Lorette Barnard Student ID #71080 PSY102 Introduction to Psychology Unit 3

Question Two

Summarize Jean Piaget’s stages of cognitive development and the major milestones

accomplished and limitations at each stage.

Jean Piaget contributed significantly to recognizing how children’s thinking differ from adults’.

His point of departure was that children formed schemes or mental concepts when they

experience new things. First, they would use schemes they already possess to interpret something

new. This process is called assimilation. As the child experiences new things, old schemes are

adjusted with more details, schemes are ‘fine-tuned’. This process is called accommodation.

The Sensorimotor Stage lasts from birth to 2 years old. During this time, the infant gets to know

the world around him via his senses (hearing, sight, touch, smell) and motor abilities

(movement). The initial involuntary reflexes of the infant become more complex movements as

he grows i.e. grasping things, putting things in his mouth and putting things into objects and

taking it out.

Towards the end of this stage, the child learns that objects exist although he can’t always see it

which is called object permanence. This process is essential in language development which

relies on symbolic thought or mental pictures. Language is symbols that replaces specific objects

in the mind. In this stage, the child should reach the milestone of planning specific actions and

‘seeing’ mental images relating to objects whether seen at that time or not.

Piaget refers to the Preoperational Stage as 2 to 7-year-old children who are more mobile and can

explore their world with questions. Although not yet capable of logical thinking, children can

think symbolically i.e. sticks and stones are cars and planes while playing outside. This stage is

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Lorette Barnard Student ID #71080 PSY102 Introduction to Psychology Unit 3

characterized by imaginative play although they believe everything they see are real for example

the faeries in a story book.

The preoperational child is limited by egocentrism; only seeing the world from their point of

view and what is important to the child must be important to everyone around them. This

probably explains some toddler tantrums! They also become fixated on one feature and ignore all

other relevant information pertaining to the situation (centration). The child don’t understand that

the inside of a product don’t change if the outside of the product change i.e. if the sweet is

presented in a shorter, wider package than before, the child may feel that it contains less of the

item although the grams may reflect the same. This touches on the last limitation in this stage:

Irreversibility; hereby the preoperational child cannot reverse play an action in their minds. So

suggesting that they imagine a specific action, probably won’t be possible for them at this stage.

The child’s cognitive development now moves on to the Concrete Operations stage from age 7 to

12. Here conservation, logic and reversible thinking become possible although he is still unable

to deal with abstract concepts such as love, freedom, spirit etc. The Concrete Operational child

still needs touchable, physical reality and can only understand something if they can see, touch

or see a mental image of something. The child can now take all the relevant features of an object

into account when making inferences.

In the last cognitive developmental stage, Piaget concludes that from 12 years old onwards, the

Formal Operational child can think hypothetically. He no longer needs physical reality and are

capable of abstract thought. Teenagers now think about possibilities, debate more critically and

more philosophically. Problem-solving abilities needed in further studies should be honed at this

developmental stage.

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Lorette Barnard Student ID #71080 PSY102 Introduction to Psychology Unit 3

Piaget was skeptical about everyone reaching stage 4 in cognitive development.

References:

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