PSYC 3800 Lecture 3: discussion post 3
8 Apr 2019
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Document Summary
In 1940, piaget believed that everyone passed through an invariant sequence of 4 qualitatively distinct stages. He stated that these different milestones in mental development are only achieved at certain ages, which meant that cognitive development could not be accelerated. Contrary to his beliefs, recent studies show that 3 year old children were able to understand piaget"s conservation concept (watanabe. 2017), which is something that according to his theory, children should not be able to understand until the age of 6. This shows that cognitive development can indeed be accelerated, and is becoming easier to achieve with the newer generations. As the textbook states, environmental factors play a very large role in the cognitive development of a child. In the case of the new generation of children, watanabe believed that gene-environmental interactions may be central to explaining cognitive human development.
