The 4 stages of the cognitive development of Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget He is one of the most important psychologists and researchers in history, and to him we owe a great part of what we have been discovering through the psychology of development.
He devoted a large part of his life to investigate the way in which our knowledge about the environment and our thought patterns evolve depending on the stage of growth in which we find ourselves, and is especially known for having proposed several stages of cognitive development by which we pass all human beings as we grow.
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Jean Piaget and his conception of childhood
The idea put forward by Jean Piaget is that, just as our body evolves rapidly during the first years of our lives, our mental capacities also evolve through a series of qualitatively different phases.
In a historical context in which it was taken for granted that boys and girls were no more than "adult projects" or imperfect versions of being human, Piaget pointed out that the way in which children act, feel and perceive denotes not that their mental processes are unfinished, but rather that they are in a stage with different, albeit coherent, rules of the game and cohesive with each other. That is to say, that the children's way of thinking is not characterized as much by the absence of mental abilities typical of adults, as by the presence of ways of thinking that follow other very different dynamics, depending on the stage of development in which they are.
That is why Piaget considered that the thinking and behavior patterns of the youngest are qualitatively different from those of adults, and that each stage of development defines the contours of these ways of acting and feeling. This article offers a brief explanation about these phases of development raised by Piaget; a theory that, although it has been outdated, is the first brick on which Evolutionary Psychology has been built.
Stages of growth or learning?
It is very possible to fall into the confusion of not knowing if Jean Piaget described stages of growth or learning, since on the one hand talks about biological factors and on the other about learning processes that develop from the interaction between the individual and the environment.
The answer is that this psychologist talked about the two, although focusing more on the individual aspects than on the aspects of learning that are linked to social constructions. If Vygotsky gave importance to the cultural context as a medium from which people internalize ways of thinking and learning about the environment, Jean Piaget placed more emphasis on the curiosity of each boy or girl as the engine of their own learning, although they tried not to ignore the influence of aspects of the environment as important as, for example, fathers and mothers.
Piaget knew that it is absurd to try to treat the biological aspects separately and those that refer to cognitive development , and that, for example, it is impossible to find a case in which a baby of two months had two years to interact directly with the environment. That is why for him cognitive development informs about the stage of physical growth of people, and the physical development of people gives an idea about what are the learning possibilities of individuals. At the end of the day, the human mind is not something that is separate from the body, and the physical qualities of the latter give shape to mental processes.
However, in order to understand Piaget's stages of cognitive development, it is necessary to know from what theoretical approach his author departs.
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Remembering the constructivist approach
As Bertrand Regader explains in his article on the theory of learning of Jean Piaget, learning is for this psychologist a process of constant construction of new meanings , and the engine of this extraction of knowledge from what is known is the individual. Therefore, for Piaget the protagonist of learning is the apprentice himself, and not his tutors or his teachers. This approach is called constructivist approach, and emphasizes the autonomy that individuals have when internalizing all types of knowledge; According to this, it is the person who lays the foundations of their own knowledge, depending on how it organizes and interprets the information it captures from the environment.
However, that the motor of learning is the individual does not mean that we all have total freedom to learn or that the cognitive development of people is carried out in any way.If so, it would not make sense to develop an evolutionary psychology dedicated to studying the phases of cognitive development typical of each stage of growth, and it is clear that there are certain patterns that make people of a similar age resemble each other and distinguish themselves from people with a very different age.
East is the point at which the stages of cognitive development proposed by Jean Piaget become important : when we want to see how an autonomous activity fits in and linked to the social context with the genetic and biological conditions that develop during growth. Stages or stages would describe the style in which the human being organizes his cognitive schemes, which in turn will serve to organize and assimilate in one way or another the information he receives about the environment, the other agents and himself.
It should be noted, however, that these stages of cognitive development do not equal the set of knowledge that we can typically find in people who are in one or another phase of growth, but rather describe the types of cognitive structures that lie behind this knowledge .
At the end of the day, the content of the different learning that one carries out depends largely on the context, but the cognitive conditions are limited by the genetics and the way in which it is shaped by the physical growth of the person.
Piaget and the four stages of cognitive development
The phases of development exposed by Piaget form a sequence of four periods that in turn are divided into other stages. These four main phases they are enumerated and briefly explained below, with the characteristics that Piaget attributed to them. However, we must bear in mind that, as we will see, these stages do not exactly conform to reality.
1. Sensorial stage - motor or sensory motor
It is the first phase in cognitive development, and for Piaget takes place between the moment of birth and the appearance of articulated language in simple sentences (towards two years of age). What defines this stage is the obtaining of knowledge from the physical interaction with the immediate environment. Thus, cognitive development is articulated through experimentation games, often involuntary at the beginning, in which certain experiences are associated with interactions with objects, people and nearby animals.
Children who are in this stage of cognitive development show an egocentric behavior in which the main conceptual division that exists is what separates the ideas of "I" and "environment". Babies who are in the sensory-motor stage play to satisfy their needs through transactions between themselves and the environment.
Although in the sensory-motor phase one can not distinguish too much between the nuances and subtleties that the category of "environment" presents, it does conquer the understanding of the permanence of the object, that is, the capacity to understand that the things that We do not perceive at a certain time can continue to exist despite this.
2. Pre-operational stage
The second stage of cognitive development according to Piaget appears more or less between two and seven years .
The people who are in the preoperational phase they begin to gain the ability to put themselves in the place of others, act and play following fictitious roles and use objects of a symbolic nature. However, egocentricity is still very present in this phase, which translates into serious difficulties in accessing thoughts and reflections of a relatively abstract kind.
Furthermore, at this stage, the ability to manipulate information following the rules of logic to extract formally valid conclusions has not yet been gained, nor can complex mental operations typical of adult life be properly performed (hence the name of this period of cognitive development). Thats why he magical thinking based on simple and arbitrary associations is very present in the way of internalizing information about how the world works.
3. Stage of specific operations
Approximately between seven and twelve years of age the stage of concrete operations is accessed, a stage of cognitive development in which logic begins to be used to arrive at valid conclusions, as long as the premises from which it starts have to do with concrete and not abstract situations. In addition, the category systems for classifying aspects of reality become noticeably more complex at this stage, and the thinking style ceases to be so markedly egocentric.
One of the typical symptoms that a child has agreed to the stage of specific operations is that it is able to infer that the amount of liquid contained in a container does not depend on the form that this liquid acquires , since it retains its volume.
4. Stage of formal operations
The phase of formal operations is the last of the stages of cognitive development proposed by Piaget, and appears from the age of twelve onwards, including adult life .
It is in this period that you earn the ability to use logic to reach abstract conclusions that are not linked to specific cases that have been experienced firsthand. Therefore, from this moment it is possible to "think about thinking", to its ultimate consequences, and deliberately analyze and manipulate thought schemes, and you can also use the hypothetical deductive reasoning.
A linear development?
The fact of being exposed in this way a list with stages of development may suggest that the evolution of human cognition of each person is a cumulative process, in which several layers of information are based on previous knowledge. But nevertheless, this idea can lead to deceit .
For Piaget, the stages of development indicate the cognitive differences in the conditions of learning. Therefore, what is learned about, for example, the second period of cognitive development, is not deposited on everything that has been learned during the previous stage, but rather reconfigures it and expands it to various fields of knowledge .
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The key is in the cognitive reconfiguration
In Piagetian theory, these phases are happening one after another, each offering the conditions for the developing person to develop the information available to move to the next phase. But it is not a purely linear process, since what is learned during the early stages of development it is constantly reconfigured from the cognitive developments that come after .
For the rest, this theory of the stages of cognitive development does not set very fixed age limits, but merely describes the ages in which the phases of transition from one to the other are common. That is why for Piaget it is possible to find cases of statistically abnormal development in which a person delays in moving to the next phase or arrives at it at an early age.
Criticism to the theory
Although the theory of the stages of cognitive development of Jean Piaget has been the foundational piece of Developmental Psychology and has had a great influence, today it is considered to be outdated. On the one hand, it has been shown that the culture in which one lives affects the way of thinking, and that there is places where adults tend not to think according to the characteristics of the stage of formal operations , due among other things to the influence of the magical thought of some tribes.
On the other hand, the evidences in favor of the existence of these phases of cognitive development are not very solid either, so it can not be taken for granted that they describe well how the way of thinking changes during childhood and adolescence. In any case, it is true that in certain aspects, such as the concept of permanence of the object or the general idea that children tend to think from approaches based on what happens in the environment and not according to abstract ideas, they are accepted and they have served to give rise to investigations that are updated.
