Piaget has four stages of cognitive development that he developed. The age ranges for these stages are birth to 2 years old, 2 years old to 6/7 years old, 7 to 11 years old, and 12 years old to adulthood. For the first stage, a person experiences the world through sense. The infant really can only comprehend looking, touching, mouthing, and grasping. Stage two become more complex as words and images start to have logical reasoning and meaning. In the third stage, a person starts to think more logically about concrete events. The person also starts grasping concrete analogies and performing basic arithmetic. Lastly, the person starts understanding the world as we all do today with abstract reasoning and logic.
In my life, I can remember some of when I switched from each stage to the next, but also have watched younger cousins grow up and graduate from one stage to another. I obviously can not remember anything about my first stage as I was an infant, but I have watched the transition of my cousins from crawling and exploring different shapes, to grasping different objects to experience texture, and looking at everything around them. The most common example for my cousin, is that she would always stare at the ceiling fan wherever she was.
In the next stage, I am able to relate my own life to the words on the page. I remember vaguely events that happened. I remember what our house looked like, specific images of places I was, but not necessarily events that happened there. I do remember one event that I had a strong emotional reaction to which is why it stayed in my memory until today. In stage three, I start to remember more concrete events that happened, but not as many details still. I remember going on vacation to the beach and building an amazing sand castle that was so proud of. Also around this time I started performing and learning beginner math concepts which fits in with Piaget’s theory.
In the last stage of the theory, we are all living in now. The way we contemplate situations, current events, conversations that we have, all shows that our mind has matured and is now capable of so much more. I am also wondering if this last stage continues to advance in complexity as we age forever, or if we stay the same after a certain point. I would assume that we always are becoming more complex based off of experiences that we have and people that we meet.