Piaget's+Four+Stages

Piaget’s Four Stages

The **sensorimotor stage** lasts from birth until about two years of age. During this stage, infants discover the relationship between their bodies and the environment by physically interacting (i.e., sensing and manipulating) with objects in it. Humans are born with their sensory abilities, and children use their senses of sight, smell, taste, sound and touch (especially via the mouth) to learn. Piaget calls this the sensorimotor stage because the initial human intelligence derives from these sensory perceptions and motor activities.

An important aspect of this stage is object permanence. Piaget proposed that children in this stage can only be aware of objects and persons if they are directly before them. If the object or person (e.g., mom) leaves sight, the child does not have the capacity to understand that it nonetheless continues to exist.

Piaget contended that the **preoperational stage** begins at about a child’s second birthday—at about the time that a child begins to talk—and lasts until about age six or seven. At this point of life, language is developing quickly and the child’s vocabulary is expanding rapidly. This expanding vocabulary reflects the numerous and new mental schemas that the child is developing, that is, the development of “symbolic thinking”. Simply put, the child is learning that there are verbal and mental symbols that represent actual objects. A child at this stage has the cognitive ability of object permanence, and learns that people, things and events that aren’t immediately present nonetheless continue to exist. She is able to think about things that aren’t physically present. Children in this stage do not have the capacity to “operate” on their thoughts and ideas, and they have difficulty understanding that there are other perspectives or points of view. In other words, they are “egocentric” in their view of the world; their mental ability to imagine objects, people and situations is restricted to their own perspective. So might a child who breaks something run away to another room, “thinking”—at this preoperational stage—that mom or dad therefore won’t see what happened.

At this stage, thinking tends to be quite imaginative but also somewhat primitive or restricted. Imagination and fantasy can be seen when a child animates objects, such as dolls, toy cars, and pets, with human qualities. A four-year old child’s doll can get in trouble for misbehaving, and the toy car “wants” to go really fast. The limitations of thinking at this age can be seen in the inability to comprehend conservation or reversal. A child will think that a ball of clay becomes less when it is transformed into a long tube, for example. He does not understand that mass is always conserved or that the tube can be reversed back to the ball. A child might think that a tall cup has more water than a shorter but thicker cup even after seeing the exact same amount of water poured in both.



The **concrete operations stage** begins at about age six or seven years and lasts until about age 11 or 12. At this stage, children can manipulate (“operate on”) things they are thinking about. For example, in the previous conservation problem, the child at this stage can mentally return the tube of clay to the shape of a ball and thereby realize that the mass is conserved. The limitation of this stage is that such mental operations are limited to concrete, observable objects and events. At this stage, children can engage in perspective taking, wherein they can better understand another’s perspective. For example, a 10 year old will understand, without having to be told, that his mom will be sad to learn that his friend’s mom is seriously ill.

The **formal operations stage** is the final stage and usually appears after children are 11 or 12 years of age and continues into adulthood. At this stage, the child has the ability to reason with (or operate upon) abstract ideas. During this stage the young adult is able to understand such things as love, commitment, hatred, effort, motivation, and values. They are better able to draw conclusions or inferences from information presented to them. They are also able to engage in counterfactual thinking. For example, a 14 year old girl will think about what it might be like to live in a poor foreign country, and she might decide to become active in a group that donates time to such causes.