13.1: Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

Section Learning Objectives

• Define schemas.
• Describe how our schemas change due to direct experience with the environment.
• Describe Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development.

General Concepts

Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget (1896-1980), proposed a stage theory of how cognitive development proceeds. Before we get into it, it is important to explain a few key concepts he proposed. First, schemas are organized ways of making sense of experience. We have a schema for ‘dog’ which includes the ideas of four legs, a tail, and being furry. Piaget said that these schemas change due to direct experience with our environment; a process he called adaptation. This change occurs in one of two ways. First, assimilation is when new information is made to fit into existing schemas. Notice the word similar within assimilation. We interpret the world in terms of our current schemas and understand anything novel similar to this existing way of understanding experience. Second, we could use the process of accommodation. Simply, when novel information is obtained, we could update an existing schema or create a brand new one. Let’s say a child meets a cat for the first time. We would expect them to call the animal a dog. Why is that? The cat has four legs, a tail, and is furry. But cats and dogs are not the same and have one major difference — cats say ‘meow’ and dogs say ‘woof.’ So the child will update his/her schema for ‘dog’ to now include woof and creates a new schema for ‘cat’ which includes four legs, tail, furry, and meow.

Piaget’s theory consists of four main stages — sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operations, and formal operations. We will cover each as they relate to how we learn, and update what we learn about our world.

Sensorimotor Stage

The sensorimotor stage is when infants focus on developing sensory abilities and learn to get around in their environment. You might say they think with their bodies and this stage lasts from birth to age 2. Have you ever noticed how young babies take genuine delight in putting everything in their mouths, but to the horror of their parents? This is evidence of the sensorimotor stage and thinking consists of coordinating sensory information with the movement of the body.

The sensorimotor stage has six substages. Occurring during the first month, the first substage focuses on schemas the infant is born with or as we called them in Module 3, reflexes. These schemas are beginning to be changed via accommodation. The second stage is called primary circular reactions by Piaget and lasts to about 4 months of age. The child practices these basic schemas constantly and even shows the first signs of coordinating schemas from different sensory systems. The third stage is called secondary circular reactions and involves trial-and-error learning and attempts to make events happening outside their body occur again. It occurs from 4-8 months.

Substage four, occurring from 8-12 months, is called coordination of secondary schemas and involves the child trying to get what they want and involves the combination of schemas to do so. This leads to tertiary circular reactions lasting from 12-18 months and is when the child begins experimenting or finding new ways of exploring their world and manipulating objects. Finally, mental representation lasts up to 24 months and involves the use of symbols to represent objects. The child may use a block to represent a cell phone and have a conversation much like their father does. This involves imitation, though the behavior does not have to occur in the presence of the model which recall is deferred imitation. The child may use the block as a cell phone in the middle of the day when the father is at work, remembering what they saw the night before.

Piaget also said that during the sensorimotor stage infants acquire object permanence or knowing that an object continues to exist even though we cannot see it. During the first few months it is basically “out of sight, out of mind” and around 2 months of age or substage 2, infants demonstrate a rudimentary understanding of an object’s permanency. The skill really shows signs of developing by 6 months of age or substage 3 and continues to grow after this, particularly up to about 12 months or substage 4.

Preoperational Stage

Piaget’s stage of cognitive development prevalent from about age 2-7 is called the preoperational stage and is characterized by acquisition of the symbolic function. There is less dependence on sensorimotor activity to learn about the world and mental reasoning emerges. Piaget said children at this stage show centration or the tendency to focus only on one aspect of a situation at the exclusion of others. Related to this, Piaget believed that children could not take another person’s point of view because they see the world only from their frame of reference, which he called egocentrism (Piaget, 1954). Children also show animistic thinking or assigning lifelike qualities to inanimate objects and have trouble with reversibility or reversing the order of operations such as they understand that 3 times 5 equals 15 but do not realize that 15 divided by 5 equals 3.

Preoperational children have also not developed conservation or understanding that an object is fundamentally the same despite changing its properties. For instance, if two glasses are filled with the same amount of liquid and children confirm they are the same, and we take one glass and pour it into a flat container which stands much lower than the glass, children will choose the glass if asked which one they want. When asked why they say that the glass has more liquid than the container.

Concrete Operations Stage

Piaget’s third stage of cognitive development is concrete operations. Children now understand conservation, reversibility, and cause and effect but their thinking is still grounded in concrete experiences and concepts. They can now decenter or take multiple aspects of a situation into account due to them being less egocentric.

Formal Operations Stage

Piaget’s fourth and final stage of cognitive development is formal operations which begins in adolescence and lasts into adulthood. Teens become capable of abstract thinking and understand that ideas can be compared and classified, just as objects can. They search systematically for answers to questions/problems that they experience. Piaget said there are two major developments at this time. First, propositional thought is when teens gain the ability to examine the logic of verbal statements without referring to real-world situations. This leads to many debates with their parents over the morality of rules and curfews. Second, hypothetico-deductive reasoning is the use of the scientific method to test theories with hypotheses. It begins with a general theory of all possible factors that could affect the outcome and from them, deduces specific hypotheses about what may happen. These hypotheses are then tested in an orderly fashion to see which ones hold up in the real world.