Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

Vocabulary flashcards covering the four stages of Piaget's theory of cognitive development and associated key psychological terms.

Sensorimotor Stage

The first stage of cognitive development occurring from birth to approximately $1-2$ years, during which intelligence is both presymbolic and preverbal.

Preoperational Stage

The second stage occurring from around $2-3$ years to approximately $7$ years, characterized by partially logical thinking and decisions based on perceptual cues.

Concrete Operational Stage

The third stage occurring from around $7-8$ years to $12-14$ or older, where thinking is linked to the direct manipulation of objects.

Formal Operational Stage

The final stage occurring from approximately $12-14$ years and older, where thinkers can solve complex cause and effect problems and systematically test hypotheses.

Action Schemes

Developed in the second year of the sensorimotor stage, these include behaviors like reaching for, grasping, or pulling an object.

Egocentrism

A characteristic of the preoperational stage describing a child's difficulty in accepting another person's perspective or point of view.

Perceptual Cues

Sensory information, such as the height of juice in a glass, that dominates a child's judgment in the preoperational stage despite being illogical.

Operations

The term Piaget used to refer to the basic units of logical thinking.

Conservation

The capability of recognizing the unchanging characteristic of an object, such as the amount of clay, even when its shape is transformed.

Reversibility

The capability to simultaneously coordinate a transformation and its opposite or inverse action, allowing a child to understand that an object can return to its original form.

Ordering

A concrete operational structure described as the process of placing objects in the correct series.

Double Classify

A skill of concrete operational children to divide objects into multiple categories simultaneously, such as distinguishing both the color and type of various flowers.

Hypothesis Testing

A systematic approach used by formal operational thinkers to begin with possible combinations and isolate explanations for complex situations.

Sixteen Possible Combinations

The number of combinations a formal operational thinker can conceptualize when faced with four distinct characteristics, compared to only four combinations for a concrete operational thinker.