Psychology

When one looks at young children and infants one realizes that their ability to think and reason is far much less that that of adults and that of older children. Over centuries philosophers have wondered whether a human being is born with the ability to perceive the environment or whether a human being learns how to see during early childhood and infancy (Michael W, 2002).

Jean peaget did a research on how children adapt and learn the world around them. According to him two processes are key in adaptation. They are accommodation and assimilation.

Accommodation
Ones cognitive organization is influenced by the need to adapt to the environment (Michael W, 2002).

Assimilation
One deals with the outside world on the basis of the cognitive organization that is existing. Interpretation of the outside world is influenced according to the nature of the individual. Cognitive development in children goes through a sequence of stages. Each stage is very different from the other.

Sensory motor is a stage that extends from birth up to about two years of age. This is the stage of intelligence in action because the infant learns a lot by moving around the environment. The infant is able to achieve the concept of object permanence. This allows the child to remember the existence of objects when they are not out of view. This concept develops as the child actively moves around in the environment.

Pre-operational stage is a cognitive development stage that lasts from the age of 2 to 7 years. At this stage thinking is dominated by perception and this leads to many errors. In this stage children pay attention to a given situation only and they lack reversibility. Reversibility is the ability to reverse so activity that occurred previously. Children in this stage also show egocentrism which involves them thinking that the way they perceive things is the just way (Michael W, 2002).

Concrete operations stage is the third stage and it lasts between the ages of 7 to 11 years. Thinking of children in this stage is less dependent on perception. Fundamental to this advance is the improvement of a number of logico-mathematical processes. The most important aspects of these processes are reversibility, where the effects of perceptual alteration can be cancelled out by visualizing a reverse alteration. Thinking of children in this stage is towards concrete situations (Michael W, 2002).

Cognitive development in children depends so much on children familiarizing with a series of cognitive structures, most of which are based on logical principles. Cognitive development is so much dependent on children learning a variety of cognitive structures most of which are based on logical or mathematical principles.

According to Jerome Bruner developmental theory world can be presented in three ways enactive, iconic and symbolic. In enactive mode the world is represented through actions. The advancement of this mode will lead to object permanence. The iconic mode includes representation of the world as mental images where the images combine information from various experiences. This mode is of significance between the ager of 1 year and 7 years. The symbolic mode is very crucial at the age of 6 to 7 years of age. A symbol is that which stands for another thing. Words are therefore objects that stand for other things and use of symbolic mode is dependent on the advancement of language (Piaget, 2001).

Older children have an advanced way of cognition and ways of representing the environment that are not obtainable to younger children. This cognitive advancement is most likely to be of use to the advancement of visual perception. However many visual processes are very basic and do not depend on cognitive advancement. Inborn factors and learning in perception are the main factors in the development of visual perception. One way of confirming this issue is to consider humans who have had little perceptual experience. If visual perception was intrinsically advanced then their perception should be at its best and if perception depended on learning, then it means their perceptual processing is supposed to very poor. This suggests that visual perception is not inborn but advances as one grows (Santrock, 2008).