Jean Piaget's 4 stages of cognitive development

Jean piaget it is one of the most important psychologists and researchers in history, and to him we owe a large part of what we have been discovering through developmental psychology.

He dedicated a large part of his life to investigating the way in which our knowledge about the environment such as our thought patterns depending on the stage of growth in which we are, Y he is especially known for having proposed various stages of cognitive development that all human beings go through as we grow up.

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Jean Piaget and his conception of childhood

The idea that Jean Piaget raised is that, like our body evolves rapidly during the first years of our lives, our mental capacities also evolve through a series of qualitatively different phases each.

In a historical context in which it was taken for granted that children were nothing more than "adult projects" or imperfect versions of the human being, Piaget pointed out that the way in which children act, feel and perceive does not denote that their processes mental are unfinished, but rather that they are in a stadium with different rules of the game, although coherent and cohesive each. That is, the way of thinking of children is not characterized so much by the absence of typical mental abilities of adults, as by the presence of ways of thinking that follow other very different dynamics, depending on the stage of development in which they are find.

That is why Piaget considered that the thought and behavior patterns of the very young are qualitatively different from those of adults, and that each stage of development defines the contours of these ways of acting and feel. This article offers a brief explanation about these stages of development raised by Piaget; a theory that, although it has become outdated, is the first brick on which Evolutionary Psychology has been built.

Stages of growth or learning?

It is very possible to fall into the confusion of not knowing if Jean Piaget described stages of growth or learning, since on the one hand he talks about biological factors and on the other about learning processes that develop from the interaction between the individual and the environment.

The answer is that this psychologist spoke of both, although focusing more on individual aspects than on aspects of learning that are linked to social constructions. If Vygotsky gave importance to the cultural context as a means from which people internalize ways of thinking and learning about the environment, Jean Piaget put more emphasis on the curiosity of each child as the engine of his own learning, although he tried not to ignore the influence of aspects of the environment as important as, for example, fathers and mothers.

Piaget knew that it is absurd to try to treat the biological aspects and those that refer to cognitive development separately, and that, for example, it is impossible to find a case in which a two-month-old baby has had two years to interact directly with the environment. That is why for him cognitive development informs about the stage of physical growth of people, and the Physical development of people gives an idea about what are the learning possibilities of individuals. After all, the human mind is not something that is separate from the body, and the physical qualities of the body shape mental processes.

However, to understand Piaget's stages of cognitive development, it is necessary to know from what theoretical approach its author starts.

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Remembering the constructivist approach

As Bertrand Regader explains in his article on Jean Piaget's theory of learning, learning is for this psychologist a process of constant construction of new meanings, and the engine of this extraction of knowledge from what is known is the individual himself. Therefore, for Piaget the protagonist of learning is the apprentice himself, and not his tutors or his teachers. This approach is called constructivist approach, and emphasizes the autonomy that individuals have when it comes to internalizing all kinds of knowledge; According to this, it is the person who lays the foundations of his own knowledge, depending on how he organizes and interprets the information he captures from the environment.

However, the fact that the engine of learning is the individual himself does not mean that we all have total freedom to learn or that people's cognitive development is carried out in any way way. If this were the case, it would not make sense to develop an evolutionary psychology dedicated to studying the phases of cognitive development typical of each stage of life. growth, and it is clear that there are certain patterns that make people of a similar age look like each other and distinguish themselves from people of a very similar age. different.

East It is the point at which the stages of cognitive development proposed by Jean Piaget become important.: when we want to see how an autonomous activity linked to the social context fits with the genetic and biological conditioning factors that develop during growth. The stages or stages would describe the style in which the human being organizes his cognitive schemes, which in turn will serve to organize and assimilate in one way or another the information received about the environment, the other agents and him same.

It should be noted, however, that these stages of cognitive development are not equivalent to the set of knowledge that we can typically find in people who are in one or another phase of growth, but describe the types of cognitive structures behind this knowledge.

Ultimately, the content of the different learnings that one undertakes depends largely on the context, but the cognitive conditions are limited by the genetics and the way in which this is shaped throughout the physical growth of the person.

Piaget and the four stages of cognitive development

The phases of development exposed by Piaget form a sequence of four periods that in turn are divided into other stages. These four main phases They are listed and briefly explained below, with the characteristics that Piaget attributed to them. However, it must be borne in mind that, as we will see, these stages do not exactly match reality.

1. Sensory - motor or sensorimotor stage

It is the first phase in cognitive development, and for Piaget it takes place between the moment of birth and the appearance of articulate language in simple sentences (around two years of age). What defines this stage is the obtaining of knowledge from physical interaction with the immediate environment. Thus, cognitive development is articulated through experimentation games, often involuntary in a beginning, in which certain experiences are associated with interactions with objects, people and animals close.

Boys and girls who are in this stage of cognitive development show behavior egocentric in which the main conceptual division that exists is the one that separates the ideas of "I" and of "environment". Babies in the sensory-motor stage play to satisfy their needs through transactions between themselves and the environment.

Despite the fact that in the sensorimotor phase it is not known to distinguish too much between the nuances and subtleties that the category of "environment" presents, the understanding the permanence of the object, that is, the ability to understand that things that we do not perceive at a given moment can continue to exist despite it.

2. Pre-operational stage

The second stage of cognitive development according to Piaget appears roughly between two and seven years.

People who are in the preoperational phase they begin to gain the ability to put themselves in the shoes of others, act and play in fictitious roles and use objects of a symbolic nature. However, egocentricity is still very present in this phase, which translates into serious difficulties in accessing thoughts and reflections of a relatively abstract type.

In addition, at this stage the ability to manipulate information following the rules of logic to formally draw conclusions has not yet been gained. valid, and complex mental operations typical of adult life cannot be correctly performed either (hence the name of this developmental period cognitive). Thats why he magical thinking based on simple and arbitrary associations is very present in the way of internalizing information about how the world works.

3. Stage of concrete operations

Approximately between seven and twelve years of age the stage of concrete operations is accessed, a stage of cognitive development in which logic begins to be used to reach valid conclusions, as long as the premises from which the starting point has to do with specific situations and not abstract. Furthermore, the category systems for classifying aspects of reality become noticeably more complex at this stage, and the style of thinking ceases to be so markedly egocentric.

One of the typical symptoms that a child has entered the stage of concrete operations is that it is able to infer that the amount of liquid contained in a container does not depend on the form that this liquid acquiresas it preserves its volume.

4. Stage of formal operations

The formal operations phase is the last of Piaget's proposed stages of cognitive development, and appears from twelve years of age onwards, including adult life.

It is in this period that you win the ability to use logic to reach abstract conclusions that are not tied to specific cases that have been experienced first-hand. Therefore, from this moment on it is possible to "think about thinking", to its ultimate consequences, and deliberately analyze and manipulate thought patterns, and the hypothetical deductive reasoning.

A linear development?

The fact of seeing a list with stages of development displayed in this way may suggest that the evolution of cognition human of each person is a cumulative process, in which several layers of information settle on the knowledge previous. However, this idea can be misleading.

For Piaget, the stages of development indicate the cognitive differences in the conditions of learning. Therefore, what is learned about, for example, the second period of cognitive development, is not deposited on everything that has been learned during the previous stage, but rather reconfigures it and expands it into various areas of knowledge.

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The key is in cognitive reconfiguration

In Piagetian theory, these phases follow one after another, each offering the conditions for the developing person to elaborate the information that he has available to pass to the next phase. But it is not a purely linear process, since what is learned during the early stages of development constantly reconfigures itself from the cognitive developments that follow.

For the rest, this theory of the stages of cognitive development does not set very fixed age limits, rather, it is limited to describing the ages at which the transition phases from one to other. That is why for Piaget it is possible to find cases of statistically abnormal development in which a person is slow to move to the next phase or reaches it at an early age.

Criticisms of the theory

Although the theory of the stages of cognitive development of Jean Piaget has been the foundational piece of Developmental Psychology and that it has had a great influence, today it is considered to be out of date. On the one hand, it has been shown that the culture in which you live greatly affects the way of thinking, and that there are places where adults tend not to think according to the characteristics of the stage of formal operations, due among other things to the influence of magical thinking typical of some tribes.

On the other hand, the evidence in favor of the existence of these phases of cognitive development is not very solid either. so it cannot be taken for granted that they describe well how thinking changes during childhood and adolescence. In any case, it is true that in certain aspects, such as the concept of permanence of the object or the general idea that boys and girls tend to think from approaches based on what happens in the environment and not according to abstract ideas, are accepted and have served to give rise to investigations that are updated.

Bibliographic references:

• McLeod, S. TO. (2010). Simply Psychology.
• Piaget, J. (1967/1971). Biologie et connaissance: Essai sur les relations entre les régulations organiques et les processus cognitifs. Gallimard: Paris - Biology and Knowledge. Chicago University Press; and Edinburgh University Press.
• Piaget, J. (1972). The Psychology of Intelligence. Totowa, NJ: Littlefield.
• Piaget, J. (1977). The role of action in the development of thinking. In Knowledge and development (pp. 17–42). Springer US.