Piagets Stages of Cognitive Development

Age of the sensorimotor stage

Birth - 2

What is the sensorimotor stage?

Infants achievements cosist largely of coordinating their sensory perceptions and simple motor behavitors. As they move through this period they come to recognize the existence of a worls outside themselves and begin to interact with it in deliberate ways.

age of preoperational stage

2-6

What is the preoperational stage?

Young children can represent reality to themselves through the use of symbols, including mental images, words, and gestures. Children often fail to distinguish their point of view from that of others, become easily captured by surface appearances, and are often confused about casual relations.

age of concrete operational stage

6-12

What is the concrete operational stage?

As they enter middle childhood, children become capable of mental operations, internalized actions that fit into a logical system. Operational thinking allows children to mentally combine, separate, order, and transform objects and actions. Such operations are considered concrete because they are carried out in the presence of the objects and events being thought about.

age of formal operational stage

12-19

What is the formal operational stage?

In adolescence, the developing person acquires the ability to think systematically about all logical relations within a problem. Adolescents display keen interest in abstract ideas and in the process of thinking itself.

What are Piaget's stages of cognitive development?

sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational