Jean Piaget He is one of the most important psychologists and researchers in history, and we owe him much of what we have discovered through developmental psychology.
He dedicated much of his life to researching the way in which both our knowledge about the environment and our thinking patterns evolve depending on the stage of growth we are in, and He is especially known for having proposed several stages of cognitive development that all human beings go through as we grow.
The idea that Jean Piaget put forward is that, just as our body evolves rapidly during the first years of our lives, our mental abilities also evolve through a series of phases that are qualitatively different from each other.
In a historical context in which it was taken for granted that boys and girls were nothing more than “adult projects” or imperfect versions of human beings, 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, although coherent, rules of the game. and cohesive with each other. That is to say, the way of thinking of boys and girls is not characterized so much by the absence of mental abilities typical of adults, but rather by the presence of ways of thinking that follow very different dynamics, depending on the stage of development in which they live. the one they find.
That is why Piaget considered that the patterns of thinking and behavior of young people 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offers a brief explanation about these phases of development raised by Piaget; a theory that, although it has become outdated, is the first brick on which Evolutionary Psychology has been built.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 talks about biological factors and on the other hand about learning processes that develop from the interaction between the individual and the environment.
The answer is that this psychologist spoke about both, although focusing more on individual aspects than on 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 boy or girl as the driving force of his own learning, although he tried not to ignore the influence of such important aspects of the environment as, for example, fathers and mothers.
Piaget knew that It is absurd to try to treat biological aspects separately from those that refer to cognitive development, and that, for example, it is impossible to find a case in which a two-month-old baby has 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 the learning possibilities of individuals are. Ultimately, the human mind is not something separate from the body, and the physical qualities of the latter shape mental processes.
However, to understand Piaget’s stages of cognitive development it is necessary to know from which theoretical approach the author starts.
Remembering the constructivist approach
As Bertrand Regader explains in his article on Jean Piaget’s learning theory, learning is for this psychologist a process of constant construction of new meanings, and the driving force behind this extraction of knowledge from what is known is the individual himself. Therefore, for Piaget the protagonist of learning is the learner 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 his own knowledge, depending on how he organizes and interprets the information he captures from the environment.
However, the fact that the driver of learning is the individual himself does not mean that we all have total freedom to learn nor that people’s cognitive development is carried out in any way. If this were the case, 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 other people. with a very different age.
This It 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. The 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, other agents and himself.
It should be noted, however, that these stages of cognitive development are not equivalent to 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 are behind this knowledge
Ultimately, the content of the different learning that one carries out depends largely on the context, but the cognitive conditions are limited by genetics and the way in which this is reflected throughout the physical growth of the person. person.
Piaget and the four stages of cognitive development
The phases of development outlined by Piaget form a sequence of four periods that are in turn divided into other stages. Are four main phases They are listed and briefly explained below, with the characteristics that Piaget attributed to them. However, it must be taken into account that, as we will see, these stages do not exactly correspond to reality.
This is the first phase in cognitive development, and for Piaget it takes place between the moment of birth and the appearance of articulate language in simple sentences (around two years of age). What defines this stage is the obtaining of knowledge from physical interaction with the immediate environment. Thus, cognitive development is articulated through experimental games, often involuntary at first, in which certain experiences are associated with interactions with nearby objects, people and animals.
Boys and girls who are in this stage of cognitive development show egocentric behavior in which the main conceptual division that exists is the one that separates the ideas of “I” and “environment.” Babies who are in the sensorimotor stage play to satisfy their needs through transactions between themselves and the environment.
Although in the sensorimotor phase one does not know how to distinguish much between the nuances and subtleties presented by the category of “environment”, one does gain the understanding of the permanence of the object, that is, the ability to understand that the things that we do not perceive at a given moment can continue to exist despite it.
2. Preoperational stage
The second stage of cognitive development according to Piaget appears more or less between the ages of two and seven
People who are in the preoperational phase They begin to gain the ability to put themselves in the shoes of others, act and play following fictional roles and use symbolic objects. However, egocentrism is still very present in this phase, which translates into serious difficulties in accessing relatively abstract thoughts and reflections.
Furthermore, at this stage the ability to manipulate information following the rules of logic to draw formally valid conclusions has not yet been gained, nor can complex mental operations typical of adult life be correctly 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 we internalize information about how the world works.
3. Stage of concrete operations
Approximately between seven and twelve years of age You enter the stage of concrete operations, a stage of cognitive development in which logic begins to be used to reach valid conclusions, as long as the premises from which you start have to do with concrete and not abstract situations. Furthermore, the category systems for classifying aspects of reality become noticeably more complex at this stage, and the style of thinking stops being so markedly egocentric.
One of the typical symptoms that a boy or girl has entered the stage of concrete operations is that he or she is capable of inferring that the amount of liquid contained in a container does not depend on the form that this liquid takes since it retains its volume.
The formal operations phase is the last of the stages of cognitive development proposed by Piaget, and appears from twelve years of age onwards, including adulthood
It is in this period that you gain the ability to use logic to reach abstract conclusions that are not linked to specific cases that have been experienced first-hand. Therefore, from this moment it is possible to “think about thinking”, to its ultimate consequences, and to analyze and deliberately manipulate thought patterns, and the deductive hypothetical reasoning.
A linear development?
Seeing a list of development stages displayed in this way may suggest that the evolution of each person’s human cognition is a cumulative process, in which several layers of information are based on previous knowledge. However, This idea can be misleading
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 top of everything that has been learned during the previous stage, but rather reconfigures it and expands it towards various areas of knowledge
The key is in cognitive reconfiguration
In Piagetian theory, these phases occur one after another, each one offering the conditions for the developing person to elaborate the information available to move on 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 based on the cognitive developments that come later
Furthermore, this theory of the stages of cognitive development does not set very fixed age limits, but is limited to describing the ages at which the transition phases from one to another are common. This is why, for Piaget, it is possible to find cases of statistically abnormal development in which a person takes a long time to move on to the next phase or reaches it at an early age.
Criticisms of the theory
Although Jean Piaget’s theory of the stages of cognitive development has been the founding 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 greatly affects the way of thinking, and that there are places in which adults tend not to think according to the characteristics of the stage of formal operations due among other things to the influence of magical thinking typical of some tribes.
On the other hand, the evidence in favor of the existence of these phases of cognitive development is not very solid either, so it cannot 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 object permanence or the general idea that boys and girls tend to think from approaches based on what happens in the environment and not according to abstract ideas, they are accepted. and have served to give rise to research that is up to date.
