Cognitive Development

Piaget’s Theory as a Framework for Understanding Children’s Thinking

Much of the scientific study of children’s thinking has focused on describing what infants and young children know at a particular age and how that knowledge changes over time. In charting the course of cognitive development, the predominant view was that children progress through a series of qualitatively distinct stages, from birth to maturity, much like the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly.

The most influential of cognitive stage theories was proposed by Jean Piaget (1896–1980), Swiss psychologist, biologist, and philosopher. Piaget postulated that all children, regardless of culture, advance through four major stages or periods of cognitive development: the sensorimotor (birth to 2 years), the preoperational (2–7 years), the concrete operational (7–11 years), and the formal operational (11–15 years). Although the order in which children pass through each stage is invariant (a child cannot skip stages or reorder them), the ages at which they do so may vary.

According to Piaget, each stage of development reflects a particular type of mental structure, or general way of thinking, that serves as a basic building block of knowledge. Piaget saw children as naturally curious about the world, actively building knowledge out of their interactions with their environment. This self-generated activity, in turn, leads to changes in the structure and content of existing knowledge.

In the sensorimotor period, cognition begins with simple motor reflexes that gradually become more complex, intentional, and organized. During this stage, to know an object is to act upon it, or what Piaget referred to as the “logic of action.” For example, infants learn about the properties of objects by sucking, grasping, shaking, and dropping them. Out of these actions, they gradually begin to form internal mental representations, or schemes, that form a framework for storing and organizing information based on experience.

In the preoperational stage, children move beyond the physical world to a symbolic world of understanding, expressed through rapid gains in language, pretend play, and mental imagery. The ability to think symbolically enables children to be less bound by time and space; they can imagine things out of sight and can reflect on the past as well as the future. However, thinking in this stage is limited by the child’s own perspective, or what Piaget referred to as egocentric thinking. Egocentrism is expressed in children’s early speech—for example, using idiosyncratic words that are meaningless to other people—and in tasks involving general problem-solving and role-taking abilities.

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