Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

Piaget's Cognitive Development Theory

• Cognitive structures used for intellectual adaptation and organization are known as schemas.
• The preoperational stage runs from ages 2 to 7 years, where children begin to engage in symbolic play and learn to manipulate symbols.
• Accommodation is the process of creating a new schema when existing ones do not suffice for new information.
• The sensorimotor stage, from birth to infancy, is where a child becomes organized in their movements and experiences.
• The ability to represent objects and events in the mind, developed during the preoperational stage, is known as symbolic function.
• Assimilation refers to fitting new experiences into existing schemas, helping individuals make sense of new information.
• The concrete operational stage is where children can think logically about concrete objects and events but struggle with abstract ideas.
• Animism is the tendency of children to attribute human-like characteristics to inanimate objects, reflecting their imaginative thinking.
• The understanding that objects can undergo changes in size or appearance while remaining fundamentally the same is termed conservation.
• The formal operational stage, occurring between ages 12 and 15, is marked by the capability for more abstract and logical thinking.
• Transitive reasoning is the ability to recognize relationships in one situation and apply that understanding to similar contexts.
• Precausal reasoning describes the preoperational child's reasoning that does not fit strictly into inductive or deductive logic.
• Egocentrism is the tendency of a child to focus only on one perspective or aspect of a situation at a time.
• During the concrete operational stage, children develop the ability to classify objects into categories and subcategories based on shared properties.