Cognitive development: Piaget, Vygotsky and information processing
Last reviewed September 2026 by Dr. Andrew Wichterman · Aligned to the current NCE blueprint. Valid for exams through June 30, 2027.
AI-narrated overview made with Google NotebookLM. The written lesson below is by Dr. Andrew Wichterman.
Piaget describes what children can think at each age; Vygotsky describes how social interaction moves them forward. The exam tests Piaget's stage features in detail and Vygotsky's two key terms.
Try to answer each from memory first, even if you have to guess. Guessing before reading makes the answer stick; reveal only after you have tried.
Piaget's four stages
Sensorimotor, birth to 2: the infant knows the world through senses and action; the key achievement is object permanence, knowing that things exist when out of sight, around 8 months. Preoperational, 2 to 7: symbolic thought and language, but egocentrism, centration, animism and irreversibility; the child cannot conserve. Concrete operational, 7 to 11: conservation, reversibility, classification and seriation; logical thought about concrete objects. Formal operational, 11 and up: abstract and hypothetical reasoning, hypothetico-deductive thinking, metacognition.
The vocabulary items
Schema: a mental framework. Assimilation: fitting new information into an existing schema. Accommodation: changing the schema to fit new information. Equilibration: the balance between the two that drives development. Conservation: knowing quantity is unchanged by a change in appearance, the classic water-in-glasses task. Egocentrism: inability to take another's perspective, tested with the three mountains task. Centration: focusing on one feature and ignoring others. These terms are each worth an item.
Adolescent egocentrism (Elkind)
David Elkind described a return of egocentrism in the formal operational stage. The imaginary audience: the belief that everyone is watching and judging. The personal fable: the belief in one's own uniqueness and invulnerability, which helps explain risk-taking. Both are exam favorites because they connect Piaget to adolescent behavior a counselor would see.
Vygotsky: the social route
Lev Vygotsky held that cognitive development is driven by social interaction and language. The zone of proximal development is the gap between what a child can do alone and what they can do with help from a more capable person. Scaffolding is the temporary support provided in that zone and withdrawn as competence grows. Private speech, a child talking herself through a task, is thought becoming internalized. If an item involves a teacher or peer helping a child do slightly more than they could alone, it is Vygotsky.
Information processing and other views
Information processing theories treat the mind as a system with attention, working memory and long-term memory whose capacity and strategies improve with age, rather than moving through stages. Theory of mind, the understanding that others have beliefs different from one's own, emerges around age 4 and is tested with false-belief tasks. Noam Chomsky's language acquisition device holds that grammar is innate, against Skinner's reinforcement account. Holophrases, single words carrying a sentence's meaning, appear around 12 months; telegraphic two-word speech around 18 to 24 months.
Without scrolling up, write everything you remember from this lesson. Then check yourself against the key terms. Recalling the whole lesson once, right after reading it, does more than reading it twice.
Ten questions from this domain, with an explanation after each answer.
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