Piaget Stages of Cognitive Development
- evilponderingartic
- Oct 20, 2025
- 2 min read
The stages of cognitive development by Piaget
A key idea in developmental psychology is Jean Piaget's view of how we learn to think and reason. Piaget suggested that from birth to adolescence, children go through four common but different stages of thinking.
From birth to about age 2, babies learn about the world through their senses and the things they do with their bodies. They develop important ideas like object memory, which means they know things exist even when they can't see them.
Children between the ages of 2 and 7 start to use language and play with symbols in the preoperational stage, but their thinking is focused on themselves and doesn't follow logic. For example, young children have trouble with conservation chores because they don't understand that quantity stays the same even when shape changes.
Next, during the concrete operational stage (ages 7–11), kids' thinking about real things and events gets more organized and reasonable. They learn ideas like conservation and find it easier to see things from other people's points of view.
Lastly, the formal operational stage (after adolescence) is characterized by the ability to think about things in an abstract and hypothetical way. This allows for scientific thinking and organized problem-solving.
Piaget thought of kids as active learners who fit new information into mental frameworks they already have and change those frameworks when new experiences don't fit. His stage model has had a big impact on education and child psychology because it shows how brain skills develop over time.
Modern research has filled in some gaps. For example, some cognitive skills appear earlier than Piaget thought they would. For example, babies just a few months old show signs of object permanence, and kids by age 4 or 5 develop a theory of mind, which is earlier than Piaget thought they would in order to overcome egocentrism. Even with these changes, Piaget's stages are still a good way to understand how kids' thought gets more complex over time.
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