CHAPTER ONE
PROBLEM AND BACKGROUND
1.1            INTRODUCTION
Generally speaking, one of the earliest observations we make in life is that the desire to explore the unknown to further our knowledge and understanding is a fundamental characteristic of being human.  Thus, to boldly go into the unknown is also what each of us does in the course of our development.
 Psychological studies have found out that human development is both the most fascinating and most complex science we have. No wonder then, Piaget pointed out that “… life is a continuous creation of increasingly complex forms with the environment”[1] This complex forms provided a ground for the contemporary research on human development to consistently emphasize the multidisciplinary approach needed to describe and explain how people change (and how they remain the same)
over time. More still, Kail asserts that another way to approach development is to focus on thought processes and the construction of knowledge[2], which shows that interest in cognitive development, is a relatively recent phenomenon.  Hence, developmentalists, who have been operating mainly within the framework of either psychoanalytic or learning theories now, discover a new aspect of development to explore – a new framework for their thinking.
According to Hilgard (1964), “Probably, the best way to view cognitive psychology is to look at it as trend of humanism and behaviorism, with an emphasis on thought processes, reasoning and problem solving.”[3]  By this, we mean the process of becoming aware, or coming to know a perceptual image.  In Piaget’s own view, cognitive development centers on the movement of a child through succeeding stages of cognitive organization, whereby this progress is accomplished by means of assimilation and accommodation.  As the child encounters new experiences he/she both reacts to them in terms of what the child already knows (assimilation) and revises his/her worldview as a result of the new information (accommodation). Thus, Cognition is in a process of constant change and reorganization. Piaget believes that “at certain points in development, these reorganizations are so momentous and fundamental that they represent a whole new way of understanding the world”4.
When such a transformation happens, for him, (Piaget), a new stage of cognitive development is reached.  The major stages he proposed are the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational periods. I have set out to counteract in line with the contemporary researchers, some of the underestimated views of cognitive development of infants and young children and then give it a positive position as will be seen in the chapters that follow.