Cognitive Development

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a child learn a seemingly advanced task.

To start with, Jerome Bruner was an American psychologist who came to study the cognitive development of children after looking at problem solving abilities. His interest was how we develop the ability to predict what will happen next (Hardy and Heyes, 1999). He identified three types of representation which he believed are the basis of cognitive development. Bruner to some extent agrees with Piaget, that individuals are born with biological that enable them to make sense of their environment and that these systems becomes increasingly more complex overtime (hardy and Heyes, 1999). However, Bruner unlike Piaget developed his own theory of cognitive development which he called modes of processing information.

Bruner believed that enactive representation is the first type of representation to appear in the child's development. It runs from birth to around one year. This mode of representation is thought to be "motor" because a baby can ...

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for him to extract from them the underlying similarities between objects.

The third and final stage is the symbolic mode which ranges from seven years to adulthood. The two forms (enactive and iconic representations) with their reliance only on individual's movement and fixed images, cannot effectively code enough information about the environment to enable one make predictions. Bruner developed a final mode of representation which he called the symbolic mode of representation, which seemingly offers a solution to the inflexibility as noted in former stages by using symbols. Bruner believed that during this stage an individual is able to encode and represent information in ...

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