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| |    Stages in Cognitive Development by Dr. Benjamin Spock reviewed by Robert Needlman, M.D., F.A.A.P. A Swiss psychologist named Jean Piaget described stages of cognitive development. An example of the first stage - which he called "sensorimotor" - is the baby dropping things off his highchair. "Sensorimotor" refers to the two main ways that infants learn about their world: They sense things (feel, see, taste, etc.) and they do things (in developmental jargon, motor activity). Sensorimotor learning ends when children begin to use language to describe their world, and to think about it. After moving on from the sensorimotor period, children go through three more stages: • Pre-operational • Concrete operations • Formal operations Piaget does not believe that a child can skip any stage; one stage grows out of the last in a continuous fashion: • Each new ability to make sense of the world grows out of his understanding of the previous stage. • Each new experience causes the child to change his understanding of the world, to better make sense of the incoming information. • Each stage implies the child is better able to live in the world of ideas, to be able to put ideas together and to come up with new ideas. According to Piaget (and to almost every scientist that has followed him), children do not simply get smarter as they grow. They actually think in different ways. What drives the development of thinking is the child's inborn urge to understand the world of people, things, and ideas. At each stage, the child creates theories about the way the world works. Young children cannot tell us about these theories, but we can observe them in action. As the child gathers more and more experience, eventually she is forced to give up her old theories, and create new ones. This process drives the child from one stage in cognitive development to the next.
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