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

He devoted much of his life to investigating how both our knowledge of the environment and our thinking patterns evolve depending on the stage of growth we are in, and is especially known for having proposed several stages of cognitive development that all human beings go through as they grow up.

Jean Piaget and his conception of childhood

Jean Piaget’s idea is that, just as our bodies evolve rapidly during the first years of our lives, our mental capacities also evolve through a series of qualitatively different phases.

In a historical context in which it was taken for granted that children were no more than “adult projects” or imperfect versions of human beings, Piaget pointed out that the way in which children act, feel and perceive denotes not that their mental processes are unfinished, but rather that they find themselves in a stadium with different but coherent and cohesive rules of the game. In other words, children’s way of thinking is not so much characterized by the absence of mental abilities typical of adults, but rather 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 thought and behaviour patterns of the youngest 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offers a brief explanation about these phases of development proposed by Piaget; a theory that, although it has become outdated, is the first brick on which Evolutionary Psychology has been built.

Growth or learning stages?

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 hand about learning processes that develop from the interaction between the individual and the environment.

The answer is that this psychologist talked about both, although focusing 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 from which people interiorize ways of thinking and learning about the environment, Jean Piaget put more emphasis on the curiosity of each child as a motor for his or her own learning, although he tried not to ignore the influence of such important aspects of the environment as, for example, the parents.

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

However, in order to understand the stages of cognitive development of Piaget, it is necessary to know from which theoretical approach the author starts.

Recalling 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 meanings , and the motor of this extraction of knowledge from what is known is the individual himself. Therefore, for Piaget the protagonist of learning is the apprentice himself, and not his tutors or teachers. This approach is called constructivist approach , and emphasizes the autonomy that individuals have when it comes to internalizing all types of knowledge; according to this, it is the person who lays the foundations of his or her own knowledge, depending on how he or she organizes and interprets the information that he or she captures from the environment.

However, the fact that the motor of learning is the individual himself does not mean that we all have total freedom to learn or that people’s cognitive development is carried out in any way. If that were the case, there would be no point in developing an evolutionary 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 resemble 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 become important : 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 or stages would describe the style in which the human being organizes his cognitive schemes, which in turn will serve him to organize and assimilate in one way or another the information he receives about the environment, the other agents and himself.

It should be noted, however, that these stages of cognitive development are not equivalent to the body of knowledge that we typically find in people who are in one or another phase of growth, but rather describe the types of cognitive structures that are behind this knowledge .

In the end, the content of the different learnings that one undertakes depends largely on the context, but the cognitive conditions are limited by genetics and the way in which genetics is shaped throughout a person’s physical growth.

Piaget and the four stages of cognitive development

The development phases outlined by Piaget form a sequence of four periods which are in turn 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’ll see, these stages don’t exactly match reality.

1.Sensory-motor or sensory-motor stage

This is the first phase in cognitive development, and for Piaget it takes place between the time of birth and the appearance of articulated language 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 by means of experimental games, often involuntary at first, in which certain experiences are associated with interactions with nearby objects, people and animals.

Children at this stage of cognitive development exhibit self-centred behaviour in which the main conceptual divide that exists is that which separates the ideas of ‘self’ and ‘environment’. Babies in the sensory-motor stage play to satisfy their needs through transactions between themselves and the environment.

Despite the fact that in the sensorimotor phase we do not know how to distinguish too much between the nuances and subtleties presented by the category of “environment”, we do gain an understanding of the permanence of the object, that is, the capacity to understand that things we do not perceive at a given moment can continue to exist in spite of this.

2. Pre-operational stage

The second stage of cognitive development according to Piaget appears between about two and seven years of age .

People who are in the pre-operational phase begin to gain the ability to put themselves in the place of others, to act and play following fictional roles and to use objects of a symbolic nature. However, egocentrism is still very present in this phase, which translates into serious difficulties in accessing thoughts and reflections of a relatively abstract nature.

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

3. Stage of the concrete operations

Approximately between the ages of seven and twelve we reach the stage of concrete operations, a stage of cognitive development in which logic is used to reach valid conclusions, as long as the premises from which we start are related to concrete and not abstract situations. In addition, the category systems for classifying aspects of reality become notably more complex at this stage, and the style of thinking stops being so markedly egocentric.

One of the typical symptoms that a child has reached the stage of specific operations is that he or she is capable of inferring that the amount of liquid contained in a container does not depend on the form that this liquid takes , since it conserves its volume.

4. Stage of formal operations

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

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 have been experienced first-hand. Therefore, from this moment on it is possible to “think about thinking”, to its ultimate consequences, and to analyse and deliberately manipulate thought schemes, and also to use hypothetical deductive reasoning .

A linear development?

The fact of seeing a list with stages of development exposed in this way may suggest that the evolution of the human cognition of each person is a cumulative process, in which several layers of information are settled on previous knowledge. However, this idea can be misleading .

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

The key is in cognitive reconfiguration

In Piagetian theory, these phases follow one another, each providing the conditions for the developing person to build up the information available to them to move on to the next phase. But this is not a purely linear process, since what is learned during the first stages of development is constantly reconfigured from the cognitive developments that come afterwards .

Moreover, this theory of stages of cognitive development does not set very fixed age limits, but merely describes the ages at which phases of transition from one to the other are common. For Piaget, therefore, it is possible to find cases of statistically abnormal development in which a person either delays the transition to the next phase or arrives at it at an early age.

Criticism of the theory

Despite the fact that Jean Piaget’s theory of the stages of cognitive development has been the foundation of Developmental Psychology and that it has had a great influence, today it is considered to be 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 in which adults tend not to think according to the characteristics of the stage of formal operations , due among other things to the influence of the magical thinking characteristic of some tribes.

On the other hand, the evidence in favour of the existence of these phases of cognitive development is not very strong 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 permanence of the object or the general idea that children tend to think from approaches based on what occurs in the environment and not according to abstract ideas, they are accepted and have served to give rise to research that is up-to-date.

Bibliographic references:

  • McLeod, Inc. (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.