| Stage (age range) | Stage Description |
|---|
| 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. |