Jean Piaget Stages Of Cognitive Development

In the early 20th century, the field of psychology had begun to bloom with multiple prominent names and figures trying to understand the human nature by proposing theories and establishing experiments. Chief among them was Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist and development biologist most notable for his theory of cognitive development of children, in which he became the first psychologist to refute the long-standing notion that children were inferior to adults in terms of thinking. Piaget argued that children tend to think in a very remarkable way in comparison to adults and correlating to their age. What interested him greatly was not how children were able to learn how to read or count, but rather, how they processed different abstract concepts,
like time and quantity. Also known as the developmental stage theory, this model serves as a “blueprint” that argues children are all born with a basic set of mental abilities and pass through different milestones of cognitive progress, acquiring new skills as they pass from one stage to the next. Beginning by observing his own children first, Piaget had divided the entire process of cognition in children into four stages, encompassing the moment they are born, and ending well into puberty and late adolescence. The four stages are the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the concrete operational stage, and finally the formal operational stage.
Sensorimotor Stage (birth – 2 years)
The sensorimotor stage is the first stage children pass through, and this itself is further divided into six substages, starting from birth until the acquirement of language skills.
The main characteristic features of this stage are the development of object permanence, or knowing that objects persist across time and space (even if they are hidden from sight) and are subject to causality rules, and mental representation. In the early period of this stage, infants only focus on the immediate relations of their environment and later on try to learn about the world around them through trial and error. Infants start to learn through adaptation, or acclimatization to the environment. According to Piaget, this is brought about by two main processes: assimilation, or organizing new situations into already-built schemas, or a pattern of though and behavior, and accommodation, when schemas have to be modified to match the new situation. The first substage of these six is modification of reflexes (birth – 1 month), in which reflexes become voluntary in response to repeated stimuli. For example, the palmar grasp reflex would later on become an intended action. Primary circular reactions (1 to 4 months) are schemes that are repeated because they are interesting and serve to explore the world. For example, and infant might continuously push his or her tongue against the roof of the mouth to discover what actions might be done with it. Secondary circular reactions (4 – 8 months) are marked by the organization of schemes in order to produce a specific desired outcome and the development of habits. For instance, an infant would intentionally grasp a rattle, shake it, and learn that it produces sound. Stage 4, which Piaget calls the “first proper intelligence” is coordination of secondary schemes (8 – 12 months) where secondary circular reactions become more coordinated and means-end behavior is established to achieve that goal. At this stage, the infant commits what is known as
A-not-B error, in which he or she looks for the hidden object at the first place the object was hidden from sight. Later on, infants pass in the stage of tertiary circular reactions (12 – 18 months) where they combine several secondary reactions to explore the world around them. They start to show interest and curiosity in things and experiment in cause and effect. The sensorimotor stage ends by the beginnings of thought-mental representations (18 – 24 months) where they anticipate the consequences of an action without actually engaging in it because they had already developed a mental representation of it.
Preoperational Stage (2 – 7 years) This stage is marked by the development of language skills; however, children exhibit magical thinking and have no sense of cause and effect, are unable to think logically, and cannot grasp the concept of “sameness”. To them, the same volume of water filled in containers of different shapes and sizes cannot be the same. They are egocentric take things at face value and quite literally.
Concrete Operations Stage (7 – 11 years) At this stage, children begin to develop logical thinking, are able to come to conclusions, and understand the concept of reversibility, conservation, and quantity. They have established a moral sense and are able to follow rules and regulations.
Formal Operations Stage (11 years and above) Formal thinking is established at this point and children are able to think abstractly and develop deductive induction. They understand the concept of probability and their use of language becomes more complex and sophisticated.
Throughout these stages, Piaget studied how children interacted with the world around them, being active learners and continuously tapping upon previously recalled knowledge, and building on to what they already knew. His theory revolutionized the way psychologists viewed children, the development of the process of cognition, and how intelligence was not a preset attribute.