The 4 stages of cognitive development by Jean Piaget

A summary of the Swiss psychologist's theory.

Jean Piaget is one of the most important psychologists and researchers in history, and to him we owe much of what we have been discovering through developmental psychology.

He devoted much of his life to investigating the way in which both our knowledge about the environment and our thought patterns evolve depending on the stage of growth in which we find ourselves, and he is especially known for having proposed several stages of developmental psychology. is especially known for having proposed several stages of cognitive development through which all beings pass that all human beings go through as we grow up.

Jean Piaget and his conception of childhood.

The idea put forward by Jean Piaget is that, just as our bodies evolve rapidly during the first years of our lives, our mental capacities also evolve through a series of phases that are qualitatively different from one another.

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

That is why Piaget considered that the patterns of thought and behavior 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 feeling. This article offers a brief explanation of these stages of development This theory, although outdated, is the first brick on which developmental psychology has been built.

Stages of growth or of learning?

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

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

Piaget knew that it is absurd to try to treat separately the biological aspects and those that refer to cognitive development.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. Ultimately, the human mind is not something that is separate from the body, and the physical qualities of the latter shape mental processes.

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

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 meaningsand the driving force of this extraction of knowledge from what is known is the individual himself. Therefore, for Piaget the protagonist of learning is the learner himself, and not his tutors or teachers. This approach is called constructivist approachand emphasizes the autonomy of individuals when it comes to internalizing all kinds of knowledge; according to this approach, it is the individual who lays the foundations of his own knowledge, depending on how he organizes and interprets the information he receives from the environment.

However, the fact that the motor of learning is the individual does not mean that we all have total freedom to learn, nor that the cognitive development of individuals is carried out in any way. If this were the case, it would make no sense to develop a developmental psychology dedicated to studying the phases of cognitive development typical of each stage of growth, and it is clear that there are certain patterns that make people of a similar age similar to each other and distinguish them from people of a very different age.

This is the point at which the stages of cognitive development proposed by Jean Piaget come into play.when we want to see how an autonomous activity linked to the social context fits in with the genetic and biological conditioning factors that develop during growth. The stages would describe the style in which human beings organize their cognitive schemas, which in turn will serve to organize and assimilate in one way or another the information they receive about the environment, other agents and themselves.

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 rather they describe the types of cognitive structures that lie behind this knowledge..

Ultimately, the content of the different learning that one undertakes depends largely on context, but cognitive conditions are limited by genetics and the way in which this is shaped over the course of a person's physical growth.

Piaget and the four stages of cognitive development

The developmental stages outlined by Piaget form a sequence of four periods which in turn are divided into other stages. These four main phases are listed and briefly explained below, with the characteristics that Piaget attributed to them. However, it should be noted that, as we shall see, these stages do not exactly conform to reality.

1. Sensory-motor or sensory-motor stage

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

Children in this stage of cognitive development show egocentric behavior in which the main conceptual division that exists is that which separates the ideas of "self" and "environment". Infants who are in the sensorimotor stage play to satisfy their needs through transactions between themselves and the environment.

Although in the sensorimotor stage they do not know how to distinguish too much between the nuances and subtleties presented by the category of "environment", they do conquer the understanding of object permanence, that is, the ability to understand that things that we do not perceive at a given moment can continue to exist in spite of it.

2. Pre-operational stage

The second stage of cognitive development according to Piaget appears more or less between the ages of two and seven years..

People in the preoperational stage begin to gain the ability to put themselves in the place of others, act begin to gain the ability to put themselves in the place of others, to act and play in fictitious roles, and to use symbolic objects. and use symbolic objects. However, egocentrism is still very present at this stage, which translates into serious difficulties in accessing relatively abstract thoughts and reflections.

In addition, the ability to manipulate information according to the rules of logic in order to draw formally valid conclusions has not yet been gained at this stage, nor can complex mental operations typical of adult life be performed correctly (hence the name of this period of cognitive development). For this reason, the magical thinking based on simple and arbitrary associations is very present in the way we internalize information about how the world works.

3. Concrete operations stage

Approximately between seven and twelve years of age the stage of concrete operations is reached, a stage of cognitive development in which logic begins to be used to reach valid conclusions, as long as the premises from which they are based have to do with concrete and not abstract situations. In addition, the systems of categories for classifying aspects of reality become notably more complex at this stage, and the style of thinking ceases to be so markedly egocentric.

One of the typical signs that a child has reached the stage of concrete operations is that he or she is able to infer that the quantity of objects in the world is not a quantity of objects. able to infer that the amount of liquid contained in a container does not depend on the shape of the liquid.The volume is preserved.

4. Formal operations stage

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

It is in this period that one gains the ability to use logic to reach abstract conclusions that are not linked to concrete cases. that are not linked to concrete cases that have been experienced firsthand. Thus, from this point on, it is possible to "think about thinking," to its ultimate consequences, and to deliberately analyze and manipulate thought schemes, and it is also possible to use hypothetical deductive reasoning can also be used.

A linear development?

The fact of seeing a list of developmental stages presented in this way may lead one to think that the evolution of each person's human cognition is a cumulative process, in which several layers of information are built on top of previous knowledge. However, this idea can be misleading, this idea can be misleading.

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

The key is in cognitive reconfiguration

In Piagetian theory, these phases follow one after the other, each of them offering the conditions for the developing person to elaborate the information available to move on to the next phase. But it is not a purely linear process, since what is learned during the first stages of development is during the first stages of development is constantly being reconfigured by the cognitive developments that come later..

Moreover, this theory of the stages of cognitive development does not set very fixed age limits, but limits itself to describing the ages at which the transitional phases from one to another are common. That is why for Piaget it is possible to find cases of statistically abnormal development in which a person takes a long time to move to the next stage or reaches it at an early age.

Criticisms of the theory

Although Jean Piaget's theory of the stages of cognitive development has been the foundational piece of Developmental Psychology and has had a great influence, today it is considered outdated. On the one hand, it has been shown that the culture in which one lives greatly affects the way of thinking, and that there are places where adults are more likely to think differently. There are places in which adults tend not to think according to the characteristics of the stage of formal operationsThe evidence of the culture in which one lives greatly affects the way of thinking.

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 object permanence or the general idea that children tend to think from approaches based on what happens in the environment and not according to abstract ideas, are accepted and have served as a basis for research that is up to date.

Bibliographical references:

• McLeod, S. A. (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.