Psychology

Cognitive development is the process by which peoples intellectual capabilities establishes and develops over time. The capabilities in question include problem solving, reasoning, and perception, etc. Piaget explains how infants and children gain knowledge from when they are born and as they grow (Santrock 2008). He explains childrens ways of thinking as they grow. According to Piaget, children participate actively in the process of learning. Piaget put forward the argument that they become accustomed to thinking and learns to discover from their faults. He provides a fundamental view that cognitive growth is in the natural concept of the environment. Piaget suggests that the way children think in their early stages of life is completely different from their thinking as they grow. At a certain age in their life, Piaget suggests that children reason in a similar way on diverse things (Slater and Bremner 2003).

Piaget suggests that people need to be accustomed to their own environment. To be able to do so, there are two basic processes involved. These processes impact on each other mutually. The first process is assimilation. Assimilation is the process by which people alter incoming knowledge so that it conforms to the existing manners of reasoning (Baron, Earhard and Ozier 1995). The incoming knowledge is incorporated into the prevailing mental structures. For example, the prevailing way of grasping items by babies will be used to grasp new items. The second process is accommodation. This is the process by which people adjust the existing knowledge structure to be able to react to traits of an item or a circumstance. This is the process of transforming the intellectual structure to accommodate new knowledge. For example a child will alter the way heshe grasps items according to the shape. Piaget contributed a great deal to the understanding of intellectual development in infants and children (Santrock 2008). The paper seeks to prove the fact that Piaget underestimates the cognitive abilities of infants and children

Piaget suggests that there transitions from one stage to the others takes place suddenly. It is not yet clear whether children develop in stages as suggested by Piaget or in a linear form. What is clear is that even if they develop in stages, there is no definite age in which they move from one stage to the next. It is evident that children develop at different rates (Baron, Earhard and Ozier 1995).

One example of a cognitive shortfall in Piagets theory is in the preoperational stage. In a situation where children understand entity permanence, they are able to know that the item is still in existence long after they cease to see it. According to Piaget, children begin to reveal entity permanence by eight months or later. Piaget came up with his conclusions after conducting some experiments on infants. He revealed an item like a stuffed doll to an infant and then hid it behind a solid screen that was placed before the baby (Ballantyne 2006). He came to the realization that as soon as he had removed the item out of the infants sight, the infant did not act as though that item was there and did not even try to find where it was moved to. In this case, Piaget reached a conclusion that at that age, the infant did not realise that the item existed past the time it was removed out of sight (Malerstein 2005). Going by this conclusion is misleading because studies have revealed that even at that age the infant realizes that the item is still in existence even after it is taken out of their sight. This takes place long before the eight months or after as suggested by Piaget. It has been argued that these children fail to reveal their knowledge of existence of such an item, not because they do not conceive its permanence, but because they are not capable of coordinating getting around the screen with their reminiscence for the item.  There are some researchers who argue that children are able to grasp concepts long before they begin revealing their knowledge of them. This phenomenon is referred to as competence performance gap (Baron, Earhard and Ozier 1995).  This takes place due to the fact that childrens motor abilities are not developed adequately or their verbal communication is not refined sufficiently to reveal their understanding and intellectual processes (Santrock 2008).
 
There are some researches that have revealed that children have the aspect of entity permanence as early as three and half months. Studies were carried out to determine whether the problem was coordination of the motors abilities or whether Piagets argument was true. Renee Baillargeon and some other researchers carried out an experiment that was very dissimilar from Piagets (Schlinger Jr. 2009).The researchers were able to gather evidence that infants as young as three months and half revealed some knowledge that an item continued to exist after it was taken away (Ballantyne 2006). Baillargeon employed a procedure referred to as habituation. This procedure uses the propensity of babies to stare at attractive items displayed before them up to the time they are tired of staring, and that is the time they get their eyes from those items. This procedure reveals the items that attract infants attention devoid of their capability to direct motor movements. In such an experiment, the attractive items can be moved slightly in such a way that it is possible to find out whether the child can respond to the movement (Anderson 1996). Normally, the person carrying out the research documents the amount of time that the child will stare at the following change in display. In the case where the child fails to look at the subsequent display for a longer period that he stared at the initial one, then the deductions are that the child does not view the second item as being dissimilar from the initial one. If the infant stares at the second display for a longer period, then this reveal the fact that he views the second item as being more attractive than the initial one ( Baron, Earhard and Ozier 1995).

In their experiment, Baillargeon and DeVos made a display that demonstrated two actions. In the first, they put a piece of carrot that was oscillating passing behind a solid window. The second one, a long carrot did the same. The screens in the two events were identical (Santrock 2008). Once the child familiarized with the show, one of two dissimilar succeeding shows was presented.  The first one was an impracticable action where the long carrot moved behind another screen that had a transparent window that was capable of revealing the top of the carrot but did not. The second one was a practical action that revealed the short carrot that passed through a transparent window but was not evident until the moment that it emerged from the other side. It was discovered that the children stared longer at the impractical than the practical action (Ballantyne 2006). This was taken to mean that the children as young as four months did remember the carrots and they expected them to appear on the screen. On the account of these experiments, Studies have revealed that Piaget underrated the cognitive ability of children. This is due to the fact that he did not account for the gap between the infants capabilities to understand and his capability to reveal the knowledge. The eight months or longer that according to Piaget is when the child is able to determine entity permanence, is actually the period when the child is capable of coordinating his motor movements. This is the time when a child is able to reach out for objects that are taken out of their sight (Slater and Bremner 2003).

There is also another aspect in children that Piaget seems to underestimate. This is their capability to see the world from other peoples point of view. In his experiment, he employed the three mountain task. This was a way of proving that children have problems seeing things from other peoples perspective. His experiment was not an easy one. Even if the mountains were somewhat dissimilar in size and had tiny differentiating marks at the peak, they were nevertheless very alike in form. Helen Borke argues that if this experiment is done using city scenery with common animals and some familiar sights with dissimilar shapes, it would be realized that a child would be in a position to view them in the same way as the grownups do (Malerstein 2005).

In the 1980s and 1990s, studies based on childrens perception capabilities were concerned with the area of cognitive growth. This field involved the a childs theory of mid. These studies provided evidence that the minds of children functions in the same way everyones mind operate. Two researchers, Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner are among those who carried out such studies. This study was done using the Maxi Chocolate Task (Schlinger Jr. 2009). They told the children a tale about Maxi who puts chocolate in the cupboard and then moves outside to have fun. While maxi is playing, his mother places the chocolate somewhere else. The question to the children is where he will seek to find the chocolate. Children who are three will answer that he will look where his mother put them. This is because they know that is where the chocolate is, and that it is hard for them know that their viewpoint is not the same as Maxis. Some of the children aged four and all those aged five will answer in maxis viewpoint, that he will find the chocolates at the exact place that he left them. This is in contrast with Piagets view that it is children between six and eight who are likely to have developed the theory of mind. It is evident from this experiment that children between the ages of four and five can take the viewpoint of someone else (Slater and Bremner 2003).

Conclusion
This paper was aimed at gathering evidence to the fact that Piaget underestimates the cognitive abilities of infants and children. It is evident that Piagets theory provided a load of knowledge on growth and development in children. Most researches have focused on experiments to test Piagets theory. From those researches, it has come out clearly that Piagets theory has underrated the cognitive capabilities of infants and children. Children tend to develop cognitive capabilities earlier than Piaget suggests. This has been proved through researches carried after Piaget. Some of these researches have employed contemporary neuro-imaging techniques to evaluate the impact of cognitive development. For example, there have been efforts to find out when the different brain cells grow so as to find out when the capabilities associated with those cells are likely to develop. Researches should be carried out not only to test Piagets theory, but also to find out the effects of other social and environmental factors influence cognitive development. This is likely to reveal why there are differences in the development rate and also how the development takes place, whether in stages or linearly.