Today we are dedicating an article to learning about one of the most important legacies of Jean Piaget, experimental psychologist, philosopher and biologist whose work has been widely studied in psychology and pedagogy as well as other disciplines.
This article is dedicated to the 4 stages of cognitive development that the researcher proposed, 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 thought patterns.
Piaget and his conception of cognitive development
In the past, society viewed childhood as a stage in which adulthood had not been reached and little else, being the individual only an incomplete version of an adult person.
Piaget understood that it was not a linear and cumulative development, but that it was characterized by having a qualitative profile It was a reference for questioning the traditional conception of childhood, and dedicated a large part of his life to refute it. Being in one stage or another has consequences when it comes to learning, behaving, relating, etc.
What a person learns at one moment within a phase of her life does not build on what he has already learned previously. What happens is that his brain reconfigures the information it had and with the new one and thus expands his knowledge.
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 he later received some criticisms.
But even today much of his work is valid, and has served as a starting point for further research. Below we present the four stages of cognitive development according to Piaget presented sequentially.
one. Sensorimotor Stage
Piaget tells us that this is the first of the four stages of cognitive development. The sensorimotor stage is from the moment of birth until the baby is able to speak making simple sentences, which is generally up to two years of age.
The way in which babies basically acquire knowledge is thanks to interacting with the environment, that is, by 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 when they are not in front of them. They generally show egocentric behaviors, and their eagerness to explore is notable and essential for the stage of cognitive development in which they find themselves.
2. Preoperational stage
Once the sensorimotor stage has been overcome, the individual would enter the second stage of development. Piaget places the pre-operational stage between two and seven years of age.
Children living in the pre-operational stage have matured their ability to interact. They are able to play by following fictional roles and use objects of a symbolic nature. For example, they can pretend that they are cooking dinner for their parents.
Also, 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 some judgment capacity.
Logical and abstract thinking has not yet flourished, so there is some information that they cannot process to reach certain conclusions. That is why this phase is called pre-operational, and it is that 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 it spans roughly ages seven through three. twelve years.
This 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 abstraction capacity has not yet acquired a high level of maturity, corresponding to a characteristic of the next stage.
The skills that correspond to 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, the fact that the person's type of thinking is no longer so egocentric also stands out.
4. Formal Operations Stage
The fourth and final phase of cognitive development according to Piaget is the stage of formal operations, which begins at the age of twelve and the individual remains in it for the entire their adulthood.
At this stage, the person can use their mental capacity to carry out logical processes and be able to use 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.
This is how 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 verifying 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 argument, therefore, is not exempt from biases, and it should be noted that egocentrism is no longer characteristic of this stage.