Piaget’s Stages of Development
Few theorists have had as strong an impact on developmental psychology as Jean Piaget. While the theories of Lev Vygotsky have offered compelling counterpoints to Piaget’s theories, the stages of psychosocial development Piaget proposed remain salient. In fact, it is easy to combine emerging research on childhood development from infancy to adolescence in terms of Piaget’s stages. As Lightfoot, Cole & Cole (2009) point out, evolutionary theories, information processing theories, and systems theories can all be integrated within the staged concept of development that Piaget proposed. Piaget shows how children develop physically, socially, and cognitively. Likewise, theories of childhood development can demonstrate how children develop self-awareness, empathy, and complex use of language. The four main stages of development include the sensorimotor, the preoperational, the concrete operational, and the formal operational. While far from being discreet stages with strong demarcations between them, empirical research in cognitive, behavioral, and biological sciences have shown that indeed children do exhibit specific features of psychosocial, cognitive, and physical development during the age brackets Piaget had observed.
Infancy: The Sensorimotor Stage
The first few years of life prove critically transformative for childhood development physically, cognitively, and even socially and emotionally. In fact, research shows that infants do already have self-awareness and “are capable of demonstrating already a sense of their own body as a differentiated entity: an entity among other entities in the environment,” (Rochat, 2003, p. 717). Self-awareness during infancy is mainly body related, linked to the ability of infants to differentiate between self-oriented touch and being touched by others (Rochat, 2003). Therefore, research on infant cognition and perception substantiates Piaget’s claim that sensorimotor mastery is the key goal of this stage of childhood development. Piaget claimed that during the sensorimotor stage, infants gain knowledge of the world and themselves by “coordinating sensory perceptions and simple motor responses,” (Lightfoot, Cole & Cole, 2009, p. 144). Research in biology and human development shows that infants are developing their sensorimotor skills by engaging with objects, particularly by reaching and grabbing (Rochat, 2003). Also evident at the sensorimotor stage is the infant’s ability to learn via both classical and operant conditioning, such...
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