Cognitive Development: Thinking and Learning

Cognitive development begins at birth when infants start to make sense of the world. Everything is new to them. They’re smelling aromas, tasting foods, hearing sounds, and feeling textures for the first time. With each new experience, the brain makes neural connections. High-quality learning environments provide a variety of ongoing experiences that strengthen these connections in infants. As they are reinforced, the brain is strengthened, and cognitive skills increase. You can offer children from birth to age three experiences that help them develop their cognitive skills. By the time they reach their third birthdays, their ability to think, reason, and solve problems will have grown remarkably, thanks to the exposure to new things you’ve given them.

Cognitive development isn’t a simple, step-by-step process. Young children develop cognitive skills by integrating a variety of underlying skills. These increase alongside developing motor and sensory abilities. For example, infants’ and toddlers’ sensory perceptions and motor activities help them explore and discover the people, things, and events around them.

Jean Piaget believed that children are naturally curious and construct their own learning through trial and error. He viewed cognitive development as a series of stages during which children confront core challenges. He believed that children from birth to age two develop their cognitive skills through sensory exploration and motor development; he called this the sensorimotor stage. During infancy and toddlerhood, children learn through exploration, trial and error, and repetition. 

Here’s a look at some of the cognitive skills children learn in their early years.

Cause and Effect

One cognitive skill that infants start to learn very early is cause and effect. Initially, babies seem surprised when a toy moves or makes a noise. They may look at you for reassurance and try to read your response to this surprising event. Their own explorations of cause and effect are simple at first: they swipe at a mobile or shake a rattle, and something happens. When they repeat the action, they may accidentally use a different part of their bodies and produce a different reaction. Through trial and error, they run through a variety of gestures to elicit the desired response. Each of their attempts generates a cognitive connection in the brain. When they become more mobile, they test their theories by making more elaborate cause-and-effect attempts. Does a wooden spoon make the same sound when hit against the floor as when it hits a soft pillow or a plastic toy? Infants learn cause and effect by exploring, pure and simple. 

Infants experience cause and effect when they start cooing and babbling, and you coo and babble in return. This reciprocal exchange reinforces their efforts. Cause and effect also fuels infants’ social-emotional development. Cause-and-effect explorations support infants’ perceptual development too. Babies learn about objects through their senses, observing how they work, what sounds they make, how they open and close. Interactive toys with buttons to push and objects that spin or light up reinforce cause and effect and perceptual development.

Children’s problem-solving ability increases when they can experiment with cause and effect by taking things apart, putting them back together, and manipulating objects. As their thinking develops, toddlers become more intentional in their explorations. They discover that they can put toys in a plastic shopping cart, and then they wonder: What else can I put in the cart? And where can I go with it? They might fill up the shopping cart with books and soft toys and wheel it outside to play.

Memory

Piaget observed that children develop mental pictures, or schema, through trial and error, and use this prior knowledge to construct new knowledge. They store this information in their memories, from which it can be retrieved to create more advanced thinking and reasoning. As their attention spans grow, they can retrieve a wider range of information and play with objects longer; this is why they outgrow toys and books and demand more challenging ones. Recognize the growing complexity of a child’s brain and the importance of creating learning environments suited to different developmental stages.

Responsive early learning environments are designed to help children build memory skills. They provide routines and structures that give children opportunities to predict what happens next and that build on existing memories. Share what is going to happen throughout the day with children. In the morning, tell them what the day’s activities will be. Tell the toddlers or twos, “Today, we’re going to play indoors and outdoors. We’ll sing songs and read books. There are puzzles and beads for you to play with too. It’s going to be warm today, so I’m going to put out the water table for those of you who want to use it. I’ll put out yellow paint, paintbrushes, and sponges for you to paint with.” At the end of the day, talk with the children about what they did and what activities will occur tomorrow. Routines like this offer continuity, security, opportunities to follow simple directions, and memory exercises.

Imitation

Long before infants understand themselves as separate people, they can imitate the facial expressions and hand gestures of their parents and caregivers. Children as young as six weeks can imitate the facial expressions of strangers (Meltzoff and Moore 1997). Infants have been observed matching gestures like sticking out their tongues to those of adults. They also self-correct imitative gestures to better match those of adults.

These games that babies play are the foundation of later imitations. All play? Not really: Imitation is how cultural knowledge and family ways get passed down. Infants and toddlers learn their families’ cultures by watching and mimicking people around them. The better they are at imitation, the more thoroughly they are imbued with the cultural values and practices of their families.

Connect imitation to language and vocabulary. Young children happily imitate sounds and repeat the words they hear. You might say, “This is a turtle. Can you say turtle?” They respond by saying the word turtle. You smile and say, “That’s right! Turtle!” Take the time to speak slowly and repeat words. Learning songs and playing with musical instruments increases language development by linking words to imitative gestures. Children learn songs from fingerplays like “Itsy, Bitsy Spider” and by watching and imitating you.

When their cognitive skills improve, children can integrate memory, mental representations, and symbols into imitative gestures and behaviors. In dramatic play, for example, a toddler might mimic a phone conversation he’s observed at home. He imitates his father’s gestures by nodding his head, frowning, and pretending to listen to someone on the phone. He might shake his head “no,” or he might shake his finger at a doll.

Spatial Awareness