Piaget Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget sought to understand and explain to others how the brain changes from birth until the mid-teens. There are so many huge developments during those years and Piaget got them down to four stages. The four stages in Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development are the sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operational stage, and formal operational stage. These stages cover things such as reflexes to adolescent egocentrism. (Santrock)

Piaget’s stages of development are broken into stages of growth to bridge the connection between cognitive and biological development. According to Piaget, there are four stages to cognitive development; Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operations and Formal Operations. In the sensorimotor stage, children form babies to two years old, experience and gather information by using the five senses.

Piaget’s theory was introduced by Jean Piaget who established four periods of cognitive development. The four stages are; Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operational, and Formal operational. The sensorimotor is the first stage and begins when the child is born and proceeds until the age of two years. The second stage is the preoperational stage and begins with the child is two years old and continues until the child reaches six years of age. The concrete stage is the third stage and begins when the child is six years old and proceeds until the age of 11 years old. The formal operational stage is the fourth stage and

Piaget’s developmental stages are ways of normal intellectual development. There are four different stages. The stages start at infant age and work all the way up to adulthood. The stages include things like judgment, thought, and knowledge of infants, children, teens, and adults. These four stages were names after Jean Piaget a developmental biologist and psychologist. Piaget recorded intellectual abilities and developments of infants, children, and teens. The four different stages of Piaget’s developmental stages are sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Sensorimotor is from birth up to twenty- four months of age. Preoperational which is toddlerhood includes from eighteen months old all the

Children develop cognition through two main stages that Jean Piaget theorized. The stages run from birth and infancy to school age children. Sensorimotor is the first stage and goes from birth to about the age of two. This stage implies that the children learn about the environment they live in and they learn this through the reflexes and movements they produce. They also learn that they are separate people from their parents and they can say goodbye to them and know they will come back. The second stage is called the preoperational stage. During this stage of development, children will learn how to incorporate symbols to represent objects. This is also the beginning of learning the alphabet and speech. The child is still very much egocentric at this point in time, but with the help of understanding educators, the child will grow appropriately onto the next stages of development. Finally, the children need to develop emotionally/socially.

“According to Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development, it states that all children go through specific stages as their brain matures. It also stated that these stages are completed in a fixed order within all children, according to their range of age (Atherton).” In other words, one cannot expect a two month old baby to solve simple math problems as that of a five year old. There are four stages in which Piaget grouped the development of a child according to their age groups, in which children interact with people and their environment. The sensorimotor stage (birth until age 2) children use their senses to explore their environment. During this stage, children learn how to control objects, although they fail to understand that these objects if not within their view continue to exist. The preoperational stage (2 until age 7) children are not able to see other's viewpoints other than their own. In other words, if the same amount of water is poured into a short wide glass and then a tall thin glass the child will perceive that the taller glass has more water because of the height. The concrete operational stage (7 until 12) children begin to think logically, but only with a practical aid. The last stage of Piaget’s cognitive theory is the formal operation stage (12 through adulthood) in which children develop abstract thinking and begin to think logically in their minds (Piaget).

In the context of infant cognitive development and its corresponding theories, Jean Piaget often serves as a key theorist. Often referred to with the metaphor of children as “explorers,” Piaget believed that children, from the moment of birth, are actively engaging with and exploring their surrounding environment. With his contributions to the psychological field, like his six stages of sensorimotor development, we grasp a better understanding of a child’s first encounters developmentally. One of his most important accounts was on the concept of object permanence. He was able to provide a look into infants’ understanding of the physical world (DeHart, Sroufe, & Cooper, p. 168). In order to better understand his account on object permanence however, one must be aware of his six stages of sensorimotor development: “Reflexes,” “Primary Circular Reactions,” Secondary Circular Reactions,” Coordination of Schemes,” “Tertiary Circular Reactions,” and “Beginnings of Representational Thought,” which were largely influence through his experiments with his own children.

Jean Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory describes four stages of human development which he described as naturally emerging reasoning and development. The first two stages can be described as sensori-motor development. In all stages of development, the child learns to adapt, assimilate, and accommodate new information into their thought process.  Stage one is Sensorimotor which lasts from birth to 2 years of age. There are six substages which the infant’s source of actions shifts from reflexes to

Jean Piaget Believed in Cognitive Development. “ Cognitive development is the construction of thought processes, including remembering, problem solving, and decision-making, from childhood through adolescence to adulthood” (Cognitive). He came up with four stages to his theory, sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Children between the ages of 0-3 years go through the Sensorimotor and the preoperational stages of development. The other stages do not impact a child’s development until the age of elementary to adolescence and into adulthood.

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development states four stages of cognitive development. During the first Sensorimotor Stage which Piaget

Jean Piaget is one of the pioneers to child development, he was an important factor in the growth, development and one of the most exciting research theorists in child development. A major force in child psychology, he studied both thought processes and how they change with age. He believed that children think in fundamentally different ways from adults.. Piaget’s belief is that all species inherit the basic tendency to organize their lives and adapt to the world that’s around them, no matter the age. Children develop schemas as a general way of thinking or interacting with ideas and objects in the environment. Children create and develop new schemas as they grow and experience new things. Piaget has identified four major stages of cognitive development which are: sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operations, and formal operations. According to the text here are brief descriptions of each of Piaget’s stages:

Not everything can be assimilated into existing schemas, though, and the process of accommodation must be used. In accommodation, existing schemas are modified or new schemas are created to process new information. According to Piaget, cognitive development involves an ongoing attempt to achieve a balance between assimilation and accommodation that he termed equilibration. He formulated a theory that systematically describes and explains how intellect develops. The basis of his theory is the principle that cognitive development occurs in a series of four distinct stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operations, and formal operations.

Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is one the most widely accepted, his four stages of development are age based.

For this paper I will be exploring Piaget's theory of cognitive development. Swiss Psychologist Jean Piaget, theorized that children progress through four key stages of cognitive development that change their understanding of the world. By observing his own children, Piaget came up with four different stages of intellectual development that included: the sensorimotor stage, which starts from birth to age two; the preoperational stage, starts from age two to about age seven; the concrete operational stage, starts from age seven to eleven; and final stage, the formal operational stage, which begins in adolescence and continues into adulthood. In this paper I will only be focusing on the

Jean Piaget, a cognitivist, believed children progressed through a series of four key stages of cognitive development. These four major stages, sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational, are marked by shifts in how people understand the world. Although the stages correspond with an approximate age, Piaget’s stages are flexible in that if the child is ready they can reach a stage. Jean Piaget developed the Piagetian cognitive development theory. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development proposes that a child’s intellect, or cognitive ability, progresses through four distinct stages. The emergence of new abilities and ways of processing information characterize each stage. 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.