Cognitive Development Stages and Logical Reasoning Principles

The Evolution of Intelligence

Intellectual development begins after birth. The first adaptations are innate character and reflexes. Many psychologists, like Freud and Piaget, consider the knowledge and skills acquired in the first stage essential for the development of the individual.

Piaget's Four Stages of Development

• Sensorimotor Period: The child develops a skill set and acquires new attitudes.
• Preoperational Stage: Characterized by the emergence of language, imagination, and a self-centered perspective.
• Concrete Operations: Activities are characterized by smart objects; reasoning with abstract concepts remains difficult.
• Formal Operational Stage: Begins at 12 years old, where intellectual capacities reach their final equilibrium and mature personality.

The Nature of Thought

Thought explains the world around us and carries two primary meanings:

1. A synonym for intelligence.
2. The activity of designing a project in the mind and managing mental contents.

The ability to think addresses various problems and serves to develop conceptual contents and find internal explanations.

Logical Legend

• Negation: ¬ (not)
• Conjunction: ∧ (and, but)
• Disjunction: ∨ (or)
• Conditional: → (if... then...)
• Biconditional: ↔ (if and only if)

Definitions

• Judgment: The operation of the understanding by which membership of a predicate to a subject is affirmed or denied.
• Proposition: The content expressed through a judgment.
• Expression: The vehicle of communication, consisting of the set of words, terms, or signs used to convey the proposition.
• Formula:
  • Tautological: True for any interpretation of variables.
  • Indeterminate: True for some interpretations, but false for others.
  • Contradictory: Always false.
• Stimulus: Any physical, mechanical, thermal, chemical, or electromagnetic energy that excites a sensory receptor.
• Sensation: The act of discovering something through sensory receptors.
• Perception: A constructive process by which the mind organizes sensations into meaningful shapes and forms.