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- Some theorists suggest children cannot understand certain ideas until they reach a particular stage of cognitive development.
- Piaget suggested that children throughout the world proceed through a series of four stages in a fixed order.
- During the sensorimotor stage, children base their understanding of the world primarily on touching, sucking, and manipulating objects.
These infants lack what Piaget calls object permanence .
- During the preoperational stage, children develop internal representational systems that allow them to describe events, and feelings.
The preoperational child uses egocentric thought, where the child views the world entirely from his or her own perspective.
Preoperational children have not yet developed the ability to understand the principle of conservation.
- This is the knowledge that quantity is unrelated to the arrangement and physical appearance of objects.
- During the concrete operational stage, children master the principle of conservation.
- The formal operational stage produces a new kind of thinking, which is abstract, formal, and logical.
People in the formal operational stage approach a problem systematically.
- Many contemporary theorists suggest that a better explanation of how children develop cognitively can be provided.
- Some psychologists suggest that cognitive development proceeds in a more continuous fashion than Piaget's stage theory implies.
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