Subtitles section Play video
-
Piaget's theory argues that we have to conquer four stages of cognitive development.
-
First, the sensori-motor stage.
-
Second, the pre-operational stage.
-
Third the concrete operational stage and fourth the formal operational stage.
-
Only once we have gone through all the stages, at what age can vary, we are able to reach full human intelligence.
-
One, the sensori-motor stage, ages birth to two.
-
In the sensori-motor stage, we develop through experiences and movement our five senses.
-
Our brain wants to see, hear, smell, taste and touch as much as possible.
-
First we start with simple reflexes and soon after we develop our first habits.
-
From four months old, we become aware of things beyond our own body and then as we get older we learn to do things intentionally.
-
A key milestone is the development of working memory or in Piaget terms "our realization of object permanence".
-
Before that, our mom can show and then hide a teddy and we would think is gone.
-
After we understand that objects continue to exist even when we can't see them.
-
We start becoming curious about everything.
-
We want to smell flowers, taste food, listen to sounds and talk to strangers.
-
To explore more, we move, we learn to sit, crawl, stand, walk and even to run.
-
This increased physical mobility consequently leads to increased cognitive development, but we remain egocentric - meaning we can perceive the world only from our own point of view.
-
Two: The pre-operational stage, ages 2 to 7.
-
Our thinking is mainly categorized for symbolic functions and intuitive thoughts.
-
We have lots of fantasies and believe objects are alive.
-
As we are not able to apply specific cognitive operations, Piaget calls this stage "pre-operational".
-
We learn to speak and understand that words, images, and gestures are symbols for something else.
-
When we draw our family, we are not concerned about drawing each person to scale but rather with their symbolic meanings.
-
We love to play pretend, which allows us to experience something new and learn a lot.
-
At around age 4, most of us become very curious and ask many questions.
-
We want to know everything.
-
We can call it "the birth of primitive reasoning".
-
Piaget calls it "the intuitive age" because while we realize that we have a vast amount of knowledge, we have no idea how we acquired it.
-
Our thinking in this stage is still pretty egocentric.
-
We think others see the world like we do and still don't understand that they see it differently.
-
Three: The concrete operational stage -age is 7 to 11.
-
We finally discover logic and we develop concrete cognitive operations, such as sorting objects in a certain order.
-
One example of this is inductive reasoning, which means that if we see someone eating a cookie we can draw a conclusion and then make a generalization.
-
And we now get the concept of conservation.
-
We understand that if we pour orange juice from a normal glass to a taller one the amount stays the same.
-
Our younger sister will pick the taller glass thinking she gets more.
-
By the same logic, we only now can understand that if 3 plus 5 equals 8, then 8 minus 3 must equal 5.
-
Our brain learns to rearrange our thoughts to classify and build concrete operational mental structures.
-
For example, we now know that we can reverse an action by doing the opposite.
-
Excited by our new mental abilities, we apply them in conversations, activities, when we learn to write, and in school.
-
As a result, we get to know ourselves better.
-
We begin to understand that our thoughts and feelings are unique and not necessarily those of others.
-
That means that we learn to put ourselves in someone else's shoes.
-
Four: The formal operational stage - Age 12 plus.
-
Once we become teenagers, we become formally operational.
-
We now have the ability to think more rationally about abstract concepts and hypothetical events.
-
Our advanced cognitive abilities allow us to understand abstract concepts such as success and failure, love and hate.
-
We form a deeper understanding of our own identity and our morality.
-
We now also think that we understand why people behave the way they behave and as a result can become more compassionate.
-
Our brain can now do deductive reasoning, which means we can compare two statements and reach a logical generalization.
-
Our new mental skills allow us to plan our life systematically and prioritize and we can make assumptions about events that have no necessary relation to reality.
-
We can now also philosophize and just think about thinking itself.
-
Our new sense for our identity now also creates egocentric thoughts and some start to see an imaginary audience watching them all the time.
-
Piaget believed in lifelong learning, but insisted that the formal operational stage is the final stage of our cognitive development.
-
Jean Piaget's first interests were animals and he published his first scientific paper on albino sparrows in 1907, when he was just 11 years old.
-
In 1920, he began working with standardized intelligence tests.
-
He realized that younger children consistently make types of mistakes that older children do not.
-
He concluded that they must think differently and spent the rest of his life studying the intellectual development of children.