Cognitive development is certainly not an easy topic to grasp.
But don’t worry. We will try our best to help you with the essentials of this complex field of study.
We’ll start with some background, then show you how cognitive skills are used daily. In addition, we will explain a few theories and describe fascinating studies.
Since cognitive development goes beyond childhood and adolescence, we are sure you will want to know about this, too.
To end this article, we provide some helpful resources. You can use these to support the cognitive skills of your students or clients.
These science-based exercises explore fundamental aspects of positive psychology, including strengths, values, and self-compassion, and will give you the tools to enhance the well-being of your clients, students, or employees.
What Is Cognitive Development in Psychology?
Cognitive development is how humans acquire, organize, and learn to use knowledge (Gauvain & Richert, 2016).
In psychology, the focus of cognitive development has often been only on childhood. However, cognitive development continues through adolescence and adulthood. It involves acquiring language and knowledge, thinking, memory, decision making, problem-solving, and exploration (Von Eckardt, 1996).
Much of the research on cognitive development in children focuses on thinking, developing knowledge, exploring, and solving problems (Carpendale & Lewis, 2015).
Nature vs. nurture debate
The nature versus nurture debate refers to how much an individual inherits compared to how much the environment influences them. How do nature and nurture shape cognitive development?
American psychologist Arthur Jensen (1969, 1974) emphasized the role of genetics within intelligence, arguing for a genetic difference in the brightness of white and Black people.
Jensen (1969) made some very bold assertions, stating that Black people have lower cognitive abilities. His research was heavily criticized for being discriminatory. He did not consider the inbuilt bias of psychometric testing (Ford, 1996). The lower test scores of Black individuals were more likely to result from a lack of resources and poor-quality life opportunities (Ford, 2004).
In an enormous cross-sample of 11,000 adolescent twins, Brant et al. (2013) found that those with a higher intelligence quotient (IQ) appeared to be more influenced by nurture and stimulation. The researchers suggested this may be because of their heightened attention and arousal system, absorbing more information from the environment, being more open to new experiences, and allowing brain plasticity and changes to occur.
They also found that adolescents with a lower IQ showed more genetic influence on their IQ from their parents. The researchers suggested that their lower levels of intelligence may result in lower motivation levels and an inability to seek new experiences.
This study highlights the need for those with lower IQ levels to be supported with positive interventions to increase their cognitive abilities and capacity.
Cognitive Development Skills & Important Milestones
Developmental milestones are specific skill achievements that occur predictably over time.
These milestones reflect skill achievement and consider genetic makeup and environmental influence (Dosman, Andrews, & Goulden, 2012).
Here are a few of these critical milestones, the associated skills, and the age at which they are typically achieved. The following table is modified from the Child Develpment Institute.
| Milestone | Description | Approximate age |
|---|---|---|
| Object permanence (early) | Follows an object until it is out of sight. Searches for a partially hidden object. |
4–8 months |
| Object permanence | I will search for a completely hidden object. | 9–12 months |
| Cause and effect | Begins to understand cause and effect in actions. Realizes how to get a response. | Nine months |
| Functional use of objects | Understands what objects are used for. | 12–15 months |
| Play (Representational) | Can functionally use dolls. | 18 months |
| Play (Symbolic) | Can use an object symbolically to represent something else. | 2–3 years |
| Skills (Pre-academic) | Knows letters, numbers, shapes, and colors and can count. | 3–5 years |
| Thinking (Logical) | Understands conversation and multi-step problem-solving. Understands others’ perspectives. | 6–12 years |
| Thinking (Abstract) | Abstract thinking, hypothesizing, and drawing conclusions. | >13 years |
Table 1. Children’s cognitive milestones and skill development
Language and other cognitive skills
Language skills are essential for a child’s ability to communicate and engage with others. These skills support other areas of a child’s development, such as cognitive, literacy, and social development (Roulstone, Loader, Northstone, & Beveridge, 2002).
The modified table below was sourced from the Australian parenting website raisingchildren.net.au and describes how language develops in children.
| Language activity | Approximate age |
|---|---|
| Singular word use. Often resembling exact words such as ‘dada’ meaning dad. Toward the end of 18 months, a child will be able to follow simple instructions such as ‘sit down and ‘get up.’ | 12–18 months |
| The use of two-word sentences. A child can understand what familiar people say and vice versa; unfamiliar people realize about half of what they say. | 18 months–2 years |
| A child will make use of three to four words with more accuracy. Play is combined with talking. | 2–3 years |
| A child will illustrate abstract thoughts and show their thoughts and feelings through more complex conversations. The ability to discuss many topics is apparent by the end of 5 years old. There will be an understanding of basic grammar and stories. | 3–5 years |
| Children are becoming good at storytelling and creatively putting together words and sentences. Children can share opinions, and by the age of 8 years, they can have adult-style conversations. | 5–8 years |
Table 2. Language development from 0 to 8 years
Thinking skills
Thinking concerns manipulating information and is related to reasoning, decision-making, and problem-solving (Kashyap & Minda, 2016). It is required to develop language because you need words to think.
Cognitive development activities help thinking and reason to grow. Thinking is a skill that does not commence at birth. It develops gradually through childhood and advances more rapidly when children are two years old. Reasoning develops around six. By age 11, children’s thinking becomes much more abstract and logical (Piaget, 1936).
Developing knowledge
Knowledge is essential for cognitive development and academic achievement. Increased knowledge equates to better speaking, reading, listening, and reasoning skills. Learning is not only related to language. Performing a task can also be gained (Bhatt, 2000). It starts from birth as children begin to understand the world around them through their senses (Piaget, 1951).
Building knowledge is essential for children to encode and retrieve new information. This makes them able to learn new material. Knowledge helps to facilitate critical thinking (Piaget, 1936). Developing children’s knowledge base is a crucial part of cognitive development.
Memory development
The development of memory is lifelong and related to personal experiences.
Explicit memory, which refers to remembering events and facts of everyday life, develops in the first two years (Stark, Yassa, & Stark, 2010). Explicit memory develops around 8 to 10 months.
Working memory and its increase in performance can be seen from three to four years through adolescence (Ward, Berry, & Shanks, 2013). This is demonstrated through increased attention, language acquisition, and knowledge.
Implicit memory, unconscious and unintentional, is an early developing memory system in infants and develops as the brain matures (Ward et al., 2013).
Perceptual skills
Perceptual skills develop from birth. They are an essential aspect of cognitive development. Most children are born with senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell (Karasik, Tamis-LeMonda, & Adolph, 2014).
As children develop, they learn to communicate by interacting with their environment and using their sensory and motor skills (Karasik et al., 2014).
When visual, tactile, and auditory skills are combined, they emerge as perceptual skills. These perceptual skills are then used to gauge spatial relationships, discriminate between figure and ground, and develop hand-eye coordination (Libertus & Hauf, 2017).
Exploring and solving problems
Problem-solving can be seen in young children playing with blocks, objects, and balls. It is entwined with perceptual skills and memory. Very young children playing with blocks, picking up a spoon, or even looking for objects demonstrate the development of problem-solving skills (Goldschmied & Jackson, 1994). This is known as heuristic play (Auld, 2002).
As children develop cognitively and gain language, the problem solving then transfers to abstract thinking and logical problem-solving (Needham, Barrett, & Peterman, 2002). Problem-solving and exploring are interconnected. Science, engineering, and mathematics are based on exploration and problem-solving skills.
5 Real-Life Examples of Cognitive Development
To understand how people think and process information, it is essential to look at how cognitive skills are used in everyday life. Here are some real-life examples of cognitive development.
Decision making
To make a decision, a person needs to weigh up information and make the best choice. As an example, think about a restaurant menu. There is a lot of information on the menu about food options. Reading the menu requires you to analyze the data and then reduce it to make a specific meal choice.
Recognition of faces
Have you ever wondered why it is possible to recognize a person even when they have grown a beard, wear makeup or glasses, or changed their hair color?
Cognitive processing is used in facial recognition and explains why we still recognize people we meet after a long time, despite sometimes drastic changes in their physical appearance.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
This widely used therapeutic intervention is based on understanding cognition and how it changes behavior.
It is based on the premise that cognition and behavior are linked, and this theory is often used to help individuals overcome negative thinking patterns. CBT provides them with alternative positive thinking patterns to promote positive behavior.
Forgetting
The cognitive processes of short-term and long-term memory explain forgetting. An example of forgetting can be seen in students who do not study for exams. If they do not transfer the information from short-term to long-term memory, they forget the knowledge required for the examination and may fail.
Reasoning
Thinking and cognition are required for reasoning. Reasoning involves intellect and an attempt to search for the truth from new or existing information. An example of this activity can be seen in political debates on television.
3 Ground-Breaking Cognitive Development Theories
There are several cognitive development theories, some more well-known than others.
They all attempt to explain how cognitive development occurs.
Piaget’s cognitive development theory
Jean Piaget (1936) is famous for his theory of cognition, which considers four specific developmental stages.
The sensorimotor stage (0–2 years) is when infants build an understanding of the world through their senses and movement (touching, feeling, listening, and watching). This is when children develop object permanence.
The pre-operational stage (2–7 years) is when language and abstract thinking arise. This is the stage of symbolic play.
When a child is seven years old, they enter Piaget’s concrete-operational stage, which goes up to 11 years. This is when logical and concrete thought come into action.
From 11 onward, children learn logical and abstract rules and solve problems. Piaget described this as the formal operational stage.
Vygotsky’s theory
Lev Vygotsky described an alternative theory. He believed that children’s cognitive development arises through physical interaction with the world (Vygotsky, 1932). Vygotsky’s approach is based on the premise that the support of adults and peers enables the development of higher psychological functions. His is known as the sociocultural theory (Yasnitsky, 2018).
Vygotsky believed that a child’s initial social interactions prompt development, and as the child internalizes learning, this shifts their cognition to an individual level.
Vygotsky (1932) considered children akin to apprentices, learning from the more experienced, who understand their needs.
There are two main themes of Vygotsky’s theory.
The zone of proximal development is described as the distance between the actual development level and the level of potential. This is determined by independent problem solving when children are collaborating with more able peers or under the guidance of an adult (Vygotsky, 1931).
This may explain why some children perform better in the presence of others with more knowledge and skills but more poorly on their own. These skills, displayed in a social context but not in an isolated setting, are within the zone of proximal development. This highlights how a more knowledgeable person can support a child’s cognitive development (Vygotsky, 1932).
Thinking and speech are considered essential. Vygotsky described a connected relationship between language development and the thinking process. His theory explains how younger children use the address to think out loud. Gradually, they evolve silent inner speech once mental concepts and cognitive awareness are developed (Vygotsky, 1931).
Ecological systems theory
Another more modern theory, similar in some sense to Vygotsky’s, is one by American psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner (1974). He suggested that a child’s environment, within an arrangement of structures, has a differing impact on the child (Bronfenbrenner, 1974).
Bronfenbrenner’s five structures are the micro-system, mesosystem, ecosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem. These concern the surrounding environment, family, school, values, customs, and cultures. They are interrelated, with each system influencing others to impact the child’s development (Bronfenbrenner, 1977).
Bronfenbrenner (1974) considered the micro-system as the most influential. This system contains the developing child, family, and educational environment and most impacts a child’s cognitive development.
A Look at Cognitive Development in Adolescence
Adolescence is a period of transition between late childhood and the beginning of adulthood.
Based on Inhelder and Piaget’s (1958) stage theory of cognitive growth, adolescence is when children become self-conscious and concerned with other people’s opinions as they go through puberty (Steinberg, 2005). The psychosocial context of adolescents is considerably different from that of children and adults.
The brain goes through a dramatic remodeling process in adolescence. Neural plasticity facilitates the development of social cognitive skills (Huttenlocher, 1979). Structural evolution of cortical regions of the brain may significantly influence cognitive functioning during adolescence (Huttenlocher, De Courten, Garey, & Van der Loos, 1983).
Recognition of facial expressions and emotions is one area of social cognition that has been investigated in adolescence (Herba & Phillips, 2004). In a study of adolescents, the amygdala, a part of the brain associated with emotion processing, was significantly activated in response to fearful facial expressions (Baird et al., 1999). This highlights that the development of emotional cognition is prominent in this age group.
3 Fascinating Research Studies
There are numerous examples of case studies involving cognitive development.
Here are three we find most interesting.
1. A cognitive habilitation program for children
Millions and Coles (2014) studied five children who had experienced learning and academic deficits because of prenatal alcohol exposure. Before and after an intervention, researchers gave standardized tests of nonverbal reasoning and academic achievement to the children.
Four of the five children showed increases in the average range of scores on nonverbal, reasoning, reading, and mathematics measures. This study highlighted the benefit of interventions to address children’s cognitive difficulties and learning problems, even when the mental challenges are apparent from birth.
2. Bilingual babies and enhanced learning
Introducing babies to two languages has improved cognitive abilities, especially problem solving (Ramírez-Esparza, García-Sierra, & Kuhl, 2017).
Spanish babies between 7 and 33.5 months were given one hour of English sessions for 18 weeks. By the end of the 18 weeks, the children produced an average of 74 English words and phrases. This study showed that the age between 0 and 3 years is the best time to learn a second language and gain excellent proficiency. However, languages can be learned at any time in life.
3. Unusual autobiographical memory
In an unusual case study, a woman described as ‘AJ’ had highly superior autobiographical memory, a condition that dominated her life (Parker, Cahill, & McGaugh, 2006).
Her memory was described as ‘nonstop, uncontrollable and automatic.’ AJ did not use any mnemonic devices to recall. She could tell you what she was doing on any day of her life.
AJ could also recall her past with a high level of accuracy. This study provided some insightful details of the neurobiology of autobiographical memory and changes in the prefrontal cortex that cause these superior cognitive abilities.
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A Take-Home Message
The first few years of a child’s life show rapid changes in brain development. This is part of the child’s cognitive development. There are several different theories of how and when this occurs. These are not set in stone but guide children’s cognitive development.
If children are not achieving their milestones at the approximate times they should, extra support can help make a difference. Children with fetal alcohol syndrome can achieve considerably improved cognition with specialized support.
Remember, as Piaget’s schema theory first suggested, cognitive development does not end in childhood. It continues through adolescence and beyond. Cognitive development changes carry on throughout much of a teenager’s life as the brain develops.
