Jean PIaget, a psychologist and developmental biologist, studied the intellectual stages of child development in the 1920s. His findings are still relevant today. Piaget determined the normal process of cognitive development in 4 stages based on age. While there is some fluidity to the stages, with some children developing faster than other and some children experiencing aspects of multiple stages at once, Piaget’s theory is a sequence and he remained adamant that children cannot skip a step and everyone goes through the process. His theory is about more than just development. It attempts to explain the process of how humans come to acquire, construct, and use knowledge. Natural cognitive development is a combination of biological maturation and environment experience that influence a child’s understanding of the world.
The four stages are as follows:
1. Sensorimotor (birth to age 18-24 months): The infancy stage is the period leading up to the acquisition of language. It is characterized as the trial and error stage. Children are only aware of what is right in front of them. They learn about the world by interacting with things in their immediate physical space. The major milestone os this stage is called object permanence. Typically occurring at age 7-9 months, it is the time in which a child begins to realize that objects exist even once they have been removed from their environment. This is the beginning of memory development. So much for the saying, out of sight, out of mind. In this stage, children move from simple reflexes to internalization of schemas, meaning that children begin to develop intent, logic, and creativity. Much of the mental development that occurs in this phase has to do with increased motor functions and physical abilities. As the infant’s world begins to expand, the child begins to create an understanding of it through experimentation.
2. Preoperational Stage (ages 2-7 or toddlerhood to early childhood): During this stage, children develop an understanding of symbolism. Children in this stage are still not capable of performing mental operations, but he begin to use their increased knowledge through play. Children think in terms of images and symbols, which is why their play is often magical in nature. Play is a demonstration of creative thinking. During the preoperational stage, a child’s thinking is egocentric, meaning that they can only think from their own viewpoint and have difficulty understanding the perspective of another person. Children in this stage also engage in precausal thinking, characterized by animism, attributing lifelike qualities to inanimate objects, artificialism, thinking that environmental characteristics are due to human actions, and transductive reasoning, forging a connection between unrelated events. During this stage, children do not yet understand cause and effect relationships. In the later half of the stage, children begin to an inquisitiveness about their knowledge. They understand that they have knowledge but do not understand how they got and begin to ask why. This is the development of a child’s intuition.
3. Concrete Operational Stage (ages 7-12 or childhood to preadolescence): The third stage sees children move away from egocentric thinking and towards a recognition of external events, thoughts, and feelings. Children use logic as it applies to concrete objects and events. Children engage in inductive reasoning, using observations to infer generalizations. Children develop operational thinking and other important mental processes, including classification, conservation, reversibility, decentering, seriation, and transitivity.
4. Formal Operations Stage (adolescence through adulthood): Children develop deductive reasoning, the ability to predict the outcome of events based on generalized principles. Children begin to apply their logic to abstract concepts. Children in this stage are able to make hypotheses. They also engage in metacognition, thinking about thinking, and systematic problem solving. Most people do not always use formal operations in every aspect of their day-to-day lives. Some people never reach this stage. Piaget believed that formal intellectual development ends with this stage and further development into adulthood depends on the accumulation of knowledge.
Image by USAG- Humphreys on Flickr Creative Commons.
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