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Sensorimotor
from birth to age 2, babies take in the world through their senses and actions. Young infants lack object permanence, the awareness that objects continue to exist when not perceived. They also experience stranger anxiety, the feeling of fear when a stranger gives attention to the infant. -
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Preoperational
during which a child learns to use language but does not yet comprehend the mental operations of concrete logic. it also presents egocentric abilities, the preoperational child’s difficulty taking another’s point of view. -
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Concrete
children learn to think more logically about complex relationships between different objects. These children show knowledge of conservation even when the shapes change. -
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Formal
this final stage describes adult reasoning. Piaget theorized that not all of us reach formal operations in all areas of thought. formal operation is abstract reasoning. we can manipulate objects and contrast ideas in our mind without physically seeing them. This is where hypothesis reasoning occurs.