debate within cognitive development is the ‘nature vs nurture’ question. This means whether cognitive development is based on an individual’s innate qualities (nature) or their personal experiences (nurture). Recent research from biological and behaviours sciences suggests that at the earliest points of development it is both, with gene activity interacting with events and experiences in the environment. This has meant a change in the way the period of infancy has been viewed in terms of cognitive development. As Madole and Oakes (1999, p. 263) write: The last two decades of infancy research have seen dramatic changes in the way developmental psychologists characterise the earliest stages of cognitive development. The infant, once regarded as an organism driven mainly by simple sensorimotor schemes, is now seen as possessing sophisticated cognitive skills and even sophisticated concepts that guide knowledge acquisition. This means that there are many developmental stages of cognitive development before entering adulthood (infancy, early childhood, middle childhood and adolescence). In Section 2 you will read about some of the key theorists of cognitive development, stretching across all of these periods. Consider the following exampleWHAT IS COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT? Cognitive development refers to the process of growth (and associated change) in intellectual/ mental abilities around thinking, reasoning and understanding. Within child development the focus is in terms of information processing, conceptual and perceptual skills development, brain development, memory, creativity and higher order thinking. A major debate within cognitive development is the ‘nature vs nurture’ question. This means whether cognitive development is based on an individual’s innate qualities (nature) or their personal experiences (nurture). Recent research from biological and behaviours sciences suggests that at the earliest points of development it is both, with gene activity interacting with events and experiences in the environment. This has meant a change in the way the period of infancy has been viewed in terms of cognitive development. As Madole and Oakes (1999, p. 263) write: The last two decades of infancy research have seen dramatic changes in the way developmental psychologists characterise the earliest stages of cognitive development. The infant, once regarded as an organism driven mainly by simple sensorimotor schemes, is now seen as possessing sophisticated cognitive skills and even sophisticated concepts that guide knowledge acquisition. This means that there are many developmental stages of cognitive development before entering adulthood (infancy, early childhood, middle childhood and adolescence). In Section 2 you will read about some of the key theorists of cognitive development, stretching across all of these periods. Consider the following example

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