Four stages of cognitive development – sensory motor, pre-operational,…

Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development proposes that children's thinking develops through four universal, sequential stages, each marked by a qualitatively different way of reasoning about the world, appearing in the same fixed order for every child regardless of culture.

This item names the four stages verbatim — sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational — precisely the sequence Piaget proposed to describe how logical and abstract reasoning abilities emerge from infancy through adolescence. This exact four-stage naming and order is unique to Piaget's framework among the psychologists offered.

Cross-checking against the other names offered confirms none of them proposed this specific four-stage sequence:

• Hilgard — known for research on hypnosis and on conditioning/learning theory, not a four-stage model of cognitive development.

• Stott — known for work on children's social and behavioural adjustment, not a stage theory of cognition.

• Hurlock — organized development into broad life periods such as infancy, childhood, and adolescence, rather than this specific four-stage cognitive sequence.

Hence, the four stages — sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational — were identified by Piaget.