The 4 Stages of Cognitive Development

The 4 Stages of Cognitive
Development
Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through
four different stages of mental development. His theory focuses not only on
understanding how children acquire knowledge, but also on understanding the nature
of intelligence.1 Piaget's stages are:
 Sensorimotor stage: birth to 2 years

 Preoperational stage: ages 2 to 7
 Concrete operational stage: ages 7 to 11
 Formal operational stage: ages 12 and up
Piaget believed that children take an active role in the learning process, acting much
like little scientists as they perform experiments, make observations, and learn about
the world. As kids interact with the world around them, they continually add new
knowledge, build upon existing knowledge, and adapt previously held ideas to
accommodate new information.
How Piaget Developed the Theory

Piaget was born in Switzerland in the late 1800s and was a precocious student,
publishing his first scientific paper when he was just 11 years old. His early exposure
to the intellectual development of children came when he worked as an assistant
to Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon as they worked to standardize their famous IQ
test.
Much of Piaget's interest in the cognitive development of children was inspired by his
observations of his own nephew and daughter. These observations reinforced his
budding hypothesis that children's minds were not merely smaller versions of adult
minds.
Up until this point in history, children were largely treated simply as smaller versions
of adults. Piaget was one of the first to identify that the way that children think is
different from the way adults think.
Instead, he proposed, intelligence is something that grows and develops through a

series of stages. Older children do not just think more quickly than younger children,
he suggested. Instead, there are both qualitative and quantitative differences
between the thinking of young children versus older children.
Based on his observations, he concluded that children were not less intelligent than
adults, they simply think differently. Albert Einstein called Piaget's discovery "so
simple only a genius could have thought of it."
Piaget's stage theory describes the cognitive development of children. Cognitive

development involves changes in cognitive process and abilities.2 In Piaget's view,
early cognitive development involves processes based upon actions and later
progresses to changes in mental operations.
The Stages
Through his observations of his children, Piaget developed a stage theory of
intellectual development that included four distinct stages:
The Sensorimotor Stage

Ages: Birth to 2 Years
Major Characteristics and Developmental Changes:
 The infant knows the world through their movements and sensations
 Children learn about the world through basic actions such as sucking,
grasping, looking, and listening
 Infants learn that things continue to exist even though they cannot be seen
(object permanence)
 They are separate beings from the people and objects around them
 They realize that their actions can cause things to happen in the world around
them
During this earliest stage of cognitive development, infants and toddlers acquire
knowledge through sensory experiences and manipulating objects. A child's entire
experience at the earliest period of this stage occurs through basic reflexes, senses,
and motor responses.
It is during the sensorimotor stage that children go through a period of dramatic

growth and learning. As kids interact with their environment, they are continually
making new discoveries about how the world works.
The cognitive development that occurs during this period takes place over a relatively
short period of time and involves a great deal of growth. Children not only learn how
to perform physical actions such as crawling and walking; they also learn a great deal
about language from the people with whom they interact. Piaget also broke this stage
down into a number of different substages. It is during the final part of the
sensorimotor stage that early representational thought emerges.
Piaget believed that developing object permanence or object constancy, the

understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, was an
important element at this point of development.
By learning that objects are separate and distinct entities and that they have an
existence of their own outside of individual perception, children are then able to begin
to attach names and words to objects.
The Sensorimotor Stage of Cognitive Development

The Preoperational Stage
Ages: 2 to 7 Years
Major Characteristics and Developmental Changes:
 Children begin to think symbolically and learn to use words and pictures to
represent objects.
 Children at this stage tend to be egocentric and struggle to see things from
the perspective of others.
 While they are getting better with language and thinking, they still tend to
think about things in very concrete terms.
The foundations of language development may have been laid during the previous
stage, but it is the emergence of language that is one of the major hallmarks of the
preoperational stage of development.3
Children become much more skilled at pretend play during this stage of development,
yet continue to think very concretely about the world around them.
At this stage, kids learn through pretend play but still struggle with logic and taking
the point of view of other people. They also often struggle with understanding the
idea of constancy.
For example, a researcher might take a lump of clay, divide it into two equal pieces,
and then give a child the choice between two pieces of clay to play with. One piece of
clay is rolled into a compact ball while the other is smashed into a flat pancake shape.
Since the flat shape looks larger, the preoperational child will likely choose that piece
even though the two pieces are exactly the same size.

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The 4 Stages of Cognitive

 Sensorimotor stage: birth to 2 years

How Piaget Developed the Theory

Instead, he proposed, intelligence is something that grows and develops through a

Piaget's stage theory describes the cognitive development of children. Cognitive

The Sensorimotor Stage

It is during the sensorimotor stage that children go through a period of dramatic

Piaget believed that developing object permanence or object constancy, the

The Sensorimotor Stage of Cognitive Development

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