Piaget's Stages Of Cognitive Development Essay

In Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, there are four stages of cognitive development including The Sensorimotor Stage (0 to 2 years old), Preoperational Stage (2 to 7 years old), Concrete Operational Stage (7 to 11 years old) and Formal Operational Stage (11 years and older). Piaget’s study (as cited in Cook& Cook, 2005) found that in the Sensorimotor Stage, infants acquire knowledge through their own sensory input (see, smell, taste, touch, and hear) and their physical or motor actions on it (e.g. sucking, reaching, and grasping). In this stage, object permanence started to exist in the toddlers where they know that the objects continue to be in the location where it is hidden. On the Preoperational Stage, mental functions are developing
Children at this age can also seriate mentally which is called as transitive inference, a process where they make comparisons then inference the relation among objects such as height of two objects. The last stage will be the Formal Operational Stage that from the age of 11 onwards, people are able to do hypothetico-deductive reasoning. People start to make logical inferences based on the hypothesis or variables and then conclude based on the inferences they have made (Berk, 2013). Adolescents also involve in abstract thinking where they think about things that are not real or starting forming abstract concepts such as truth, justice or fairness. Piaget’s study (as cited in Cook& Cook, 2005) described that there are two forms of adolescent egocentrism. The first is the imaginary audience. Adolescents believe that people are paying attention to their behaviour or looks that sometimes leads to high level of self-consciousness. The second adolescent egocentrism is the facet of personal fable. Adolescents tend to believe that they and their newly abstract thoughts are unique and that they are invulnerable where they believe nothing bad will happen to