Description: How do we learn to think? In this episode, we explore the revolutionary work of Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist who transformed our understanding of human intelligence by proving that children are not just “mini-adults,” but active architects of their own reality.

From his early days as a teenage prodigy publishing on mollusks to becoming the second most-cited psychologist of the 20th century, we trace Piaget’s journey into the “hidden side” of the child’s mind.

In this episode, we cover:

• The “Zeroeth” Piaget: How a background in natural history and philosophy laid the groundwork for his “Genetic Epistemology”.
• The Four Stages of Development: A breakdown of the Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operational, and Formal Operational stages that map the growth of human logic.
• Mechanisms of Learning: We explain assimilation and accommodation—the biological processes we use to organize new information and adapt our mental schemas.
• Methodology & Controversy: How Piaget used the “clinical method” and observations of his own three children to conduct his research, and why modern critics argue he may have underestimated the capabilities of infants.
• Lasting Impact: From “child-centered” education to the development of Artificial Intelligence and the Logo programming language, we look at how Piaget’s constructivist theories continue to shape our world.

Join us to learn how we move from simple reflexes to complex abstract thought, and why Piaget declared that “to understand is to invent”.

4 Counter-Intuitive Truths About Child Development from Jean Piaget

As an adolescent, the psychologist Jean Piaget learned a shocking fact about one of his most vivid childhood memories. He could clearly recall a dramatic event from his infancy: a would-be kidnapper tried to snatch him from his pram, and his brave nanny fought him off. The only problem? It never happened. When Piaget was 15, the nanny wrote to his parents and confessed she had fabricated the entire story.

Piaget was fascinated that he had somehow formed such a powerful memory of an incident that was completely false, a memory that endured even after he knew the truth. This personal anecdote is a perfect window into his life’s work. He concluded that memory isn’t a perfect recording of the past, but something our minds actively construct. This same constructive principle, he would discover, applies to all of cognition. The minds of children, he revealed, work in mysterious and fundamentally different ways than we assume. Here are four of Piaget’s most surprising and impactful discoveries about how children think and learn.

1. He Found Genius in Getting Things Wrong

While standardizing intelligence tests in Paris, Jean Piaget was tasked with marking children’s answers. He soon became less interested in whether the answers were right or wrong and more interested in the patterns of their mistakes. He noticed that young children consistently made the same types of errors—errors that older children and adults did not make.

He realized this wasn’t simply a lack of knowledge. It was evidence of a completely different cognitive process. A child’s mind isn’t just a less-developed version of an adult’s; it is qualitatively different. They aren’t just missing facts; their entire logical framework for understanding the world is distinct, lacking core concepts like conservation or reversibility that adults take for granted. Their wrong answers were windows into a unique logic and a distinct way of structuring reality. This was a revolutionary idea that shifted the focus of developmental psychology from measuring failure to understanding a fascinating way of seeing the world.

2. Sometimes, Children Get Dumber Before They Get Smarter

We tend to think of development as a straight, upward line of progress. Piaget’s research showed it can be far stranger, with unexpected peaks and valleys. In one of his most famous studies, he presented children with two parallel rows of sweets. The rows had the same number of sweets, but one row was spread out to be longer than the other.

The results were astonishing and defied linear logic:

• Children between 2 years, 6 months and 3 years, 2 months old correctly identified that the number of sweets was the same.
• Children between 3 years, 2 months and 4 years, 6 months old consistently insisted that the longer row had “more” sweets.
• After 4 years, 6 months, children once again understood that the number was the same.

The likely explanation for this temporary dip in ability is that children in the middle group develop an overdependence on a simple perceptual rule: longer equals more. This flawed heuristic temporarily overrides their initial, more basic ability to discriminate quantity. This finding powerfully demonstrates that cognitive development isn’t always a simple march forward; sometimes, acquiring a new mental strategy can temporarily make a child’s judgment less accurate.

3. He Believed Peers, Not Parents, Shape Our Morals

In a radical departure from conventional wisdom, Piaget proposed that a child’s moral framework develops primarily from interactions with peers, not from rules handed down by parents or other authority figures. He contrasted two fundamental types of relationships:

• Asymmetrical relationships (child-adult): In these relationships, power is unequal. Knowledge is passed down through “social transmission,” leading to a fixed and inflexible understanding of rules.
• Cooperative relationships (child-child): Among peers, power is more evenly distributed. This allows for genuine intellectual exchange, negotiation, debate, and the mutual construction of concepts like fairness, reciprocity, and justice.

Piaget’s radical insight was that morality is not transmitted, but constructed. It emerges from the friction of negotiation between equals, not from the passive acceptance of rules from on high. True moral judgment—an understanding of why something is right or wrong—must be actively built among equals free to consider different positions.

4. Education’s Goal Is to Create Innovators, Not Conformists

Piaget was a passionate advocate for education, but his vision was a far cry from the rote memorization that characterized many schools. He saw learning as an active process of discovery. For him, knowledge isn’t something that can be poured into a child’s head; it must be constructed by the child through direct experience. This philosophy is captured perfectly in one of his most famous statements:

“Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society … but for me and no one else, education means making creators… You have to make inventors, innovators—not conformists”

This perspective challenges traditional educational models that prioritize compliance and getting the “right” answer. Instead, Piaget argued that the goal of education should be to nurture the natural curiosity and creativity inherent in every child, empowering them to become the innovators of the future.

Conclusion: A Complicated Genius Who Taught Us to Listen to Children

Jean Piaget’s work fundamentally changed how we view the minds of children. He revealed a complex and often alien cognitive landscape, proving that a child is not merely a miniature adult. But his legacy as the founder of developmental psychology is immense. While modern studies have shown that infants understand concepts like object permanence far earlier than he theorized, it was Piaget who first taught us that the key wasn’t if children had the right answer, but how they built their world.

Piaget’s work forces us to ask a difficult question: Are our schools and homes designed to foster creators, or do they inadvertently reward conformity? If children are innovators by nature, how must we transform their environments to protect, rather than extinguish, that spark?

Jean Piaget: A Synthesis of Life, Theory, and Legacy

Executive Summary

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was a seminal Swiss psychologist whose work fundamentally reshaped the fields of developmental psychology and education. His primary contribution is the theory of cognitive development, a comprehensive framework explaining how children actively construct knowledge and understanding of the world. This theory is a cornerstone of his broader intellectual project, genetic epistemology, which seeks to explain the origins and development of knowledge itself by studying children.

Piaget’s work is founded on the constructivist principle that children are not passive recipients of information but are active scientists who build their cognitive structures, or schemata, through interaction with their environment. This process occurs via two primary mechanisms: assimilation, where new experiences are integrated into existing schemata, and accommodation, where schemata are modified or created to incorporate new information.

The theory’s most famous element is its four-stage model of cognitive development:

1. Sensorimotor Stage (Birth–2 years): Infants learn through sensory experiences and physical actions.
2. Preoperational Stage (2–7 years): Children begin to use language and symbols but lack logical reasoning.
3. Concrete Operational Stage (7–11 years): Children develop logical thought but are limited to concrete, physical objects.
4. Formal Operational Stage (11+ years): Adolescents and adults develop the capacity for abstract thought and hypothetical reasoning.

Piaget’s influence is vast, extending to education, where he inspired learner-centered and constructivist pedagogies, as well as to morality, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. Despite his profound impact, his work has faced significant criticism, particularly regarding his research methods—which often involved small, non-random samples like his own children—and for underestimating the cognitive abilities of infants while overestimating those of adolescents. Nonetheless, his legacy as the founder of modern developmental psychology remains secure, with his theories continuing to serve as a crucial foundation for subsequent research.

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I. Biographical and Career Trajectory

Jean Piaget’s intellectual journey was marked by a progression from natural history to philosophy and ultimately to a pioneering psychological framework. His career can be understood through distinct phases of research that built upon one another to form his comprehensive theory.

Early Life and Foundational Experiences

Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Piaget was a precocious child with an early aptitude for the natural sciences, publishing articles on mollusks by age 15. Two key experiences profoundly shaped his later work:

1. False Memory: As a child, Piaget formed a vivid memory of an attempted kidnapping that his nanny later confessed to fabricating. This incident sparked his fascination with the construction and nature of memory and reality.
2. Work with Alfred Binet: While assisting in the standardization of Binet’s intelligence tests in Paris, Piaget became intrigued not by the children’s correct answers, but by the consistent patterns of their incorrect answers. He theorized that these systematic errors revealed that young children’s cognitive processes are qualitatively different from those of adults, a realization that became the catalyst for his stage theory.

Key Appointments and Institutions

• Rousseau Institute (Geneva): In 1921, Piaget became the director of research, marking the beginning of his formal career in psychology.
• International Bureau of Education (IBE): Appointed Director in 1929, he held the post until 1968. Here, he championed his educational credo, stating in 1934 that “only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual.”
• International Center for Genetic Epistemology: Piaget founded this center in Geneva in 1955 and directed it until his death. The center’s prolific output of collaborative research earned it the moniker “Piaget’s factory.”

Phases of Research

Harry Beilin characterized Piaget’s theoretical program as unfolding in four major phases, with a fifth (“zeroth”) added by Jeremy Burman.

1. The Zeroth Piaget: Before becoming a psychologist, Piaget trained in natural history and philosophy, receiving a doctorate in 1918.
2. Sociological Model of Development: In the 1920s, Piaget investigated children’s minds, proposing a movement from egocentrism to sociocentrism driven by social interaction. He developed the semiclinical interview during this period.
3. Biological Model of Intellectual Development: Piaget conceptualized thinking as an extension of biological adaptation, introducing the core concepts of assimilation and accommodation.
4. Elaboration of the Logical Model of Intellectual Development: This phase produced his famous age-related stage theory, arguing that intelligence develops in a progressive, upward-expanding spiral where ideas from earlier stages are constantly reconstructed.
5. Study of Figurative Thought: In his later work, Piaget explored non-logical areas of intelligence like perception and memory, which he described as irreversible processes, unlike logical operations.

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II. Core Theoretical Framework: Genetic Epistemology

Piaget defined himself as a ‘genetic’ epistemologist, interested in the qualitative development of knowledge. His theory proposes that cognitive development is a process of differentiating biological regulations.

The Developmental Process

Piaget viewed cognitive development not as a simple accumulation of facts but as a dynamic, cyclical process of construction and reconstruction.

• Schema: The foundational building block of intelligence, a schema is a mental framework that organizes concepts and information. Schemata are constantly modified by experience. Piaget identified three types:
  • Behavioural (or sensorimotor) schemata: Organized patterns of behavior for responding to objects.
  • Symbolic schemata: Internal mental symbols like images or words.
  • Operational schemata: Internal mental activities performed on objects of thought.
• Adaptation: The process of adjusting to the world occurs through two complementary functions:
  • Assimilation: Interpreting new experiences in terms of existing schemata. For example, an infant sucking on various new objects is assimilating them into the “sucking” schema.
  • Accommodation: Modifying existing schemata or creating new ones to fit new information. For example, the infant modifies the sucking reflex to accommodate objects of different shapes.
• Equilibration: This is the central force driving intellectual development. It is the process of balancing assimilation and accommodation to resolve cognitive conflict and create a stable understanding. When a child’s existing schemata are insufficient for a new situation, a state of disequilibrium occurs, motivating the child to accommodate and thus reach a new, more sophisticated level of equilibrium.

This dual process allows a child to construct new ways of dealing with the world, establishing a new cognitive stage. Once this new level proves effective, it is generalized, leading to what can appear as a rapid transition between stages.

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III. The Four Stages of Cognitive Development

Piaget proposed that all children progress through four universal and sequential stages of cognitive development. Each stage represents a fundamental shift in how the child understands and interacts with the world.

Stage	Age Range	Key Characteristics & Concepts
1. Sensorimotor	Birth to 2 years	World understood through senses and actions. <br>- Egocentrism: Inability to see the world from another’s perspective.<br>- Object Permanence: The understanding that objects continue to exist even when not perceived (develops towards the end of this stage).<br>- Substages: The stage is divided into six substages, from simple reflexes to the internalization of schemata.
2. Preoperational	2 to 7 years	Begins with language acquisition; thought is symbolic but not logical.<br>- Symbolic Play: Using one object to stand for another (e.g., a box as a table).<br>- Egocentrism: Difficulty taking the viewpoint of others.<br>- Centration: Focusing on only one aspect of a situation at a time.<br>- Irreversibility: Inability to mentally reverse a sequence of events.<br>- Substages: Symbolic Function and Intuitive Thought.
3. Concrete Operational	7 to 11 years	Development of logical and organized thought, but only for concrete objects.<br>- Conservation: Understanding that quantity remains the same despite changes in appearance.<br>- Reversibility: The ability to mentally reverse actions.<br>- Decentration: The ability to consider multiple aspects of a situation simultaneously.<br>- Classification Skills: Drastic improvement in sorting objects into categories.
4. Formal Operational	11 years onward	Development of abstract and hypothetical reasoning.<br>- Abstract Thought: Can think about abstract concepts like justice and morality.<br>- Metacognition: The ability to think about one’s own thinking.<br>- Hypothetical-Deductive Reasoning: Can systematically test hypotheses and consider multiple potential solutions to a problem.

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IV. Research Methodology

Piaget’s methods were revolutionary for his time. Dissatisfied with traditional data collection, he sought a more nuanced approach to uncover the reasoning behind children’s answers.

• Shift from Psychometrics: Piaget initially worked with standardized psychometric tests but found them too rigid to reveal a child’s deepest thoughts. He argued they could not distinguish between a child’s genuine belief and pretense.
• The Clinical Method: To overcome these limitations, Piaget developed the clinical method. This involved a flexible interview process where the researcher would question a child, carefully observe their responses, and then follow up with tailored questions to probe their reasoning. The goal was to understand how the child arrived at a conclusion.
• Combination of Methods: Ultimately, Piaget’s research combined naturalistic observation (especially of his own three children), clinical interviewing, and psychometrics to create a richer, more empirically grounded picture of child development.

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V. Influence and Legacy

Piaget is the most-cited psychologist of the 20th century after B. F. Skinner, and his influence extends across numerous domains.

• Developmental Psychology: He is widely considered the founder of the field. Although many of his specific findings have been challenged and the strict stage model is no longer accepted by mainstream psychologists, his work created the path for subsequent researchers. Modern developmental psychology is often described as post-Piagetian or neo-Piagetian.
• Education: His theories inspired a shift towards more learner-centered and constructivist educational practices. Key implications for educators include:
  • Viewing students as active builders of knowledge.
  • The concept of readiness, suggesting children should not be taught concepts until they have reached the appropriate developmental stage.
  • The importance of hands-on, experience-based learning.
  • In a conversation, he famously stated: “education means making creators… You have to make inventors, innovators—not conformists.”
• Morality: In The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), Piaget proposed the radical idea that morality develops from peer interaction, which is based on equality and reciprocity, rather than from the top-down transmission of rules from authority figures like parents. This work was highly influential on later theorists like Lawrence Kohlberg.
• Other Fields:
  • Artificial Intelligence: His work influenced pioneers like Seymour Papert, who developed the Logo programming language, and Alan Kay, whose Dynabook concept was a precursor to the modern graphical user interface (GUI).
  • Philosophy: Thinkers like Jürgen Habermas and Thomas Kuhn credited Piaget with influencing their work on communicative action and paradigm shifts, respectively.
  • Historical Studies, Primatology, and Evolution: His models have been used to analyze historical changes in thought, assess the cognitive abilities of primates, and model the emergence of human intelligence.

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VI. Major Criticisms

Despite its monumental influence, Piaget’s work has been subject to extensive criticism from both methodological and theoretical standpoints.

Methodological Criticisms

• Sample Size and Bias: Many of Piaget’s studies relied on very small, non-randomly selected samples. His influential work The Origins of Intelligence in Children was based solely on observations of his own three children, making generalizations problematic.
• Lack of Standardization: Piaget did not follow a set script in his clinical interviews, meaning experimental conditions varied between participants.
• Data Collection and Reliability: His data consisted of handwritten notes that he analyzed himself, lacking the modern standards of multiple coders and inter-rater reliability.
• Replication Issues: Scientists attempting to replicate his experiments have found that minor changes to his procedures can lead to significantly different results, challenging his theoretical interpretations.

Theoretical Criticisms

• Underestimation of Children’s Abilities: Subsequent research has shown that Piaget underestimated the capabilities of infants and young children.
  • Babies understand abstract numbers and object permanence far earlier than he proposed.
  • Children as young as 18 months can understand that others have desires different from their own, contradicting Piaget’s view of profound egocentrism.
• Overestimation of Adolescent Abilities: He may have overestimated the cognitive abilities of adolescents, as many adults do not consistently demonstrate formal operational thought.
• The Role of Culture: Critics like Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky argued that Piaget neglected the crucial role of cultural background and social interaction in development. Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development challenged Piaget’s view of development as an individualistic process unfolding in universal succession.
• Neo-Piagetian Theories: These alternative theories argue that cognitive development is better explained by underlying mechanisms of information processing, such as working memory and processing speed, rather than broad, logical stages.

Study Guide: The Theories and Influence of Jean Piaget

Short-Answer Quiz

This quiz is designed to assess your understanding of the core concepts, biographical details, and theoretical frameworks associated with the work of Jean Piaget. Please answer each question in two to three complete sentences.

Questions

1. What did Piaget observe while marking Alfred Binet’s intelligence tests that became a catalyst for his own developmental theory?
2. Describe the two fundamental processes of adaptation that form the basis of Piaget’s biological model of intellectual development.
3. What is “genetic epistemology,” and how did Piaget propose to study its central questions?
4. Explain the concept of “egocentrism” and identify the primary developmental stages in which it is a prominent feature.
5. Define “object permanence” and state during which developmental stage children begin to acquire this understanding.
6. How did Piaget’s “clinical method” of research represent a shift away from the psychometric tests he had previously used?
7. In his theory of moral development, why did Piaget believe that interactions with peers were more conducive to moral growth than interactions with adults?
8. Define “schema” according to Piaget and briefly explain its role in cognitive development.
9. Summarize one of the major methodological criticisms that has been directed at Piaget’s research.
10. According to Piaget’s theory, what is the concept of “readiness” and how does it apply to education?

Answer Key

1. While marking Binet’s intelligence tests, Piaget noticed that young children consistently made the same types of mistakes that older children and adults did not. He became less interested in the fact that the answers were wrong and more fascinated by the consistent patterns, which led him to theorize that children’s cognitive processes are inherently different from those of adults.
2. The two processes are assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation occurs when a child responds to a new event in a way consistent with an existing schema, such as an infant sucking on all objects. Accommodation involves modifying an existing schema or forming a new one to deal with a new object or event, such as an infant adjusting their sucking reflex for different objects.
3. Genetic epistemology is a field Piaget created that seeks to explain knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, based on its history, sociogenesis, and psychological origins. He believed he could answer major epistemological questions by studying the development of thought and action in children.
4. Egocentrism is the inability to perceive the world from another person’s viewpoint. It is a key characteristic of the sensorimotor stage, where children are extremely egocentric, and the preoperational stage, where a child has difficulty seeing the viewpoint of others.
5. Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen. Children begin to develop this crucial concept in the later months of the sensorimotor stage, specifically during the “coordination of secondary circular reactions” substage (from eight to twelve months old).
6. Piaget found that psychometric tests were too limited to access a child’s deepest thoughts. He developed the clinical method, which involved more flexible questioning and careful examination of a child’s responses, to better observe how the child reasoned and to understand their perception of the world.
7. Piaget proposed that peer relationships are cooperative and symmetrical, allowing for authentic intellectual exchange where children can consider different viewpoints and develop concepts like equality and justice. In contrast, relationships with adults are often based on constraint and social transmission, where the child passively acquires knowledge from a dominant authority figure.
8. A schema is a mental framework or a structured cluster of concepts that children create as they interact with their physical and social environments. Schemata are the essential building blocks of conceptual development and are constantly revised and elaborated upon through experiences.
9. A significant methodological criticism is that Piaget’s research often relied on very small, non-randomly selected samples, most famously his study of his own three children. This makes it difficult to generalize his findings to a wider population and has led to challenges when other scientists have tried to replicate his experiments.
10. The concept of readiness suggests that children should not be taught certain concepts until they have reached the appropriate stage of cognitive development. For example, a child in the preoperational stage who engages in “irreversible” thought is not considered ready to comprehend that a transformed item can be returned to its original state.

Essay Questions

1. Trace the evolution of Jean Piaget’s career through the four theoretical research phases described by Harry Beilin: the sociological model, the biological model, the logical model, and the study of figurative thought. How did his focus and theoretical frameworks shift over time?
2. Discuss the lasting influence of Piaget’s theories on the field of education. Explain the principles of a “learner-centered” and “constructivist-based” classroom, and provide examples of concepts like reversibility and decentration in an educational context.
3. Analyze the major criticisms leveled against Piaget’s work. Address both the methodological shortcomings of his research and the theoretical challenges posed by figures like Lev Vygotsky and modern cognitive science.
4. Explain the developmental process in Piaget’s theory, detailing the cyclical relationship between action, empirical abstraction, reflecting abstraction, and the formation of new cognitive stages. Use the concept of “equilibration” through assimilation and accommodation to support your explanation.
5. How did Piaget’s personal experiences, from his early interest in mollusks to the false memory of his own kidnapping, shape his approach to psychology and his interest in epistemology?

Glossary of Key Terms

Term	Definition
Accommodation	The process where a child either modifies an existing schema or forms an entirely new schema to deal with a new object or event.
Assimilation	The process where a child responds to a new event in a way that is consistent with an existing schema.
Behavioural Schemata	Organized patterns of behaviour that are used to represent and respond to objects and experiences.
Clinical Method	A research approach developed by Piaget that included questioning a child and carefully examining their responses to observe how the child reasoned, moving beyond standardized psychometric tests.
Concrete Operational Stage	The third stage of cognitive development (ages 7 to 11), where children can think logically about concrete events, understand reversibility and conservation, and are no longer egocentric. Their thinking is limited to what they can physically manipulate.
Constructivism	A theory of knowing, pioneered by Piaget, which posits that individuals actively construct their own understanding and knowledge through experiences and interactions with the environment.
Decentration	The ability to concentrate on multiple components of a problematic task at a time. This skill is characteristic of the concrete operational stage.
Egocentrism	The inability to perceive the world from others’ viewpoints. It is a defining feature of the sensorimotor and preoperational stages.
Empirical Abstraction	The process by which a child identifies the properties of objects by observing how different kinds of actions affect them.
Equilibration	The process of balancing new knowledge with previous understanding. Piaget described it as the central problem of intellectual development, managed through assimilation and accommodation.
Figurative Thought	Areas of intelligence, such as perception and memory, that are not entirely logical or reversible. Piaget studied this in the fourth phase of his career.
Formal Operational Stage	The final stage of cognitive development (age 11 and onward), characterized by the development of abstract thought, logical thinking without concrete objects, and metacognition.
Genetic Epistemology	A field created by Piaget that attempts to explain knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, based on its history, sociogenesis, and the psychological origins of the concepts and operations upon which it is based.
Irreversibility	A characteristic of preoperational thought where a child cannot comprehend that an item that has been transformed in some way may be returned to its original state.
Metacognition	The ability to think about one’s own thinking processes. This develops during the formal operational stage.
Morphisms	Comparisons that do not transform objects but extract common forms or analogies between them. Piaget studied these as part of his later work on figurative thought.
Object Permanence	The understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or otherwise sensed. This concept begins to develop during the sensorimotor stage.
Operational Schemata	Internal mental activity that one performs on objects of thought.
Preoperational Stage	The second stage of cognitive development (ages 2 to 7), where a child begins to use language and symbols but does not yet understand concrete logic or the ability to mentally manipulate information. It includes the symbolic function and intuitive thought substages.
Readiness	The concept that certain information or concepts should only be taught when a child has reached the appropriate stage of cognitive development necessary to comprehend them.
Reflecting Abstraction	The process where a child, through repeated actions, is able to differentiate and integrate the elements and effects of their own actions.
Reversibility	The ability to recognize that numbers or objects can be changed and returned to their original condition. This logical capability is developed in the concrete operational stage.
Schema (Schemata)	A mental framework or structured cluster of concepts created as children interact with their environment. Schemata are constantly being modified by ongoing experiences through assimilation and accommodation.
Sensorimotor Stage	The first stage of cognitive development (birth to age 2), where infants experience the world through movement and senses. It is divided into six substages and is characterized by extreme egocentrism.
Sociocentrism	The developmental progression from egocentrism, where a child can understand and consider social perspectives beyond their own.
Symbolic Schemata	Internal mental symbols (such as images or verbal codes) that one uses to represent aspects of experience.