Hello friends, continuing with my publications in relation to the label of psychology and with the theories Jean piaget, today I will speak in this post about The 4 stages of cognitive development of Jean Piaget, in this article you can see a summary of the aforementioned theory Piaget's studies are now of great importance and are already applied in education for the intellectual and cognitive development of children, this has allowed to exercise a transcendental influence in evolutionary psychology and modern pedagogy. You are invited to read the article ... if you have not done it yet!

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Jean Piaget 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 researching the way in which our knowledge about the environment evolves as well as our thought patterns depending on the stage of growth in which we find ourselves, and is especially known for having proposed several stages of cognitive development through what we all human beings pass through as we grow.

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 rules of the game, although coherent 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offers a brief explanation about these phases of development proposed by Piaget; a theory that, although it has been outdated, is the first brick on which Evolutionary Psychology has been built.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 whether Jean Piaget described stages of growth or learning, since on the one hand he 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 means from which people internalize ways of thinking and learning about the environment, Jean Piaget placed more emphasis on the curiosity of each child as the motor of their own learning, although he 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 deal separately with the biological aspects and those that refer to cognitive development, and that, for example, it is impossible to find a case in which, in a two-month-old baby, he had two years to interact directly with the child. ambient. 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.

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 own 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.

This 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 linked to the social context fits 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 growth phase, but 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 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 it takes place between the moment of birth and the appearance of language articulated 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 ability 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.

People who are in the preoperational phase 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 remains 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). Therefore, 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 the concrete 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 departs must have see with concrete situations and not abstract. 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 accessed 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 acquires this liquid, as 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 twelve years of age onwards, including adult life.

It is in this period that the ability to use logic to reach abstract conclusions that are not linked to specific cases that have been experienced first hand is gained. Therefore, from this moment it is possible to "think about thinking", to its ultimate consequences, and deliberately analyze and manipulate thought schemes, and hypothetical deductive reasoning can also be used.

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. However, this idea can lead to deception.

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 it reconfigures it and expands it towards several fields of knowledge.

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 first stages of development is constantly reconfigured from the cognitive developments that come later.

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.

References

• Torres, J. and Ash, M. (2007). Cognitive development. In Encyclopedia of special education: a reference for the education of children, adolescents and adults with disabilities and other exceptional people. Retrieved from http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/wileyse/cognitive_development/0
• McLeod, S. A. "Piaget | Cognitive Theory". Simply psychology. Retrieved on September 18, 2012.
  ^ Baldwin, J. (2005). Jean Piaget In Key pensers in linguistics and the philosophy of language. Retrieved from http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/edinburghthinkl/jean_piaget/0
• Great lives of history: the twentieth century; September 2008, p1-3
• Singer Freeman, Karen E. "Concrete Operational Period". Encyclopedia of Human Development. Ed. Neil J. Salkind. Vol. 1. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Reference, 2006. 291-292. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. December 10, 2014.
• Piaget, J. (1977). The role of action in the development of thought. In Knowledge and Development (pp. 17-42). Springer in the United States.