Accredited Child Psychology Comprehensive Guide

Explore stages four and five of sensorimotor development, where practical intelligence and instrumental acts show how children coordinate means and ends to reach objects.

Explore undifferentiation of self and other in infancy’s first stages, tracing primary narcissism, symbiosis, and the emergence of imitation, smiling, and early object relations.

Examine how sensorimotor schemes shape perception, including constancy of size and form, permanence of the object, and perceptual causality, from newborn to later development.

Perceptual activities develop with age as adults use strategic eye movements to explore configurations, while six-year-olds have less accurate fixations and different scanning patterns.

Investigate how perception gives way to concepts in child development, detailing sensorimotor schematism, perceptual constancies, and operatory conservations, and contrast perceptual versus logico-mathematical operations.

Explore the emergence of the semiotic function in the second year, when children represent absent objects through differentiated signifiers such as language, mental imagery, and symbolic play.

Explore drawing as a semiotic function, bridging symbolic play and the mental image, and examine its stages from topological intuition to visual realism.

Explore how mental imagery arises from internal imitation, contrasts with imageless thought, and shows reproductive and anticipatory images across preparatory and operatory stages before and after age 7–8.

Explore how memory in children structures image memories, distinguishing recognition from evocation, and how memory relates to sensorimotor schemes and language development.

Traces the evolution of language from spontaneous infant vocalization to one- and two-word sentences and early grammar, highlighting Chomsky's influence and the role of language in thought.

Examine how language and operations shape child cognition, linking scalar and vector expressions to reasoning, conservation, and seriation, and tracing the semiotic function from sensorimotor action to intelligence.

Investigate the genesis of concrete operations, highlighting reversibility, conservation, and transformations in children's reasoning, from preparatory phases to mastering conservation of substance, weight, volume, and length.

Explore how concrete operations bridge action schemes and early logical structures through groupings like seriation, classification, and transitivity, and how numbers emerge from invariant spatial arrangements and 1-to-1 correspondences.

Examine how social and affective development in children intertwines with cognitive growth from sensorimotor roots to concrete operations, highlighting symbolic play, ego opposition, language, and rules-based cooperation in early socialization.

Explore moral feelings and judgments shaped by parental influence, superego concepts, and imitation, detailing how orders, respect, and ambivalence form duty, guilt, and moral autonomy.

Explore the pre-adolescent shift toward propositional operations and hypothetico-deductive reasoning, signaling the liberation from concrete thought toward systematic, future-oriented thinking.

Explore the development of reversibility in child psychology, detailing inversion, negation, reciprocity, and symmetry within concrete operations and the emergence of a combinatorial system of transformations from sensorimotor schemes.

Explore the development of formal operatory schemes in children aged 11 or 12, including notions of proportion, double systems of reference, hydrostatic equilibrium, and probabilistic and combinatorial reasoning.

Explore how the induction of laws and the dissociation of factors drive formal thought, experimental reasoning, and moral autonomy in adolescence, illustrated by pendulum and factor-dissociation examples.