Some contemporary scholars of cognitive theory (neo-Piagetians, as they are often called) have challenged a number of Piaget’s cognitive development assumptions. For instance, Bower (1982) and Wishart and Bower (1985) challenged the notion of object permanence in the infant at six to eight months. Whereas Piaget proposed that an infant will not search an object hidden behind a screen because the infant believes that the object not longer exists, Bower believes immature space perception may explain the infant’s failure to search. He suggests that from the infant’s point of view, the screen has replaced the hidden object, and two objects cannot occupy the same space. Bower believes that Piaget underestimated what infants come to know about objects and that their failure to search for or locate a hidden object may represent a lack of spatial knowledge rather than a lack of knowledge of object permanence. Bower suggests that infants as young as five months old will not only anticipate the reappearance  of an object that has been moved to a position behind the screen but will attempt to look for it when a different object or no object appears when the screen is removed.

Other researches have challenged Piaget’s notion that infants must do something to or with objects or people in their environment for cognitive development to occur. These scholars suggest that there may be other pathways through which cognition emerges. Studying infants and young children with impaired vision, hearing, and/or motor abilities, they have demonstrated that cognitive development proceeds nonetheless. They belief is that infants, through their perceptual abilities and mental imagery, are able to form concepts with and without direct interaction with objects or people and can do so earlier than Piaget proposed.

While Piaget’s theory is characterized by abstract language and ideas that are often hard to translate and to verify through research, his theory remains important to caregivers and educators for several reasons. Piaget’s cognitive development theory:

• Focuses attention on the sequential aspects of growth and development in the cognitive domain
• Emphasizes the fact that thinking processes in young children are significantly different than thinking processes in order children and adults
• Emphasizes the importance of firsthand, direct, interactional experiences with objects and people
• Provides insight into numerous aspects of cognitive development, such as the development of cause-and-effect relationships; time, space, and number concepts, classification strategies; logic; morality; and language.

Reference: Margareth B. Puckett (2001), The Young Child Development From Prebirth Through Age Eight, USA: Merrill Prentice Hall.

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