Stages of Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through four different
stages of intellectual development which reflect the increasing sophistication of children's thought
Each child goes through the stages in the same order, and child development is determined by
biological maturation and interaction with the environment.
At each stage of development, the child’s thinking is qualitatively different from the other stages, that
is, each stage involves a different type of intelligence.

Piaget’s Four Stages

Stage Age Goal

Sensorimotor Birth to 18-24 months Object permanence

Preoperational 2 to 7 years old Symbolic thought

Concrete Ages 7 to 11 years Logical thought

operational

Formal operational Adolescence to Scientific

adulthood reasoning
The Sensorimotor Stage (object permanence)
Ages: Birth to 2 Years
The first stage is the sensory motor stage, and during this stage the infant focuses on physical
sensations and on learning to co-ordinate his body.
The infants use their actions and senses to explore and learn about their surrounding environment.
A variety of cognitive abilities develop at this stage; which mainly include representational play, object
permanence, deferred imitation and self-recognition.
At this stage, infants live only in present. They do not have anything related to this world stored in their
memory. At age of 8 months, the infant will understand different objects' permanence and they will
search for them when they are not present.
Towards the endpoint of this stage, infants' general symbolic function starts to appear and they can
use two objects to stand for each other. Language begins to appear when they realise that they can use
words to represent feelings and objects. The child starts to store information he knows about the
world, label it and recall it.

From 2 to 7 years: Preoperational stage (Symbolic thought)

Young children and Toddlers gain the ability to represent the world internally through mental imagery
and language.
At this stage, children symbolically think about things. They are able to make one thing, for example, an
object or a word, stand for another thing different from itself.
A child mostly thinks about how the world appears, not how it is. At the preoperational stage, children
do not show problem-solving or logical thinking.
Infants in this age also show animism, which means that they think that toys and other non-living
objects have feelings and live like a person.
By an age of 2 years, toddlers can detach their thought process from the physical world. But, they are
still not yet able to develop operational or logical thinking skills of later stages.
Their thinking is still egocentric (centred on their own world view) and intuitive (based on children's
subjective judgements about events).

7 to 11 years: Concrete operational stage (Logical thought)

At this stage, children start to show logical thinking about concrete events.
They start to grasp the concept of conservation. They understand that, even if things change in
appearance but some properties still remain the same.
Children at this stage can reverse things mentally. They start to think about other people's feelings and
thinking and they also become less egocentric.
This stage is also known as concrete as children begin to think logically. According to Piaget, this stage
is a significant turning point of a child's cognitive development because it marks the starting point of
operational or logical thinking. At this stage, a child is capable of internally working things out in their
head (rather than trying things out in reality).

Age 12 and above: Formal operational stage (Symbolic reasoning)

At this stage, individuals perform concrete operations on things and they perform formal operations on
ideas. Formal logical thinking is totally free from perceptual and physical barriers.
At this stage, adolescents can understand abstract concepts. They are able to follow any specific kind
of argument without thinking about any particular examples.
Adolescents are capable of dealing with hypothetical problems with several possible outcomes. This
stage allows the emergence of scientific reasoning, formulating hypotheses and abstract theories as
and whenever needed.
Piaget's (1936, 1950) theory of cognitive development explains how a child constructs a mental model
of the world. He disagreed with the idea that intelligence was a fixed trait, and regarded cognitive
development as a process which occurs due to biological maturation and interaction with the
environment.

Piaget believes that a child's development is led by his own self-centred and focused activities as he is
more independent.
For Piaget, moral development is a construction process, and the interplay of thought and action
creates moral concepts.
Piaget mainly emphasized life events that occur from infancy to the late teenage years. Also, Piaget's
most work is on the topic of cognitive development,

Children’s ability to understand, think about and solve problems in the world develops in a stop-start,
discontinuous manner (rather than gradual changes over time).

▪ It is concerned with children, rather than all learners.

▪ It focuses on development, rather than learning per se, so it does not address learning of information
or specific behaviors.
▪ It proposes discrete stages of development, marked by qualitative differences, rather than a gradual
increase in number and complexity of behaviors, concepts, ideas, etc.

The goal of the theory is to explain the mechanisms and processes by which the infant, and then the
child, develops into an individual who can reason and think using hypotheses.
To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental processes as a result of
biological maturation and environmental experience.
Children construct an understanding of the world around them, then experience discrepancies
between what they already know and what they discover in their environment.

How is Piaget's Theory Different from others?

Piaget's Theory is different from other theorists in several ways:
Jean Piaget vs Vygotsky: Vygotsky claims that cognitive development is led by social interactions and
children are social beings. Whereas, Piaget believes that a child's development is led by his own self-
centred and focused activities as he is more independent.
Piaget vs Kohlberg: For Piaget, moral development is a construction process, and the interplay of
thought and action creates moral concepts. Whereas, Kohlberg believes that process of exploring
universal moral principles is called development.
Piaget vs Erikson: The main difference between Erikson and Piaget is that Erikson focused on the
understanding of development during the entire life of a person. Whereas, Piaget mainly emphasized
life events that occur from infancy to the late teenage years. Also, Piaget's most work is on the topic of
cognitive development; whereas, Erikson was more interested in the area of emotional development.