Cognitive Development and Body Image Psychology

Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

Sensorimotor Stage

• Level 1: Reflexes and hereditary basis. Habits developed from the experience of repetition of reflexes.
• Level 2 (3 to 6 months): Primary circular reactions. Voluntary movements slowly replace reflex behavior.
• Level 3 (8 months to 1 year): Secondary and tertiary circular reactions; the search for new means.
• Level 4 (1 to 2 years): Invention, coordination, and mental anticipation.

Preoperational Stage

• Level 5 (2 to 4 years): Transition from dedicated conduct to rudimentary self-satisfaction and socialized behavior; ongoing research, play, and language as vehicles for development. Preconceptual thought.
• Level 6 (4 to 8 years): Intuitive thinking. Experiences are judged according to external appearances and results.

Concrete Operations

• Level 7 (8 to 12 years): The mental experiment still depends on perception (works on objects that can be manipulated or perceived). Awareness of reversibility (the ability to return to the starting point of a given operation).

Formal Operations

• Level 8 (12 to 15 years): Surge of the ability to think outside their own realistic world and beliefs; fully reflective intelligence: entering the world of ideas.

The Concept of Body Image

Body image is unconscious and is built from experience, smell, taste, touch, and other senses. It develops through the structured communication of subjects, which is mainly developed from humanizing exchanges. Therefore, it is said that body image is relational, because it builds on the history of a subject's relationship with other subjects.

Dolto's Three Aspects of Body Image

Françoise Dolto described three aspects of body image:

• Base image: This allows the child to have an experience of himself as an individual; a basic experience of personal identity beyond body changes.
• Functional image: The body moving toward the fulfillment of a desire to achieve what it does not have; this implies an enrichment of other relational possibilities.
• Erogenous image: Refers to the place where erogenous pleasure or displeasure is located.

The dynamic image encompasses and holds together these three images; it is the desire to achieve the object and provides cohesion because it makes sense univocally in its dynamic perspective.

Body Schema vs. Body Image

The body schema is different from the body image; it specifies the individual as a member of the species and is the same for everyone. It is structured from experience and learning.

Wallon stated that own-body awareness is achieved because we recognize the similarity but also the difference of our body relative to others. To build it, we must go through a long process during our childhood.