Stage (age range) | Stage Description |
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Sensorimotor (birth to 2 years) | Children use senses and motor abilities to learn about the world and develop object permanence. |
Preoperational (2 to 6 years) | Children use symbolic thinking to understand the world but remain egocentric and lack the mental operations that allow logical thinking. |
Concrete operational (6 to 12 years) | Children gain cognitive operations for logical thinking about concrete events, understand conservation, and perform mathematical operations, but they cannot reason abstractly. |
Formal operational (12 years through adulthood) | Further development of cognitive operations enables adolescents to engage in abstract thinking and hypothetical-deductive reasoning. |