Cognitive Theories
Another approach that may also be supplemental to understanding human personality is the approach on understanding how a person’s cognitive level develops. One of the psychologists who made a highly significant contribution to this approach is Jean Piaget, born in Switzerland. He argued that children “are curious, active, and constructive thinkers who want to understand the world around them”. He proposed that even children already form “schemas”, or cognitive representations of external experiences. Children also add additional information to the existing schemas through a process called assimilation. These schemas can also be changed and modified through accommodation. Piaget further contest the idea that children merely imitate everything they see and hear. For him, accumulation of knowledge occurs “through a complex interplay between pre-existing knowledge and new information gathered through interaction with the external environment”.
Piaget also proposed that children also go through a chronological set of developmental stages, characterized by a different level of cognitive functioning. The first stage, “sensorimotor stage”, from birth to two years old, infants acquire knowledge through their own actions. These actions include smelling, touching, grasping, biting, sucking and rolling. Piaget also used his observations to introduce the concept of object permanence, or the awareness that an object continues to be present even when not seen. During this stage, infants also begin to suffer from separation anxiety or fear of being separated from the primary caregiver.
The second stage, preoperational stage, states that at ages of two to six years old, children already possess intuitive, prelogical cognitive thinking. However, during this stage, children tend to become egocentric or unable to perceive things in another person’s point of view and tend to become limited in conservation thinking, or thinking that physical properties of an object does not change despite physical changes. The third stage, concrete operational stage, is characterized by the child’s capability of logical reasoning at ages six years old. At later ages, children already become capable of the conservation level of thinking. The last stage, formal operational stage, corresponds to the adolescent stage, when cognitive functioning operates with logic and abstract thought.