Analyzing Piaget's Four Stages Of Cognitive Development

Throughout the years, many psychologists have studied the capabilities of infants and children in their development. It was once thought by many psychologists that infants were ‘empty vessels’ not capable of much higher thinking and perceptual abilities. The work of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1895-1980) changed this view through his development of a theory on the development of cognitive abilities.
Piaget’s theory includes the idea of a sequence of four stages of cognitive development, in which we will develop our thinking and mental abilities. When at ages of zero to two, infants are in the sensorimotor stage, this is where through senses and motor activities that they begin to explore and learn about the world around them. An ability

At ages two, infants leave the sensorimotor stage and enter the pre-operational stage, lasting to the age of seven. In this stage “they become increasingly able to mentally represent objects and experiences” (Grivas, 2018, p.g.262). The use of symbolic thinking develops and increases in this stage, which is where they are able to represent objects not physically present through words and pictures. The concrete stage is reached at the age of seven, and lasts to around age twelve, and is where the child is now capable of logic and mental operations. At these ages, children develop the ability of conservation, which is the ability to understand “that certain properties of an object can remain the same even when its appearance changes,” (Grivas, 2018, p.g.266). As the age of twelve is reached, children

This task involved three model mountains of different size, shape and colour and children at ages of 3-4 years old, as well as children older than this used later on in his testing. The child would become familiar with the mountains, then, with the child facing the mountains, a doll would be placed facing one of the mountains, and the child would be asked, “What can the doll see?”(Grivas, 2018, p.g.264). It was found that six-year olds had the ability to show awareness of the different perspectives and children around the age of four were often found to choose the photograph of their own perspective. But only the children of ages of seven to eight choose the right perspective of the doll. From this, Piaget found that it was the children who had reached the concrete operational stage or were close to it were capable of egocentric