Jean Piaget's 4 stages of cognitive development

Today we dedicate an article to know one of the most important legacies of Jean Piaget, experimental psychologist, a philosopher and biologist whose work has been widely studied in psychology and pedagogy in addition to other disciplines.

This article is dedicated to the 4 stages of cognitive development proposed by the researcher, and it is that Jean Piaget differentiated these different stages in our lives. As we grow as human beings we go through them, and consequently our cognition acquires a better knowledge of the environment and new patterns of thought.

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Piaget and his conception of cognitive development

In the past, society conceived childhood as a stage in which the adult stage had not been reached and little else, the individual being only an incomplete version of an adult person.

Piaget understood that it was not a linear and cumulative development, but rather was characterized by being qualitative in profile.

. He was a reference for questioning the traditional conception of childhood, and he dedicated a large part of his life to deny it. Being in one stage or another has consequences when it comes to learning, behaving, relating, etc.

What a person learns at a time within a phase of his life does not build on what he has previously learned. What happens is that your brain reconfigures the information that it had and with the new one and thus expands its knowledge.

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Piaget and the 4 phases of cognitive development

Jean Piaget's theory of the stages of cognitive development has been indispensable for Developmental Psychology, despite the fact that it subsequently received some criticism.

But even today much of his work is current, and has served as a starting point for further research. Below we present the four stages of cognitive development according to Piaget presented sequentially.

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1. Sensorimotor stage

Piaget tells us that this is the first of the four stages of cognitive development. The sensorimotor stage is located from the moment of birth until the baby is able to speak crafting simple sentences, which is generally up to two years of age.

The way in which the baby acquires knowledge is basically thanks to interacting with the environment, that is, exploring their immediate world through their senses, and interacting with other people.

Babies have been shown to show the ability to understand that objects exist even though they are not in front of them. They generally show egocentric behaviors, and their eagerness to explore is notable and essential for the phase of cognitive development in which they are.

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2. Pre-operational stage

Once the sensorimotor stage has been passed, the individual would enter the second stage of development. Piaget places the preoperational stage between two and seven years of age.

Children who live the preoperational stage have matured their capacity for interaction. They are able to play fictitious roles and use objects of a symbolic nature. For example, they can pretend that they are cooking dinner for their parents.

Furthermore, they are now able to put themselves in someone else's shoes, even though they continue to be self-centered. This represents a limiting factor to be able to develop a certain capacity for judgment.

Logical and abstract thinking has yet to flourish, so there is certain information that they cannot process to reach certain conclusions. That is why this phase is called preoperational, and that is because the mental operations of the adult do not yet exist.

The person uses simple associations and the ability to contrast is very low, being able to develop magical thinking that is based on unjustified informal assumptions.

3. Stage of concrete operations

The next chronological phase in children's cognitive development is the stage of concrete operations, and covers more or less the ages between seven and twelve years.

It is a stage in which the person has the ability to begin to use logic to reach conclusions, although it is linked to specific situations. The capacity for abstraction has not yet acquired a high maturity, corresponding to a characteristic of the next stage.

The skills that correspond at this stage have more to do with the ability to group objects according to some dimension that you share, order subgroups hierarchically, etc.

At this stage, it also highlights the fact that the person's type of thinking is no longer so egocentric.

4. Stage of formal operations

The fourth and final phase of cognitive development according to Piaget is the stage of formal operations, which begins from the age of twelve and the individual remains in it throughout his adulthood.

At this stage, the person can use her mental capacity to carry out logical processes and be able to make use of abstraction to reach conclusions. This means that it is not necessary to start from experiences, being able to analyze and think from scratch about anything.

In this way, hypothetical deductive reasoning can appear. This is based on observing, making a hypothesis about what has been observed to explain the phenomenon in question, and verification of that idea through experimentation.

The ability to use reasoning to the last consequences can also lead to the generation of some inconsistencies, such as fallacies or manipulation.

The argumentation, therefore, is not without bias, and it should be noted that self-centeredness is no longer characteristic of this stage.

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Bibliographic references

• Dasen, P. (1994). Culture and cognitive development from a Piagetian perspective. In W.J. Lonner & R.S. Malpass (Eds.), Psychology and culture. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

• Piaget, J. (1937). The construction du réel chez l'enfant, Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé.

• Vidal, F. (1994). Piaget before Piaget. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.