Examples of different cultures are industrialised or agrarian societies and religious values. .
Two forms of tools are developed, technical tools which change the external environment and psychological tools which change the internal environment.(Miller, 1993:387).
Piaget did concede that culture had some influence on development, but his theory allowed that only real effector was age-graded. From birth to adolescence there are four stages, each one has specific thought structures associated with it.
The four stages are from birth to two years (sensorimotor stage), two to seven years (preoperational stage), seven to eleven or twelve years (concrete operational) and from eleven or twelve to around 15 years (formal operational). (Berk, 2000:21).
The sensorimotor stage is when infants manipulate objects and process the external world in terms of sensory input. Manipulation of the object gives them information that they start to organise in terms of sight, touch, taste, sound and smell. Later this gets translated into symbolic thought during the preoperational stage. Language and pretend play are the out workings of the development of symbolic thought. After this, the concrete operational stage is the development of logic based on real situations eg, conservation of mass when shape is altered. The final of Piaget's stages is formal operational thinking when the child becomes capable of reasoning with abstractions, "what-if" reasoning.
Schemata are described as the basic building blocks of mental development.(Hethrington & Parke, 1999:360-361) From his training as a biologist, Piaget formed the view that changing schemata are an adaptation to allow personal equilibrium, balance between internal structures and external environment. As a biologist sees development, this allows the organism (person) to adapt and survive.
Cognitive dissonance describes the conflict between existing structure of the mind, and environmental events acting on the person.
