How does cognition develop over the lifespan? What role does the environment play in the development of cognition?

     Piaget argues that cognitive development and that children learn through social and physical interactions with the world around them. As each of us progress, we all have experiences and interact with our own environments. We all have our own experiences and with that develop our own cognition. As children progress they go through the sensorimotor stage; where they interact with the world around them. In class we discussed how all children know at a young age is to sleep and eat. They interact with environment around them by putting everything in their mouths. 

     Next comes the pre-operational stage. In this stage, language acquisition takes place and egocentrism is at a forefront. The third phase is the concrete operations stage where children begin logical reasoning and realize that there are events that happen outside their own lives. Finally, the formal operations stage is where children can hypothetically reason and use deduction in making decisions. Moral issues come into play in this stage. 

     In the chapter "Designs for Knowledge Evolution" that we read in class, it mentions that Lave describes "learning as a participation in practice". We learn and grow cognitively depending on the environment around us. We can learn by becoming "apprentices" at work. We are molded by what we are surrounded by. For example, technology surrounds us; that technology will develop our brains in a certain way. It becomes us. In my reading Andy Clark's Natural Born Cyborgs, it suggests this very thing. We have become one with our devices/technology; it has become part of ourselves. We in a sense are no longer one without the other. This is a very alarming consequence of our interaction with the tools we have. Is this causing us to be smarter, or simply making us dependent on the technology we have? Once that technology is gone or we are without it for a period of time, can we get by?