AQA A-level Psychology (7182): Paper 3 – Cognition and development – Study Guide

This guide covers Cognition and development from the AQA AS and A-level Psychology (7181, 7182) specification, Version 1.4 (1 September 2025), for teaching from September 2025. In the specification PDF this is section 4.3.4, one of the optional topics in 4.3 Issues and options in Psychology. It is examined in Paper 3: Issues and Options in Psychology, Section B, which is where you answer on one topic from option 1.

Use it with the revision notes and the practice questions. The AQA A-level Psychology hub lists everything for this course, and the 7182 checklist lets you tick off each point.

How Paper 3 works

The specification prints these rules for Paper 3:

• Written exam: 2 hours, 96 marks in total, 33.3% of A-level.
• What’s assessed: compulsory content 8 (Issues and debates in Psychology), plus optional content: one from option 1 (9–11), one from option 2 (12–14) and one from option 3 (15–17).
• Section A: multiple choice, short answer and extended writing, 24 marks (Issues and debates).
• Section B: one topic from option 1 (Relationships, Gender, or Cognition and development), multiple choice, short answer and extended writing, 24 marks.
• Section C: one topic from option 2 (Schizophrenia, Eating behaviour, or Stress), 24 marks. Section D: one topic from option 3 (Aggression, Forensic Psychology, or Addiction), 24 marks.

The specification also says that research methods, practical research skills and mathematical skills will be assessed in Paper 3, and that sections B, C and D contain extended response questions. Your school chooses which option topics you study; your teacher will confirm whether Cognition and development is yours.

Coverage table

Syllabus reference (4.3.4)	What you must know or be able to do	Where assessed
Piaget’s theory	Schemas, assimilation, accommodation, equilibration; stages of intellectual development; object permanence, conservation, egocentrism, class inclusion	Paper 3, Section B
Vygotsky’s theory	The theory of cognitive development, including the zone of proximal development and scaffolding	Paper 3, Section B
Baillargeon	Explanation of early infant abilities, including knowledge of the physical world; violation of expectation research	Paper 3, Section B
Social cognition	Selman’s levels of perspective-taking; theory of mind; the Sally-Anne study; the role of the mirror neuron system	Paper 3, Section B
Skills across the topic	Knowledge (AO1), application (AO2), analysis and evaluation (AO3), research methods and maths	Paper 3, Section B

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development

Jean Piaget argued that children are active learners who build knowledge by acting on the world. Thinking changes in quality, not just quantity, as children grow.

Key terms

• Schema: a mental structure holding everything a child knows about an object, action or idea.
• Assimilation: fitting new information into an existing schema without changing it. A toddler who calls a cow “doggy” is assimilating.
• Accommodation: changing a schema, or making a new one, when new information will not fit.
• Equilibration: the drive to restore balance. New information that does not fit causes disequilibrium, which is unpleasant, so the child accommodates to restore equilibrium.

The four stages (ages are Piaget’s approximate guides)

1. Sensorimotor (0–2): learning through senses and movement. Object permanence — knowing an object still exists when out of sight — appears at about 8 months, when infants start to search for a hidden toy.
2. Pre-operational (2–7): language and symbolic play grow, but logic is limited. Children show egocentrism (they cannot take another person’s visual viewpoint; Piaget and Inhelder’s three mountains task), fail conservation (they think quantity changes when appearance changes, such as liquid poured into a taller glass) and fail class inclusion (they cannot see that a sub-class is part of a larger class).
3. Concrete operational (7–11): children conserve and reason logically, but only about real, concrete objects.
4. Formal operational (11+): abstract and hypothetical reasoning becomes possible.

Evaluation

• Strength: Piaget changed how people saw children, as active thinkers rather than small adults. His ideas shaped discovery learning in schools.
• Limitation (method): McGarrigle and Donaldson (1974) used “Naughty Teddy” to mess up a row of counters. Many more 4–6-year-olds conserved than in Piaget’s version, where an adult deliberately changed the row. Piaget’s task may have signalled that the answer should change.
• Limitation (method): Samuel and Bryant (1984) found fewer errors when children were asked about quantity only once, after the change. Asking twice may make children think their first answer was wrong.
• Limitation (egocentrism): Hughes (1975) used a “policeman doll” task with a scenario children understood. About 90% of children aged 3½–5 hid a boy doll where neither of two policeman dolls could see him, which suggests less egocentrism than the three mountains task showed.
• Limitation (sample): Piaget’s early observations included his own children, which raises the risk of bias and limits generalisation.

Worked paragraph (Piaget and conservation)

Piaget claimed that pre-operational children fail conservation because they centre on one feature, such as the height of a glass (knowledge). A four-year-old who says a tall thin glass “has more juice” is focusing only on height (application). However, McGarrigle and Donaldson’s Naughty Teddy study suggests the failure may come from the way the question is asked, not from a lack of logic, because more children conserved when the change looked accidental (analysis). This means Piaget may have underestimated what young children understand, so his stage ages may be too late (evaluation).

Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development

Lev Vygotsky argued that cognitive development is social first and individual later. Children learn through interaction with “more knowledgeable others” (adults, older children, peers) and through cultural tools such as language.

Key terms

• Zone of proximal development (ZPD): the gap between what a child can do alone and what they can do with help from someone more expert. Learning happens best inside the ZPD.
• Scaffolding: temporary, adjusted support from an expert that is reduced as the learner becomes more able. The term comes from Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976), who described how a tutor supported young children building a block construction.
• Cultural tools and language: speech moves from social talk, to self-talk, to inner speech, which guides thinking.

Evaluation

• Strength: Wood and Middleton (1975) found that mothers who adjusted their help to how their child was doing (more help after failure, less after success) gave the most effective help as their 4-year-olds tried to build a model from blocks and pegs. This supports scaffolding within the ZPD.
• Strength (application): the theory supports guided group work, peer tutoring and teacher questioning in schools.
• Limitation: the ZPD is hard to measure precisely, so it is difficult to test the theory scientifically.
• Limitation: Vygotsky said less about individual differences, such as why two children with the same help learn at different speeds, or about the role of biological maturation.

Worked paragraph (scaffolding)

Vygotsky argued that children learn best in the zone of proximal development, with scaffolding from a more knowledgeable other (knowledge). For example, a parent teaching a child to tie shoelaces might first do most of the steps, then give hints only, then simply watch (application). Wood and Middleton’s finding that the most effective mothers adjusted their help to how the child was doing supports this, because the help was matched to the child’s current level (analysis). However, scaffolding research mostly uses practical tasks with young children, so it shows how help works rather than proving that all thinking starts as social interaction (evaluation).

Baillargeon’s explanation of early infant abilities

Renée Baillargeon argued that infants understand far more about the physical world than Piaget thought. She proposed that infants have an innate physical reasoning system, which gives them a basic sense of how objects behave (for example, that solid objects cannot pass through each other and still exist when hidden). Experience then refines this knowledge.

Violation of expectation (VoE) research

Infants cannot search or speak, so Baillargeon measured looking time. Infants are shown a possible event and an impossible event. If they look longer at the impossible event, this suggests it violated what they expected.

• Baillargeon, Spelke and Wasserman (1985): 5-month-olds saw a screen rotate like a drawbridge. When a box was placed behind it, infants looked longer when the screen appeared to rotate through the space the box occupied. This suggests object permanence months earlier than Piaget claimed.
• Baillargeon and DeVos (1991): 3½-month-olds watched a tall or a short carrot slide behind a screen with a window in its top half. Infants looked longer when the tall carrot did not appear in the window.

Evaluation

• Strength: VoE gives a way to study infants without relying on motor skills, which Piaget’s search tasks required.
• Limitation (validity): longer looking may reflect novelty or a preference for more movement, not surprise. Rivera, Wakeley and Langer (1999) found that infants looked longer at a 180-degree rotation even with no box present.
• Limitation: looking time shows an infant noticed a difference, not what they understood about it. Researchers have to infer the mental state.
• Debate link: Baillargeon’s view leans towards nature, while Piaget stressed interaction with the environment. This is useful for the nature-nurture debate.

Worked paragraph (VoE)

Baillargeon used violation of expectation, where longer looking at an impossible event is taken to show surprise (knowledge). If a five-month-old stares at a screen that seems to pass through a hidden box, this suggests the infant knows the box still exists (application). However, Rivera and colleagues found infants looked longer at the larger rotation even with no box, so longer looking could reflect a preference for more movement (analysis). This weakens the internal validity of VoE, because we cannot be sure looking time measures understanding (evaluation).

The development of social cognition

Social cognition is how we understand other people’s thoughts, feelings and intentions.

Selman’s levels of perspective-taking

Robert Selman interviewed children about social dilemmas, such as a story in which a girl, Holly, has promised her father not to climb trees but sees a friend’s kitten stuck in one. He scored how well children could take others’ perspectives. Ages are approximate and vary between textbooks.

Level	Name	What the child can do
0	Undifferentiated and egocentric (about 3–6)	Recognises others exist but assumes they share the child’s own view
1	Social-informational (about 6–8)	Knows others may think differently because they have different information
2	Self-reflective (about 8–10)	Can see their own behaviour from another’s viewpoint
3	Third-party / mutual (about 10–12)	Can step outside a two-person situation and see both views as a third party would
4	Societal (about 12+)	Understands views in relation to social norms, laws and the wider group

Evaluation: Selman’s levels were based on research with children, and older children consistently reached higher levels. However, interviews depend on language: a child may understand more than they can explain.

Theory of mind and the Sally-Anne study

Theory of mind (ToM) is the understanding that other people have beliefs, desires and knowledge that may differ from your own. Premack and Woodruff (1978) introduced the term. A key test is false belief: knowing someone can believe something untrue.

Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith (1985), the Sally-Anne study: children watched two dolls. Sally puts a marble in her basket and leaves. Anne moves the marble to her box. Sally returns. The belief question is: “Where will Sally look for her marble?” About 85% of typically developing children and 86% of children with Down syndrome answered correctly (the basket), but only 20% of the autistic children did. The researchers argued that autism may involve a specific difficulty with ToM.

Evaluation: the study links ToM to autism and has led to many follow-up studies. However, false belief tasks also need memory and language, so failing may not mean a lack of ToM. Onishi and Baillargeon (2005) used a looking-time method and found that 15-month-olds seemed to expect an actor to search where she falsely believed a toy was, which suggests ToM may appear earlier than verbal tasks show.

The mirror neuron system

Mirror neurons fire both when you perform an action and when you watch someone else perform it. Rizzolatti’s research group first recorded them in macaque monkeys in the 1990s. The theory is that the mirror neuron system lets us understand others’ actions and intentions by simulating them, which could support empathy, imitation and ToM. Iacoboni and colleagues (2005) used fMRI and found that a mirror area in the inferior frontal cortex responded differently to the same grasping action depending on whether the scene suggested the person intended to drink or to clean up.

Evaluation: Mukamel and colleagues (2010) recorded single neurons in human patients and found cells that responded to both doing and seeing actions, which supports their existence in humans. However, Hickok (2009) reviewed the evidence and argued that it does not show mirror neurons are the basis of understanding others’ actions. Also, much human evidence comes from fMRI, which measures broad activity in brain areas rather than individual mirror neurons.

Worked paragraph (mirror neurons)

The mirror neuron system may underpin social cognition because the same neurons fire when we act and when we watch others act (knowledge). If a teenager winces as a friend trips, their brain may be simulating the friend’s movement and feeling (application). Iacoboni’s finding that mirror areas responded to the intention behind a grasp supports a role in understanding intentions (analysis). However, fMRI cannot isolate individual neurons and the evidence is correlational, so it is not yet clear that mirror neurons cause social understanding (evaluation).

Linking to other parts of the course

• The cognitive approach and the idea of schemas link to Approaches in Psychology and its revision notes.
• Early development also appears in Attachment, covered in Paper 1 Introductory Topics.
• Nature-nurture, holism and reductionism and cultural bias are useful debates here; see the Issues and debates guide.
• The other option 1 topics are Relationships and Gender.

Common errors

• Writing that assimilation changes a schema. Assimilation adds to an existing schema; accommodation changes it.
• Mixing up egocentrism (cannot take another’s visual viewpoint) and class inclusion (cannot see that a sub-class sits within a larger class).
• Saying Vygotsky invented the word “scaffolding”. The term comes from Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976).
• Describing VoE without explaining why longer looking is taken as evidence of expectation.
• Giving Sally-Anne results without naming the false belief question or the three groups.
• Claiming mirror neurons “prove” empathy. The evidence is mainly correlational.
• Listing evaluation points without linking them back to the theory in the question.

Official syllabus

AQA AS and A-level Psychology (7181, 7182) specification, Version 1.4 (1 September 2025), for teaching from September 2025, section 4.3.4 Cognition and development, assessed in Paper 3: Issues and Options in Psychology, Section B. Check the 7182 checklist as you revise.