Cognitive development theories have made significant and everlasting contributions to developmental psychology. These theories facilitate our understanding of the development of skills necessary for processing information for a child (Miller, 2016). Therefore this paper compares and contrasts Gibson’s and Piaget’s theory while determining their strengths and weaknesses in infant development.
Gibson’s and Piaget’s theories are similar in that they both imply that specification of information occurs in stimulation. Their description of the proactive, self-motivated child making an exploration of the stimulus world is similar. Nonetheless, Gibson’s theory differs from Piaget’s theory (Miller, 2016). Piaget is concerned with children, adolescents, and general individual’s behavior while Gibson’s theory focuses on children instead of all learners. Piaget is concerned with development instead of learning therefore not addressing learning particular behaviors or information (Miller, 2016). Gibson’s theory, on the other hand, is concerned with a child’s learning and information processes (Miller, 2016). Piaget’s theory has distinct developmental stages discernible by differences in quality instead of a gradual increase in the complexity of concepts, and behaviors.
Piaget’s strength entails his significant contribution that enables us to understand cognitive development. His idea that development happens in distinctive and different stages, with every stage taking place at a particular time, in a consecutive way, and in the manner that enables children to have the ability to think about the world utilizing new capacities (Miller, 2016). However, Piaget’s theory has certain weaknesses such as; its components are difficult or impossible to combine them in a broader picture. His theory has a tendency of being slow in the inclusion of biology and evolution in its context (Miller, 2016). Moreover, the computer metaphors impact the information processing as they simplify the real-life experience thus overlooking the interaction with others. Gibson’s theory strength is in the form of the perceptual learning which increases the capacity to extract significant information out of a stimulus array out of the experience (Miller, 2016). The strength of this theory is on its concerns on ecological perception as well as its inclusivity of body in motion in cognition. However, its weakness is in the cognitive traits of perceptual learning (Miller, 2016). In essence, these two theories have enabled us to understand children’s development.