http://socyberty.com/psychology/four-stages-of-cognitive-development/
socyberty.com
by tiffanyaliano in Psychology

In the following article I will describe Jean Piaget’s theory of the four stages of cognitive development for children. I will also cover how children move through these stages, followed by some brief examples pertaining to environmental factors and so forth. In addition I will express my opinion of the gender factor of a person’s development.

Cognitive development is the process of how a person throughout their entire life obtains knowledge, retains information, and uses it to trouble shoot their everyday life situations. When referring to the earlier years of a person’s development, psychologist often refer back to Jean Piaget discussion of the four stages of cognitive development for children; which are the Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operational and the Formal Operational Stages.

The Sensorimotor Stage covers the time a child is born until they are two years of age, and is characterized as the first part of human life that takes in the world around them. This includes the child observing their environment with their senses, touch, taste, feel, smell and what they hear. At this stage an infant makes relationships and connections through their five senses, with their physical actions as well as their natural instincts. For example a baby when hungry will normally instinctively know to suck their mother’s breast or nipple of a bottle for sustenance.

When a child becomes two years old they enter a stage known as the Preoperational Stage; which last until they are seven years old. During this stage the child starts to absorb images, sounds and words, which acts as symbols. From this point they begin to understand cause and effect as well as how one thing relates to another. With this line of thinking they are able to expand on how much information they are taking in and the connections that follow that information; where they are able to recall an experience. For example a three year old is jumping in the bath tub, falls into the water and bangs his head on the way down. His mother franticly grabs her baby out of the water and cuddles him. The child may sometimes relate the pain, fear, paired with his mother’s reaction to remove him from the water, as the water or tub is to be feared.

The Concrete Operational Stage follows the Preoperational Stage and last between the ages of seven through eleven. During this stage the child can rationalize and reason using logic gathered from their earlier experience, and events. At this stage the child is able to group objects and or people in to their separate categories based on their gathered knowledge thus far.  For example a little girl is watching a scary movie
with her older brother, where one of the antagonists had distinct characteristics. Later, that week the little girl is with her mother in the grocery store, the cashier her mom chooses to check her groceries out with has features that resemble the character in the horror film the girl might ask her mom to go to another line or plainly express signs of fear towards the clerk.

The final stage last from age eleven throughout their adult life, this stage is known as the Formal Operational Stage. Throughout this stage formed by the other earlier three is the end result of how the child or person, now perceives the world around them; where they have formed their own ideas, way of reasoning, and perception to view the world around them. Although, in the earliest part of this stage a child’s reasoning and logic can sometimes tend to be riddled with heavy emotions and hormonal changing factors that occur during the late stage of puberty. (Santrock, 2004, p. 88)

Even though most children will follow the stages mentioned above, does gender make a difference?. Throughout life since the beginning of time both genders in every culture held and have different social roles reflective on what at the time is socially acceptable in their immediate environment. For example in early American history when the Puritan culture populated the thirteen colonies, women were expected to serve men for the most part, any that showed  otherwise were shunned from the community and church or prosecuted as a witch. That fear alone of being ridiculed, shaming their family, or worse their fear of god can often make one choosey upon what information they wish to retain due to self preservation. (Cody, 1988) But that example is more of the interaction of gender roles in society. Physically is there a difference in a male or female’s brain that makes their cognitive development different? As of now studies to prove the answer to the above question are still taking place, and are constantly being explored. Some findings were that men brains are average out to be 10% larger than females, but taking body mass, type , and weight into consideration, most men are built larger than the majority of woman studied. One theory is that men use their left hemisphere at a higher percentage than woman, where woman use their right hemisphere more. (Guner, 2005)

In conclusion, human beings start cognitive development the day that they are born, throughout their life. The first three stages are the most important and essential to the development of a human being, as the three stages of the human brain is developing at a rapid pace compared to the last stage. Although there are different social roles of what is expected of a man or woman, society is always changing and the actual physical differences of the male and female brain, has not shown any extraordinary conclusions, besides from what areas of the brain show the most activity. Both infant men and women seem to have the same advantages and disadvantages as far as physical make up and development.

References

1.      Cody, D. (1988). Puritanism in New England. Retrieved March 3, 2009, from Www.victorianweb.org/ Web site
: http://www.victorianweb.org/religion/puritan2.html

2.      development, c. (n.d.). The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Retrieved March 3, 2009, from Dictionary.com website: Web site: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cognitive development

3.      Guner, J. (2005, January 28). General intelligence equal between sexes. Retrieved March 3, 2009, from The Daily Bruin. UCLA Web site: http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/2005/jan/28/general-intelligence-equal-bet/

4.      Santrock, J. W. (2004). 3. Human Development. In Psychology, Essentials (Second ed., p. 88). Dallas, Tx: Stephen Rutter. Retrieved March 3, 2009, from http://www.mhhe.com

http://www.howtodothings.com/health-and-fitness/a3762-how-to-understand-infant-cognitive-development.html
howtodothings.com
By Andy Humphrey

Infants
learn a tremendous number of skills during their first two years. The trip from the purely reflexive “eat-sleep-poop” stage to running around asking “Mommy, why is the sky blue?” requires learning at a rate unmatched at any other stage of life. Not only are they learning new information, but their brains are physically developing at an astonishing rate and that changes the kind of thought and learning they are capable of. One model for this period of development, created by Jean Piaget, is detailed below with the addition of language milestones. Note that this article covers only cognitive development (thinking and language) and not other types of development such as gross and fine motor skills.

1. Birth to 1 month – At this stage, infants respond purely by reflex (e.g. sucking in response to a nipple). There isn’t really any cognitive process in these actions. They imitate observed mouth movements, which is the first language milestone, but vocal cords are too undeveloped to form language-like sounds.
2. 1-4 months – Infants start to understand patterns, such as the presence of a bottle means that it is feeding time. Infants start to choose to do things because they anticipate the outcome. They learn trust (if their needs are met) or mistrust (if they are not). They begin cooing and making vowel noises, and by the end of this period, they have started to make some consonant sounds (b, k, m, g, p).
3. 4-8 months – Until now all of their actions have been centered around their bodies, but now they start to perform actions on external objects without regard to their physical needs. They explore by hand and mouth and begin experimenting with objects. They track objects that leave their direct line of vision. They start to join consonants and vowels to form nonsense words (”gaga”). These words start to adopt the rhythm of the language they hear, and they learn to take turns “speaking” with others rather than just talking all the time. By the end of this period, they start to understand some simple words (”milk”) and may start to use words to represent objects. These words may be simple but real words (”mama”) or may be nonsense words (”buh” referring to a favorite stuffed animal).
4. 8-12 months – Infants start to adopt more sophisticated means-end behavior. They mimic actions such as clapping. They will repeat the same action with different objects to compare results, for example discovering that dropping a block on a hard floor makes a sound while dropping a teddy bear doesn’t. They learn that objects don’t disappear when they are out of sight (object permanence) and will look for objects that have been hidden. They start to use real words and by their first birthday, they can speak up to a dozen words. They understand far more language than they can speak. By the end of this period, they can point to desired objects and nod or shake their heads in response to questions.
5. 12-18 months – Infants continue to explore and experiment but don’t understand that some things can hurt them, such as knives and electric sockets, so baby-proofing should already be in place. Their understanding of object permanence is more advanced and they can find objects that have been hidden and then moved to another place. They can remember images of objects without seeing them, and the same applies to other senses. They start to use different tones of voice to give words multiple meanings. For example, the single word “mama” can mean “Where is mama?,” “Mama, come here,” or “I love you, mama” depending on the child’s tone. Words will often be overgeneralized, such as “cat” being used for any furry animal.
6. 18-24 months – Infants look for objects in expected places, such as looking for a toy in the toy chest, even if they didn’t see the object put there. They learn scripted routines, understanding that a simple phrase like “let’s go for a drive” means going to the garage, then getting in the car, then getting buckled into a car seat, then seeing the driver get in, then hearing the car start, and so on. They gain an understanding of past, present, and future. They learn to group objects into categories, thus recognizing an object as a shirt even though it is different from other shirts they have seen. By the end of the period, they have learned to make things up and engage in pretend play. They start to speak in phrases using nouns, verbs, and adjectives (though seldom other parts of speech). They can express feelings such as “me sad,” they understand “me” and “mine.”  They can call themselves by name and by the end of this stage, they will likely use over 100 words.

As with any development chart, the ages listed are mean or median ages. If your child is lagging in some particular area, that doesn’t mean there is a need to panic any more than meeting milestones early means your child is a genius. Albert Einstein didn’t start speaking until he was three, and didn’t speak well until he was much older. My own sister still wasn’t speaking long after the charts said she should have, then one day abruptly started using full sentences.

However having said that, delays in language development can be particularly troublesome later in life as in many cases people can’t ever catch up. Language delays can also be symptomatic of hearing disorders more subtle than typical infant hearing exams can detect.

As with so many things about your child, it is difficult to find the balance between overreacting and ignoring a potentially serious problem. If you have concerns about your child’s development, talk to your pediatrician.

http://www.littlegiants.de/Paedagogik/Paed_Background_JeanPiaget_e.html
littlegiants.de

Jean Piaget (August 9, 1896 – September 16, 1980) was a Swiss philosopher, natural scientist and developmental psychologist, well known for his work studying children, his theory of cognitive development and for his epistemological view called “genetic epistemology”. He created in 1955 the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva and directed it until 1980. According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget is “the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing”.
Biography

Piaget was born in Neuchâtel in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. His father, Arthur Piaget, was a professor of medieval literature at the University of Neuchâtel. Piaget was a precocious child who developed an interest in biology and the natural world, particularly mollusks, and even published a number of papers before he graduated from high school. In fact, his long career of scientific research began when he was just ten, with the 1907 publication of a short paper on the albino sparrow. Over the course of his career, Piaget wrote more than sixty books and several hundred articles. Piaget received a Ph.D. in natural science from the University of Neuchâtel, and also studied briefly at the University of Zürich. During this time, he published two philosophical papers which showed the direction of his thinking at the time, but which he later dismissed as adolescent work. His interest in psychoanalysis, a strain of psychological thought burgeoning at that time, can also be dated to this period.

He then moved from Switzerland to Grange-aux-Belles, France, where he taught at the school for boys run by Alfred Binet, the developer of the Binet intelligence test. It was while he was helping to mark some instances of these intelligence tests that Piaget noticed that young children consistently gave wrong answers to certain questions. Piaget did not focus so much on the fact of the children’s answers being wrong, but that young children kept making the same pattern of mistakes that older children and adults did not. This led him to the theory that young children’s thought or cognitive processes are inherently different from those of adults. (Ultimately, he was to propose a global theory of developmental stages stating that individuals exhibit certain distinctive common patterns of cognition in each period in their development.) In 1921, Piaget returned to Switzerland as director of the Rousseau Institute in Geneva.

In 1923, he married Valentine Châtenay, one of his students; together, the couple had three children, whom Piaget studied from infancy. In 1929, Jean Piaget accepted the post of Director of the International Bureau of Education and remained the head of this international organization until 1968. Every year, he drafted his “Director’s Speeches” for the IBE Council and for the International Conference on Public Education in which he explicitly expressed his educational credo.
Scientific and philosophical development

The stages of cognitive development

Piaget studied animals to begin with. He was a biologist, but specifically a malacologist. Piaget served as professor of psychology at the University of Geneva from 1929 to 1975 and is best known for reorganizing cognitive development theory into a series of stages, expanding on earlier work from James Mark Baldwin: four levels of development corresponding roughly to (1) infancy, (2) pre-school, (3) childhood, and (4) adolescence. Each stage is characterized by a general cognitive structure that affects all of the child’s thinking (a structuralist view influenced by philosopher Immanuel Kant)[citation needed]. Each stage represents the child’s understanding of reality during that period, and each but the last is an inadequate approximation of reality. Development from one stage to the next is thus caused by the accumulation of errors in the child’s understanding of the environment; this accumulation eventually causes such a degree of cognitive disequilibrium that thought structures require reorganizing.

The four development stages are described in Piaget’s theory as

1. Sensorimotor stage: from birth to age 2 years (children experience the world through movement and senses and learn object permanence)
2. Preoperational stage: from ages 2 to 7 (acquisition of motor skills)
3. Concrete operational stage: from ages 7 to 11 (children begin to think logically about concrete events)
4. Formal operational stage: after age 11 (development of abstract reasoning).

The developmental process

Piaget provided no concise description of the development process as a whole. Broadly speaking it consisted of a cycle:

* The child performs an action which has an effect on or organizes objects, and the child is able to note the characteristics of the action and its effects.
* Through repeated actions, perhaps with variations or in different contexts or on different kinds of objects, the child is able to differentiate and integrate its elements and effects. This is the process of reflecting abstraction (described in detail in Piaget 2001).
* At the same time, the child is able to identify the properties of objects by the way different kinds of action affect them. This is the process of empirical abstraction.
* By repeating this process across a wide range of objects and actions, the child establishes a new level of knowledge and insight. This is the process of forming a new cognitive stage. This dual process allows the child to construct new ways of dealing with objects and new knowledge about objects themselves.
* However, once the child has constructed these new kinds of knowledge, he or she starts to use them to create still more complex objects and to carry out still more complex actions. As a result, the child starts to recognize still more complex patterns and to construct still more complex objects. Thus a new stage begins, which will only be completed when all the child’s activity and experience have been re-organized on this still higher level.

This process is not wholly gradual, however. Once a new level of organization, knowledge and insight proves to be effective, it will quickly be generalized to other areas. As a result, transitions between stages tend to be rapid and radical, and the bulk of the time spent in a new stage consists of refining this new cognitive level. When the knowledge that has been gained at one stage of study and experience leads rapidly and radically to a new higher stage of insight, a “gestalt” is said to have occurred.

It is because this process takes this dialectical form, in which each new stage is created through the further differentiation, integration, and synthesis of new structures out of the old, that the sequence of cognitive stages are logically necessary rather than simply empirically correct. Each new stage emerges only because the child can take for granted the achievements of its predecessors, and yet there are still more sophisticated forms of knowledge and action that are capable of being developed.

Because it covers both how we gain knowledge about objects and our reflections on our own actions, Piaget’s model of development explains a number of features of human knowledge that had never previously been accounted for. For example, by showing how children progressively enrich their understanding of things by acting on and reflecting on the effects of their own previous knowledge, they are able to organize their knowledge in increasingly complex structures. Thus, once a young child can consistently and accurately recognize different kinds of animals, he or she then acquires the ability to organize the different kinds into higher groupings such as ‘birds’, ‘fish’, and so on. This is significant because they are now able to know things about a new animal simply on the basis of the fact that it is a bird – for example, that it will lay eggs.

At the same time, by reflecting on their own actions, the child develops an increasingly sophisticated awareness of the ‘rules’ that govern in various ways. For example, it is by this route that Piaget explains this child’s growing awareness of notions such as ‘right’, ‘valid’, ‘necessary’, ‘proper’, and so on. In other words, it is through the process of objectification, reflection and abstraction that the child constructs the principles on which action is not only effective or correct but also justified.

One of Piaget’s most famous studies focused purely on the discriminative abilities of children between the ages of two and a half years old, and four and a half years old. He began the study by taking children of different ages and placing two lines of M & M’s, one with the M & M’s in a line spread further apart, and one with the same number of M & M’s in a line placed more closely together. He found that, “Children between 2 years, 6 months old and 3 years, 2 months old correctly discriminate the relative number of objects in two rows; between 3 years, 2 months and 4 years, 6 months they indicate a longer row with fewer objects to have “more”; after 4 years, 6 months they again discriminate correctly” (Cognitive Capacity of Very Young Children, p. 141). Initially younger children were not studied, because if at four years old a child couldn’t conserve quantity, how could a child that is younger? The results show however that children that are younger than three years and two months have quantity conservation, but as they get older they lose this quality, and don’t recover it until four and a half years old. This attribute may be lost due to a temporary inability to solve because of an overdependence on perceptual strategies, which correlates more candy with a longer line of candy, or due to the inability for a four year old to reverse situations.

By the end of this experiment several results were found. First, younger children have a discriminative ability that shows the logical capacity for cognitive operations exists earlier than acknowledged. This study also reveals that young children can be equipped with certain qualities for cognitive operations, depending on how logical the structure of the task is. Research also shows that children develop explicit understanding at age 5 and as a result, the child will count the M & M’s to decide which has more. Finally the study found that overall quantity conservation is not a basic characteristic of man’s native inheritance.
Genetic epistemology

According to Jean Piaget, genetic epistemology “attempts to explain knowledge, and in particular scientific knowledge, on the basis of its history, its sociogenesis, and especially the psychological origins of the notions and operations upon which it is based”.

Jean Piaget has become a reference for epistemology, and particularly for constructivist epistemology.
Influence

Despite ceasing to be a fashionable psychologist, the magnitude of Piaget’s continuing influence can be measured by the global scale and activity of the Jean Piaget Society, which holds annual conferences and attracts very large numbers of participants. His theory of cognitive development has proved influential in many different areas:

* Developmental psychology
* Education and Morality
* Historical studies of thought and cognition
* Evolution
* Philosophy
* Primatology
* Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Developmental psychology

Piaget is without doubt one of the most influential developmental psychologists, influencing not only the work of Lev Vygotsky and of Lawrence Kohlberg but whole generations of eminent academics. Although subjecting his ideas to massive scrutiny led to innumerable improvements and qualifications of his original model and the emergence of a plethora of neo-Piagetian and post-Piagetian variants, Piaget’s original model has proved to be remarkably robust (Lourenço and Machado 1996).
Education and development of morality

During the 1970s and 1980s, Piaget’s works also inspired the transformation of European and American education, including both theory and practice, leading to a more ‘child-centred’ approach. In Conversations with Jean Piaget, he says: “Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but for me and no one else, education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators—not conformists,” (Bringuier, 1980, p.132).

Mainly, Piaget influenced two parts of education: early education and moral education.

In early education, teachers use his theory of cognitive development as a tool in the classroom. According to Piaget, children developed best in a classroom with interaction. Using this idea, teachers in elementary schools or pre-school can make use of classroom time better using peer interaction.

In moral education, Piaget believed in two basic principles. The first one is the fact that children develop moral ideas in stages. The other is the children make their idea of the world “The child is someone who constructs his own moral world view, who forms ideas about right and wrong, and fair and unfair, that are not the direct product of adult teaching and that are often maintained in the fact of adult wishes to the contrary. (Gallagher, 1978, p.26).” The idea is that children observe the world, and then decide what is morally correct. So in today’s education, we have started to bring moral education into education, such as talking about cheating and what is morally correct in today’s society, dealing with crime and morals in politics.

Piaget’s theory of morality was radical in 1932, when his book, The Moral Judgment of the Child, was published, due to his use of philosophical criteria to define morality (as universalizable, generalizable, and obligatory), and his rejection of equating cultural norms and moral norms. Piaget, drawing on Kantian theory, proposed that morality developed out of peer interaction, and that it was autonomous from authority mandates. Peers, not parents, were a key source of moral concepts, such as equality, reciprocity, and justice.

http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Theory_of_cognitive_development/id/1989989
experiencefestival.com

The theory of cognitive development is a developmental psychology theory developed by Jean Piaget to explain cognitive development. The theory is central to child psychology and is based on schemata—schemes of how one perceives the world—in “critical periods,” times when children are particularly susceptible to certain information. For his development of the theory, Piaget was awarded the Erasmus Prize.

Piaget divided schemes that childen use to understand the world through four main stages, roughly correlated with and becaming increasingly sophisticated with age:

* Sensorimotor stage
* Preoperational stage
* Concrete operational stage
* Formal operational stage

Theory of cognitive development – Sensorimotor stage

The sensorimotor stage is the first of the four stages. According to Piaget, this stage marks the development of essential spatial abilities and understanding of the world in six sub-stages:

* The first sub-stage occurs from birth to six weeks and is associated primarily with the development of reflexes. Three primary reflexes are described by Piaget: sucking of objects in the mouth, following moving or interesting objects with the eyes, and closing of the hand when an object makes contact with the palm (palmar grasp). Over these first six weeks of life, these reflexes begin to become voluntary actions; for example, the palmar reflex becomes intentional grasping. (Gruber and Vaneche, 1977).
* The second sub-stage occurs from six weeks to four months and is associated primarily with the development of habits. Primary circular reactions or repeating of an action involving only ones own body begin. An example of this type of reaction would involve something like an infant repeating the motion of passing their hand before their face. Also at this phase, passive reactions, caused by classical or operant conditioning, can begin (Gruber et al., 1977).
* The third sub-stage occurs from four to nine months and is associated primarily with the development of coordination between vision and prehension. Three new abilities occur at this stage: intentional grasping for a desired object, secondary circular reactions, and differentiations between ends and means. At this stage, infants will intentionally grasp the air in the direction of a desired object, often to the amusement of friends and family. Secondary circular reactions, or the repetition of an action involving an external object occur begin; for example, moving a switch to turn on a light repeatedly. The differentiation between means also occurs. This is perhaps one of the most important stages of a child’s growth as it signifies the dawn of logic (Gruber et al., 1977). Towards the late part of this sub-stage infants begin to have a sense of object permanence, passing the A-not-B error test.
* The fourth sub-stage occurs from nine to twelve months and is associated primarily with the development of logic and the coordination between means and ends. This is an extremely important stage of development, holding what Piaget calls the “first proper intelligence.” Also, this stage marks the beginning of goal orientation, the deliberate planning of steps to meet an objective (Gruber et al. 1977).
* The fifth sub-stage occurs from twelve to eighteen months and is associated primarily with the discovery of new means to meet goals. Piaget describes the child at this juncture as the “young scientist,” conducting pseudo-experiments to discover new methods of meeting challenges (Gruber et al. 1977).
* The sixth sub-stage is associated primarily with the beginnings of insight, or true creativity. This marks the passage into the preoperational stage.

Theory of cognitive development – Preoperational stage

The Preoperational stage is the second of four stages of cognitive development. By observing sequences of play, Piaget was able to demonstrate that towards the end of the second year a qualitatively quite new kind of psychological functioning occurs. Operation in Piagetian theory is any procedure for mentally acting on objects.

According to Piaget, the Sensorimotor stage of development is followed by this stage (2-7 years), which includes the following processes:

Symbolic functioning – is characterised by the use of mental symbols words or pictures which the child uses to represent something which is not physically present.

Concentration – is indicated by a child concentrating more on one aspect of a person which is consistent rather than concentrating on the inconsistent aspects of his personality, behaviour or physical characteristics.

Intuitive thought – occurs when the child is able to believe in something without knowing why she or he believes it.

Egocentrism – tendency of child to only think from own point of view.

Inability to Conserve – Through Piaget’s conservation experiments (conservation of mass, volume and number) Piaget concluded that children in the preoperational stage lack perception of conservation of mass, volume, and number after the original form has changed. For example, a child in this phase will believe that a string of beads set up like this O-O-O-O-O will have the same number of beads as a string set up like OO-O-OO-O because they are the same length, or that a tall, thin 8-ounce cup has more liquid in it than a wide, fat 8-ounce cup.

Theory of cognitive development – Concrete Operational stage

The concrete operational stage is the third of four stages of cognitive development in Piaget’s theory. This stage, which follows the Preoperational stage and occurs from the ages of 7 to 12, is characterized by the appropriate use of logic. Important processes during this stage are:

Decentering – where the child takes into account multiple aspects of a problem to solve it. For example, the child will no longer perceive an exceptionally wide but short cup to contain less than a normally-wide, taller cup.

Reversibility – where the child understands that numbers or objects can be changed, then returned to their original state. For this reason, a child will be able to rapidly determine that 4+4 which they can answer to be 8, minus 4 will equal four, the original quantity.

Conservation – understanding that quantity, length or number of items is unrelated to the arrangement or appearance of the object or items. For instance, when a child is presented with two equally-sized, full cups they will be able to discern that if water is transfered to a pitcher it will conserve the quantity and be equal to the other filled cup.

Serialisation – the ability to arrange objects in an order according to size, shape, or any other characterstic. For example, if given different-shaded objects they may make a colour gradient.

Classification – the ability to name and identify sets of objects according to appearance, size or other characteristic, including the idea that one set of objects can include another. A child is no longer subject to the illogical limitations of animism (the belief that all objects are animals and therefore have feelings).

Delimitation of Egocentrism – the ability to view things from anothers’ perspective (even if they think incorrectly). For instance, shown a diagram in which Jane leaves the room with a doll under the box labeled #1, the child will know that Jane will still think the doll is located under that box despite Jill moving it to under the box labeled #2.

Theory of cognitive development – Formal Operational stage

The formal operational stage is the fourth and final of the stages of cognitive development of Piaget’s theory. This stage, which follows the Concrete Operational stage, commences at around 12 years of age (puberty) and continues into adulthood. It is characterised by acquisition of the ability to think abstractly and draw conclusions from the information available. During this stage the young adult functions in a cognitively normal manner and therefore is able to understand such things as love, “shades of gray”, and values. Lucidly, biological factors may be traced to this stage as it occurs during puberty and marks the entering into adulthood in physical, cognitive, moral (Kohlberg), Psychosexual (Freud), and social development (Erikson).

Theory of cognitive development – General Information regarding the stages

These four stages have the following characteristics:

1. Although the timing may vary, the sequence of the stages does not
2. Universal (not culturally specific)
3. Related to cognitive development, but…
4. Generalizable to other functions
5. Stages are logically organized wholes
6. Hierarchical nature of stage sequences (each successive stage incorporates elements of previous stages, but is more differentiated and integrated)
7. Stages represent qualitative differences in modes of thinking, not merely quantitative differences

The development of thought, according to Piaget, is completed through assimilation and accommodation to existing schemas, which were first developed by Barlett, F.C. Assimilation, the representation of the concept according to a pre-existing schema, is evident when a child, seeing a horse for the first time, represents it under the quadripedal-animal schema, and calls it “doggie”; on the other hand accommodation, or the modification of an existing schema to better fit the environment, is when the child is told that this is a “horsie” rather than a “doggie”.

Despite its general accuracy overall, his theory has since been slightly critiqued, because today’s developmental psychologists believe the logical or cognitive development is more gradual and variable among certain groups or individuals. Many find that children combine conceptions from different developmental stages, are in different stages in different areas of life, and their advancement in thinking can be seen to vary from minute to minute. The stages are now seen as overall tendencies in thought processes; as a child develops they more frequently choose concepts from higher levels.

Further criticism of the Theory of Cognitive Development cites the inability of most adults to reach the formal operational level in all areas of life, this appearing to be largely reserved for students of tertiary education. Other critics attack the universality of the theory, claiming that the theory is only truly applicable for western society.