5.2: Piaget- Sensorimotor and Preoperational Stages

Piaget: Stages of Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) is one of the most influential cognitive theorists. He was inspired to explore children’s ability to think and reason by watching his own children’s development.

He was one of the first to recognize and map out the ways in which children’s thought differs from that of adults.Jean Piaget is the most noted theorist when it comes to children's cognitive development. He believed that children's cognition develops in stages.

Schemas begin to develop during infancy, in the sensorimotor stage. Schemas are a way of interpreting and understanding information. They are used created to create meaning behind symbols and objects. As a child progresses into the preoperational stage, their schemas become solidified in their conscious thought.

Piaget explained this growth for infants and toddlers in the following stages:

• Sensorimotor Stage (Birth through 2 years old)
  • learning happens via the baby's senses and movements
• Preoperational Stage (2-7 years old)
  • learning as the child begins to think symbolically using words and pictures that represent objects

Fig 5.2. Visual representing Piaget's Sensorimotor and Preoperational stages.

Sensorimotor Intelligence

Piaget describes intelligence in infancy as sensorimotor or based on direct, physical contact. Infants taste, feel, pound, push, hear, and move in order to experience the world. His view is that the infants’ main task is to coordinate their sensory impressions with their motor activity.

It is during the sensorimotor stage that children go through a period of dramatic growth and learning. As infants interact with their environment, they are continually making new discoveries about how the world works.

The cognitive development that occurs during this period takes place over a relatively short period of time and involves a great deal of growth. Children not only learn how to perform physical actions such as crawling and walking; they also learn a great deal about language from the people with whom they interact.

Key Cognitive Developments of the Sensorimotor Stage

• babies learn about the world directly through their sensory and motor experiences
  • physical actions such as sucking, grasping, and moving their arms, legs, and the rest of their body
  • sensory activities such as looking, listening, tasting, and touching
• babies come to learn they are separate from the people and objects around them
  • object permanence
• babies realize that their actions can cause things to happen in their environment
• babies learn about cause and effect by interacting with their environment and
  • learning their actions cause something to happen and associate their actions with outcomes
• symbolic thought
  • mentally picturing objects, things, events
• nonverbal communication -
  • interactions with caregivers teaches them about gestures and facial expressions

Object Permanence

Fig 5.2.1. Baby playing peek-a-boo.

Image Source: Cognitive and emotional benefits of playing peek-a-boo with your 5-month old. Montessori Baby Ed. Magical Movement Company. 2025.

Imagine a game of peek-a-boo!

When babies have developed a sense of object permanence, they realize that people and things continue to exist whether or not they can see or hear them. This cognitive skill begins to emerge between 4-8 months of age. At this stage, for example, the baby experiences the caregiver goes away, but also realizes they comes back. An object may disappear and then reappear. Object permanence is an essential building block for working memory, language development, and emotional attachment.

One way to test if the baby has developed object permanence is to hide a toy under a cloth as the infant watches. A baby with a sense of object permanence will lift the cloth to seek the toy while a very young baby will amazed that something can reappear after being gone. At this stage babies are learning about existence.

Fig 5.2.2 Baby develops a sense of object permanence by playing with a toy where a ball disappears then reappears.

Image Source: Object Permanance. Parent Resources. Lovevery.

Piaget’s Preoperational Stage

The foundational skills and knowledge gained during the sensorimotor stage are essential for children's ability to learn and use language effectively. but the actual emergence of language typically occurs in the next stage, the preoperational stage. They are becoming more developed in their with language and thinking, they still tend to view things in very concrete terms and focus on tangible, observable details. They have not yet developed the capacity for abstract or generalized thinking.

Characteristics of the preoperational stage

Here’s a list of the main characteristics of this stage of development.

• Egocentrism
  • early in this stage a young child assumes that other people see, hear, and feel the same things they do, they struggle to see things from the perspective of another person
  • Animism
    • example of egocentrism and reflects egocentric thinking
    • the act of giving life-like qualities to inanimate objects
      • the child believes that toys, dolls, and everyday items are alive just like they are
      • peaks as the child enters the preoperational stage but will also fade as a child develops a more concrete understanding of the meaning of life
    • example: a child believes their toys are afraid of the dark because they themselves are afraid of the dark and insists the lights be kept on for the toys
• Centration
  • a child can only make judgments based on one level of comparison or focus on only one detail of a situation at a time and will neglect, ignore, or fail to realize other details are also part of the situation
    • example: a child sees 2 rows of paper clips, one row of 5 paper clips and one row of 7 paper clips
    • when asked to point to the longer row the child points to the row of 5 paper clips focusing only on the concept of longer not yet realizing that a greater number (a second detail) means a longer row
• Conservation
  • linked to centration - a child can not yet understand either logic or measurements (time, length, mass, area, quantity, volume, weight).
    • they don't understand that a quantity stays the same even if you change the size, shape, or container it’s in
    • until the age of 5 most children can’t understand that all 4 glasses contain an identical amount of water even if one is taller
• 

Fig. 5.2.3 Example of conservation. Group A shows 2 identical glasses of water. Group B shows one glass of water identical to those in Group A and one glass that is taller and narrower but contains the same amount of water.

Image source: GinaMarie Guarino, LPC-MHSP. Preoperational Stage. Find a Therapist. Updated January 2nd, 2024.

• Parallel play
  • linked to egocentrism
  • small children play alongside one another but not with each other, they do not yet engage in cooperative play, where two children play the same game cooperatively together
  • at this stage although children may be talking, but only to express what they see, feel, or need, they don’t yet realize that talking is a way of interacting socially
• Imaginative or pretend play
  • a child activates the imaginative part of the mind and these skills grow during this stage even as they tend to remain concrete thinkers about the world around them
  • the point at which a child begins to learn how to problem solve and incorporates reasoning into play
  • children imagine different scenarios and situations
    • the child learns how to incorporate logic into different combinations of solutions
    • example - a child is playing with the doll and pretending it is alive and needs a crib to sleep in, so goes in search of a shoe box too use as a crib
      • the child demonstrates the use of schema, symbolism, and problem solving: they imagine the shoebox is a crib because it is a space with 4 walls where the baby can be placed in and taken out easily
• Symbolic representation / symbolism
  • in the late sensorimotor stage children begin to think symbolically and realize that words and objects are symbols for something else
  • in the the preoperational stage the child will learn how to differentiate between different objects with similar characteristics, for example learning that ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ both have fur and four legs, but understands they are different types of creatures
  • symbolism will be exhibited during imaginative play, when they substitute one thing for another similar thing, for example pretending a pencil is a magic wand

Sources

• Guarino, GinaMarie. Preoperational Stage. Find a Therapist. Updated January 2nd, 2024.
• Leon, Ana R. Children’s Development. Licensed under CC BY 4.0
• Lewis, Rhona. The Preoperational Stage of Cognitive Development, Healthline. January 13, 2020.