PIAGET'S 4 STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT BY: ADAMERO, APRIL L.

1. The Sensorimotor Stage

The sensorimotor stage is the first phase of children’s cognitive development. During this stage, children primarily learn about their environment through their senses and motor activities.

The sensorimotor stage comprises six substages, where children’s behavior moves from being reflex driven to more abstract. Each substage is described briefly.

• Use of reflexes (0–2 months)

During this stage, children typically use their reflexes. They cannot consolidate information from their sensory organs into a single, unified concept.

• Primary circular reactions (1–4 months)

Children start to consolidate information from different sensory organs. They start to engage in behavior that satisfies the way their body feels or their needs. For example, they repeat pleasurable behaviors, and they adapt their behavior to feed from different objects. They turn to respond to sounds and sights in their environment.

• Secondary circular reactions (4–8 months)

Children’s behaviors become more intentional, and the types of behaviors that they repeat expand to include those that result in interesting responses external to their body. For example, they might push buttons on a toy. Children also start to take more interest in their environment. They repeat behaviors that generate interesting responses.

• Coordination of secondary schemes (8–12 months)

At this point, children’s behaviors become more goal oriented, and they can combine different behaviors to achieve goals.

• Tertiary circular reactions (12–18 months)

Instead of performing the same actions, children try new behaviors and actions to achieve different results. These behaviors are not spontaneous or by accident, but are purposeful. Unlike primary and secondary reactions, children can combine more complicated behaviors and even perform a behavior similarly but not the same to get the desired result.

•  Mental combinations (18–24 months)

Children start to rely on mental abstractions to solve problems, use gestures and words to communicate, and can pretend. Instead of relying on numerous attempts to solve problems/puzzles, children can deliberate and carefully choose their actions.

 

2. The Preoperational Stage

At the end of the sensorimotor stage, children start to use mental abstractions.

At the age of two, children enter the preoperational stage, where their ability to use mental representations, rather than the physical appearance of objects or people, improves greatly.

Examples of abstract representations include engaging in pretend play and talking about events that happened in the past or people who are not currently in the room.

Other interesting cognitive advances occur during this phase. For example, children understand causality. Children also understand identities, where items and people remain the same even if they look different. For example, at some point during this stage, a caregiver dressing up as Santa Claus might not be as convincing.

In this stage, children also learn more about categorization. They can classify items based on similarities or differences. They also start to understand numbers and quantity (e.g., concepts such as ‘more’ or ‘bigger’).

Although abstract thought advances quickly in the preoperational stage, other cognitive processes develop more slowly.

For example:

• Children tend to consider their own viewpoint and perspective.
• Children fail to understand that two things can be the same, even if they appear different (more about this in the next section on Conservation).
• Children struggle to take someone else’s point of view.

 

3. The Concrete Operational Stage

The next phase is the concrete operational stage, which begins around the age of seven. During this stage, children are more capable of solving problems because they can consider numerous outcomes and perspectives. All of their cognitive abilities are better developed in this stage.

• Categorization abilities improve so that children can arrange items along a dimension, understand that categories have subcategories, and relate two objects to each other through a third object.
• Their numerical abilities improve a lot, and they can perform more complicated mathematical operations.
• Their spatial abilities are better. They are better at estimating time and distance. They can read maps and describe how to navigate from one location to another.

Conservation

During this stage, children understand the concept of conservation better and, as a result, are better at solving conservation problems. Conservation refers to the idea that things can be the same, even if they look different.

An example would be a cup of water poured into two glasses. One glass is tall and thin, while the other is short and wide. Recognizing that both glasses contain the same amount of water shows an understanding of conservation.

Children in the preoperational stage struggle with problems of conservation. For example, they struggle with tasks where the following is conserved even it appears different:

• Number of items (e.g., two sets of 10 items arranged differently)
• The volume of liquid (e.g., the same volume of liquid in two differently shaped glasses)

Children struggle with conservation because they can only focus on one dimension at a time; this is known as centering. For example, with the volume of liquid, they can only consider the shape of the glass, but not the shape of the glass and the volume of water.

They also do not yet understand reversibility. Irreversibility refers to a child’s inability to reverse the steps of an action in their mind, returning an object to its previous state. For example, pouring the water out of the glass back into the original cup would demonstrate the volume of the water, but children in the preoperational stage cannot understand this.

In contrast, children in the concrete operational stage can solve conservation problems. This is because children now have the following cognitive abilities:

• They understand reversibility (i.e., items can be returned to original states).
• They can decenter (i.e., concentrate on multiple dimensions of items, rather than just one).
• They better understand identity (i.e., an item remains the same even if it looks different).

 

4. The Formal Operational Stage

At the age of 11, children enter the formal operational stage.

Abstract thought characterizes this stage. Children can think about abstract concepts and are not limited to a current time, person, or situation.

They can think about hypothetical situations and various possibilities, like situations that don’t exist yet, may never exist, or might be unrealistic and fantastical.

During this stage, children are capable of hypothetical-deductive reasoning, which allows them to test hypotheses and draw conclusions from the results. Unlike younger children who haphazardly approach problems, children in the formal operational stage can apply their reasoning skills to apply more complicated problems in a systematic, logical manner.