2 Extended Piaget Theory

Extended Piaget theory on cognitive development
Abstract – Piaget noticed stages in children’s cognitive development. In this paper, it is argued
that the same process continuous in adulthood. The difference is in the domain of the
intelligence. At childhood, we deal with concrete objects. At adolescence, mental
manipulation replaces playing. The next stage covers our heart. We learn to control our
emotions and thus empower our creativity with intelligence. At this stage, one becomes truly
a human who loves even his enemy. But it is argued that humans can develop even further to
include some divine values in their action and intelligence. It is the dawn of submission.
The paper introduces a very simple zig-zag movement between brain’s right hemisphere and
left hemisphere. By this notion, one can explain a lot of cognitive biases apparent in human
thoughts. Humans show difficulties in their cognitive abilities while they have developed new
tenets in the right hemisphere which has not yet corrected by the logical powers of the left
hemisphere.
To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganisation of mental processes

resulting from biological maturation and environmental experience. He believed that children
construct an understanding of the world around them, experience discrepancies between
what they already know and what they discover in their environment, then adjust their ideas
accordingly. One of the most important elements to remember of Piaget's theory is that it
takes the view that creating knowledge and intelligence is an inherently active process.
According to Piaget’s theory, there are both qualitative and quantitative differences between
the thinking of young children versus adolescents.1 However, the fact that there are sharp
stages in Piaget’s theory rather than continuous development was recognised as a weakness
in his theory by Piaget himself.
By cognitive development, we mean that field of study in which human’s development in
terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning,
and other aspects of brain development and cognitive psychology is studied. Therefore, it is
argued that cognitive development or thinking is an active process from the beginning to the
end of life; intelligence is something that grows and develops all the time. In other words,
cognitive development is the emergence of the ability to think and understand. Yet, Piaget
terminates the process of cognitive development at adulthood. In this work, it is argued that
cognitive development is not a development through a series of stages as suggested by
Piaget; and it does not reach its peak at around the age of 18.
In this work, we agree with Piaget that cognition changes with age (e.g., it moves from being
dependent on actions and perception in infancy to an understanding of the more observable
aspects of reality in childhood to capturing the underlying abstract rules and principles in
adolescence). But we have extended it even further. We argue that cognitive development is
a process along the life of humans and we never reach a final stage in our cognitive ability.
The difference in variations of our cognitive abilities can be said to be in the domain or its
type. In other words, cognitive progress occurs concurrently across different domains of
1
https://www.verywell.com/piagets-stages-of-cognitive-development-2795457
knowledge. For example, infants learn that new objects can be grabbed in the same way of
familiar objects, and adults explain the day's headlines or new physical experiments as
evidence for their existing worldview. Philosophers have tried to provide better meanings
based on whatever they know.
It is worth mentioning that the idea suggested here are created based on recent
neuroscientific research particularly on the different works of the right and left hemispheres
of our brain. This work is also influenced by works in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Moreover, the
theory offered here is based on the following three main assumptions:
a) The left hemisphere and right hemisphere of the brain function quite differently.
b) Cognitive development or thinking is an active process from the beginning to the
end of life.
c) Our cognitive process is able to improve its understanding of the outside world.
Although we named this work as extended version of Piaget’s theory, but there are major
differences with what he said. The common points are Piaget’s description of the more
prominent changes in cognition with age (the first three stages of cognitive development).
However, the fourth stage is extended to include the same previous three stages again but in
new periods of abstract reasoning and spiritual beliefs.
What is proposed in this theory is a novel idea of the zig-zag movement of the cognitive
process between right and left brain. It works as follows: With each sensory stimulation to
our mind, the cognitive process starts with the right brain, then the results of the right brain
are sent to the left brain in order to be critically corrected and purified there. The result of
this process in turn are driven back to the right brain. This process continually happens in our
daily life. But as the cognitive power improves, it takes more time to create new perceptions
and ideas. Thus, the stages mentioned by Piaget become apparent due to delay between
works of the (mainly) left brain.
The process is easy to understand but the outcomes may be controversial. We have tried to
give some examples and comparisons to Piaget’s work in this paper so that the above process
gets more familiarised by readers. The life span of human cognitive development is divided in
to three major periods in this work. This can be divided further but for simplicity, we confined
it to 3 areas of Concrete, Abstract, and Spiritual. The Concrete period is in fact the same first
3 stages of Piaget’s theory. The fourth stage is extended and includes all previous substages
but with a difference in its domain. In this period, instead of dealing with actual (concrete)
objects, the mental operations deal with abstracts (operations happen in the head without
being in touch with any object) but abstracts are not developed right away. We can see the
same previous stages of development here as well. The same development stages can be seen
again but in another domain of meaning and spiritual beliefs. So, our understanding of the
meanings of life and its purpose is developed continuously but the same stages of Piaget can
be identified along its development.
How much the right brain differs from the left one?
Since this theory is heavily based on the works of both hemispheres of the brain and the
differences between their functions, we have to have a look at those differences that have
been documented so far. For clarity and simplicity, we have selected and focused only on a
few of those features that matters to this theory in order to make it brief yet meaningful.
However, readers are urged to study the full difference between these two functions.
Iain McGilchrist in his book “The Master and his Emissary” has documented more than 500
differences between the physical and functional differences between two brains. The
following is a selection of them which matters to us. All references are retrieved from the said
book. He starts with a claim that Greek physicians in the third century BC held that the right
hemisphere was specialised for perception and the left hemisphere for understanding1; and
at the end he concludes: I believe the essential difference between the right hemisphere and
the left hemisphere is that the right hemisphere pays attention to the Others, whatever it is
that exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees profound relations... By contrast, the left
hemisphere pays attention to the virtual world that it has created … (it) knows itself.2
 The conscious sense of self is more dependent on the right hemisphere, whereas the
objectified self, and the self as an expression of will, is generally more dependent of
the left hemisphere.3
 Damage to the tight parietal and medial regions may result in confusions of self with
others, damage to the right frontal lobe creates a disturbance of ego boundaries.4
 The left hemisphere is the hemisphere of abstraction5
 The right hemisphere deals preferentially with actually existing things, as they are
encountered in the real world.6
 Perceptual links between words are made primarily by the right hemisphere7
 Francois Lhermitte … described a case which confirmed that the right hemisphere is
more concerned with living individuals than man-made objects… its capacity for
empathy – as well as seeing the whole.8
 The body as such is a right hemisphere concern, whereas body parts are the province
of the left hemisphere.9
 The right hemisphere priorities whatever actually is, and what concerns us.10
 The right hemisphere, with its greater integrative power, is constantly searching for
patterns in things. In fact, its understanding is based on complex pattern recognition.11
1
Ibid page 16, reference 1
2
Ibid page 93
3
Ibid page 87
4
5
Ibid page 50 referring from (Cutting 1997, pp. 185; Kosslyn, 1987; Goldberg, 1990; Hecaen & Albert, 1978)
6
Ibid page 50 referring from (Warrington & Taylor, 1973; Deglin, 1976)
7
Ibid page 51 referring from (Shibhara & Lucero-Wagoner, 2002; see Beeman & Chiarello, 1998; Joanette,
Goulet & Hannequin, 1990)
8
Ibid page 55 reference 172
9
Ibid page 55 reference 177
10
Ibid page 56 referring from (Cutting, 1997, pp 186-8; D.W. Zaidel, 1985, 1987; Drews, 1987; Foldi, 1987; ….
11
Ibid page 47 referring from (E. Zaidel, 1985; Walsh & Darby, 1999)
 The right hemisphere understands from indirect contextual clues, not only from
explicit statement, whereas the left hemisphere will identify by labels rather than
context (e.g. identifies that it must be winter because it is ‘January’, not by looking at
trees)1
 The right hemisphere … is specialized in pragmatics, the art of contextual
understanding of meaning, and in using metaphor.2
 Time is the context that gives meaning to everything in the world… the sense of time
passing lies in the right hemisphere.3 The ability to compare duration in time is clearly
better performed by the right hemisphere.4 And the sense of past or future is severely
impaired in right- hemisphere damage.5
 (depth and) duration belongs to the right hemisphere, while sequencing (‘before’,
‘after’ = ‘above’, ‘below’) belongs to the left.6
 Left hemisphere is concerned with what it knows, where the right hemisphere is
concerned with what it experiences.7
 The right hemisphere’s particular strength is in understanding meaning as a whole and
in context. … “the point of a joke”.8 It is this hemisphere that understands the meaning
from the body language.9
 While syntactical understanding is more impaired in left- hemisphere-damaged
children, actual lexical understanding is worse impaired by right- hemisphere
damage.10
 It is the area around the fusiform gyrus of the right hemisphere that is dominant for
unconscious reading of the facial expressions.11
 Those with left- hemisphere damage are actually better at detecting a lie.12
 The right hemisphere’s version is more global and holistic, … the left hemisphere
identifies single features that would place the object in a certain category in the
abstract.13
 The right hemisphere’s view of the world in general is construed according to what is
of concern to it, not according to objective impersonal categories, and therefore, has
a personal quality.14
 Self-awareness, empathy, identification with others, and more generally inter-
subjective processes, are largely dependent upon … right hemisphere resources.15
1
Ibid page 49 referring from (Blakeslee, 1980; Deglin, 1976)
2
Ibid page 49 referring from (Foldi, 1987; Bottini, Corcoran, Sterzi et al., 1994; Faust & Marshal, 2007)
3
4
5
6
7
Ibid page 78
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Ibid page 54
15
Ibid page 57 referring from (Decety & Chaminade, 2003, p591)
 Memory for emotional language is in the right hemisphere.1
 Some types of reasoning, is dependent of the right hemisphere. More explicit
reasoning is underwritten by the left hemisphere.2
 There is a relation between the pleasurable ‘aha!’ phenomenon of insight and the
right amygdala.3
 The discovery that the contrapuntal music of J S Bach causes a strong right-
hemisphere activation even in trained musicians is fascinating.4
 Because the right hemisphere sees things as they are, they are constantly new for it,
so it has nothing like the databank of information about categories that the left
hemisphere has. It cannot have the certainty of knowledge … it acknowledges the
importance of ambiguity. It therefore, is virtually silent, relatively shifting and
uncertain.5
 Denial is the left- hemisphere specialty… subjects tend to evaluate themselves
optimistically, view pictures more positively, and are more apt to stick their existing
point of view.6
 Moral judgments are not deliberative, but unconscious and intuitive, deeply bound up
with our emotional sensitivity to others.7
 Our sense of justice is underwritten by the right hemisphere, particularly by the right
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.8 … and capacity to see the other’s point of view, and
for empathy in general.
In addition to the above, one can refer interested bodies to the famous works of Gazzaniga
on so called “Split Brain”. Gazzaniga’s works clearly shows that the language belongs to the
left hemisphere and the “unconscious mind” belongs to the right hemisphere. He argues that
our left-brain constructs stories about our lives, thus he calls the left- hemisphere
‘interpreter’.9
In short, what matters to cognitive development are these two different characteristics of
each hemisphere:
Right Brain: Always the starting point. It is in direct connection with the outside world and
creates new perceptions directly from senses. The process here is basically an
Inductive reasoning one. It creates perceptions (generalisations) from senses
(specific). It is the unconscious mind; we do not understand why it has reached those
results but it is immediate. The process is similar to fuzzy logic in AI. It categorises
1
2
Ibid page 65 referring from (Poincare, 1908 (trans. F Maitland))
3
4
Ibid page 75
5
Ibid page 80
6
7
8
9
Gazzaniga 1998
perceptions on their types (broad specifications) and tries to unify as much as
possible its experiences.
Left Brain: Is the world of abstracts. It is disconnected from the outside world but is the realm
of models and theories. It utilises the power of language. Please note that language
and logic are one and the same. The process here is Deductive reasoning and is
similar to Rule Based reasoning in AI. Its job is basically to break down every new or
old perceptions and make it unique with minimum intersection with other concepts.
Moreover, it creates and classifies concepts based on their detailed ingredients.
Our knowledge such as pen, car, white, large, etc. like any other human thought are produced
in both parts of the brain. The right brain creates what it feels but does not analyse it (we call
it perception). It just knows it. A timeless thing. Perceptions hold very personalised views. This
feeling belongs to that person who feels it and only him/her. However, the aim of our
cognitive process is to make the best representation possible to the outside world. The left
brain tries to create models for that truth and then speak about it or logic it. This is the
cognitive development itself. But the process, is a zig-zag movement between right and left
hemispheres of our brain. It always starts from right brain in which we grasp a perception; it
is very much ego based and direct feeling but not necessarily a good representation of the
facts out there. Then our left brain tries to correct this ego based feelings and find an abstract
finding that can be referred to it by everybody. This process is the same all the time.
Although the cognitive development is a continuous process and there are no sharp stages,
nevertheless, like a rainbow, we can say we have seven colours in it. Although the rainbow
has unlimited number of colours and is a continuous spectrum, yet we can find clear colours
within it. The same is true for cognitive development. Although it is a continuous spectrum,
yet we can identify stages or periods along its developments. We can divide this spectrum to
as many areas as we wish. For simplicity, we have divided it into 3 areas only. We call them,
Concrete, Abstract, and Spirituality periods.
Concrete Period: This period covers first three stages of Piaget’s theory. All cognitive activities
at this stage deal with actual (concrete) objects. Things we can see and interact
directly. This can be summarised as the world of children. It seems children are
concerned with playing, but in fact they are learning a process that can be used in
later stages of their life.
Abstract Period: In this period, instead of dealing with actual (concrete) objects, the mental
operations deal with abstracts (operations that happen in the head without being
in touch with any object). This can be summarised as the world of relations
between things, and human values. Not only we consider people at this stage as
adults, we can see humane activities in their thoughts as well as actions. The
experience gained at playing period helps us develop our cognitive tenets in
abstracts. Things that exist in our mind only but have a close (and one by one
relation to) things in the outside world.
Spirituality period: In this period, the cognitive powers develop further to include meaning in
life and spirituality in general. It starts with simple concepts such as causality and
goes to philosophy and it can jump even further by taking the leap of faith. Like a
silkworm, humans can develop another dimension and fly cognitively. This is the
stage where we can say humans can develop divine values.
More details on the above levels are given later. The aim of this paper is to show that we have
the same features observed by Piaget on children, but extended to older ages as well. Some
people might die at old age but remain at childhood level in their cognitive abilities. Some
progress to higher levels. It is very much environment-based activity and is influenced by how
we are taught and act.
How Perceptions are created:

Perceptions are cognitive results of our feelings created in the right brain. Since the whole
activity in the right brain is unconscious to our mind, we do not understand what is happening
there; we just feel it. For example, one does not know why he likes yellow colour but he does.
So far, this part of brain activity has not fully entered in to the realm of digital computing and
what is proposed here is a novel idea to do that. Moreover, creative thinking is produced here
because it is only with inductive reasoning that we can do so. The model of creating
perceptions introduced here allows computers to become really creative, albeit a dangerous
thing to do as well.
In an article in Scientific America we read:
A primal connection exists between our brain and our gut. We often talk about
a “gut feeling” when we meet someone for the first time. We’re told to “trust
our gut instinct” when making a difficult decision or that it’s “gut check time”
when faced with a situation that tests our nerve and determination. This mind-
gut connection is not just metaphorical. Our brain and gut are connected by an
extensive network of neurons and a highway of chemicals and hormones that
constantly provide feedback about how hungry we are, whether or not we’re
experiencing stress, or if we’ve ingested a disease-causing microbe. This
information superhighway is called the brain-gut axis and it provides constant
updates on the state of affairs at your two ends.1
This system of connection between brain and gut is dubbed the “second brain”. You may ask
what this second brain has to do with perception? It is here that the new theory got its
inspiration. We knew that all five sensual organs have direct nerve connections to the brain,
but the digestion link was missing. The fact that digestion creates feelings in our minds, hence
1
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-feelings-the-second-brain-in-our-gastrointestinal-systems-
excerpt/
the word “gut feelings”, and the fact that the right brain is responsible for our perceptions
and feelings, as well as the one being in connection with our senses and hence the outside
world, has given us a new idea. In this proposition, it is argued that we can create perceptions
by making a matrix of values given to each sensual excitation. An example of such a matrix is
given in Fig.1. The columns in this matrix are the different sensual stimulations and the rows
are different perceptions made in our mind. Now if we have 100 different types of
stimulation, then each perception is a vector with 100 elements. Apparently, there are around
100 nerve inputs from our 5 senses to brain and around 30 from gut areas. This makes each
human perception a vector of 130 elements. This is quite big and diverse number of
possibilities, specially if each element can have many values.
appetising / revolting
Complexity of sight
symmetry of vision
colour complexity
hungry / satisfied
smooth / rough
loud / gentle
hot / cold
…..
Sun 77 95 23 11 42 69 78 34
Angel 5 67 89 43 38 21 13 10
House 68 79 45 4 66 59 53 38
Prayer 8 23 48 8 43 4 47 23
Table 43 19 89 14 22 77 79 70
Love 57 88 83 77 38 57 12 14
Injustice 23 13 15 81 69 21 11 26
....
....
Fig.1: Relations between Perceptions and sensual stimulations
In this way, when there is a new sensual stimulation, right brain tries to find the closest match
to existing perceptions in this matrix. If it could not find one, then it can create a new
perception with different values for it. From time to time, it is possible that the whole matrix
be re-evaluated and as a result, we suddenly see things differently (a moment of “aha” event).
How Concepts are produced:

Concepts are logical outcome of our perceptions. The left brain uses models and a database
of relations between individual concepts in order to create a reality to match as much as
possible the facts and truth of the outside world1. Since one such a model is the rule based
programming such as PROLOG, a basic and simple explanation of this program is given below
to give readers an idea of how brain works in this field.
1
By outside world, we mean what is there outside our mind.
Syntax in PROLOG is like this: brother (a,b). It is read “a is brother of b”.
Now similarly, sister (a,b). is read “a is sister of b”.
But note if brother (a,b). is true this does not mean that brother (b,a). is true as well because
from the first fact we understand that “a” is male indeed but “b” can be his sister! The same
is true if sister(a,b). is true this does not mean that sister (b,a). is true as well because “a” is
female indeed but “b” can be her brother! Only if we had another fact such as:
same_gender (a,b). (a has the same gender as b)
Then we will have: brother (a,b) :- brother (b,a)
(Which is read: If “a” is brother of “b”, then “b” is brother of “a”)
Now we try to write the rule for “uncle”. We should have these rules first:
father (a,b). : a is father of b
mother (a,b). : a is mother of b
Then “a” is uncle of “b” will be:
Uncle (a,b) :- or((father(x,b), brother(a,x)), (mother(x,b), brother(a,x)))
The above statement is read as this: “a” is uncle of “b” if (“x” is father of “b” and “a” is brother
of “x”) or (“x” is mother of “b” and “a” is brother of “x”).
It is pretty complex, isn’t it? Now we can make it even shorter and more complex by writing
it as:
Uncle (a,b) :- and( or (father(x,b), mother(x,b)), brother(a,x))
Can you even read it properly? In proper English, we should read the above statement as:
“a” is uncle of “b” if (there is an “x” which is father of “b” or
mother of “b”) and (“a” is brother of this “x”).
Note in the above statement, the gender of “x” can be either male or female. It works in both
cases of uncle being brother of father(x) or brother of mother(x). It may sound so difficult to
comprehend it but that is exactly what our left brain does it all the time. So, bravo to our
mind! As you can see, in order to comprehend a new concept such as “uncle”, not only you
need to know what is the relations between people in “brother”, “father” and “mother”; you
need to know what is “gender”, “and”, & “or” means as well.
The engine for rule based systems is as easy as the concept matrix. In both cases, mind has to
look at a table (matrix) but in the rule based case, it has to refer to it much more times while
it needs to go through the matrix only once in the case of perceptions. That is why thinking
takes time while feeling is immediate.
Now that we had a pretty good idea of what is a perception and what is a concept, it is time
to have a look at another novel idea which is the core principle of the extended Piaget theory.
We call it zig-zag movement of the cognition development.
Zig-Zag Development Theory:
To Piaget, assimilation meant integrating external elements into structures of lives or
environments. Assimilation is how humans perceive and adapt to new information.
Accommodation is the process of taking new information. Piaget believed that the human
brain has been programmed through evolution to bring an equilibrium between these two
features. Therefore, neither assimilation nor accommodation cannot exist without the other.
For instance, to recognize (assimilate) an apple as an apple, one must first focus
(accommodate) on the contour of this object.1
In the extended theory, we talk of perceptions and concepts instead. The big picture, is
covered by perceptions and details are looked after in the concepts. The vision
(understanding) in perception is real but vague. Although the power of creativity and
progressive reorganisation of mental process comes from the right brain but it has a big
disadvantage: It can notoriously go wrong. The left brain’s job is to control these irrational
results of the right brain. Hence, we have a zig-zag movement between imperfection results
of the right brain and controlled but non-progressive result of the left brain.
It is worth mentioning that staying in the left brain only can have disastrous results as well.
During the last century, our best scientists could not have come with a satisfactory
explanation of the quantum physics. This is because our thinking mechanism is stuck in the
left brain. Nobody dares to question established ideas such as relativity theory of Einstein.
Nobody dares to drop the notion of cause and effect. Nobody considers the role of “free will”
in physics and so on. We need to break the deadlock we have in our pure rational thinking by
lateral thinking. So, brain does a perfect job by moving between two hemispheres. Every time
there is a delay in moving to the other part, we have some sort of cognitive difficulties such
as irrational thinking or getting stuck in too much rational thinking.
Concrete Stage (Period)

For this stage, we only review the theory of Piaget without any modification. The stages in
Piaget’s theory are: Object Permanence, Pre- Operational, Concrete Operational, and Formal
operational.
Object Permanence
The concept of object permanence plays a significant role in the theory of cognitive
development of Jean Piaget. In the sensorimotor stage of development, a period that lasts
from birth to about age two, Piaget suggested that children understand the world through
their motor abilities such as touch, vision, taste, and movement.
1
"Block, Jack" "Assimilation, Accommodation, and the Dynamics of Personality Development". Retrieved from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive_development#cite _note-17
During early infancy, babies are extremely egocentric. They have no concept that the world
exists separate from their point of view and experience. To understand that objects continue
to exist even when they are unseen, infants must first develop a mental representation of the
object.
Piaget referred to these mental images as schemas. A schema is a category of knowledge
about something in the world. For example, an infant might have a schema for food, which
during early infancy will be either a bottle or breast.
1. Reflexes - During the earliest part of the sensorimotor stage (birth to one month), reflexes
are the primary way that infants understand and explore the world. According to Piaget,
reflexive responses are how the infant interacts with its environment.
2. Development of New Schemas - Next, in ages between one to four months, primary circular
reactions lead to the formations of new schemas. A baby might accidentally suck on his thumb
and realises that it is enjoyable. He will then repeat the action because he finds it pleasurable.
3. Intentional Actions - Around the ages of four to eight months, infants begin paying much
more attention to the world around them. They will even perform actions to create a
response. Piaget referred to these as secondary circular reactions (habits).
4. Greater Exploration - Between eight and twelve months, intentional actions become much
more evident. Babies will shake toys to produce sounds and their responses to the
environment become more cohesive and coordinated. At this stage, left brain is in action and
the notion of immediate gives way to notion of creation: If you do not see something useful,
you can create one. If a toy is silently dead, you can move it and it becomes live, creates
interesting sound and so on. It is the dawn of logic.
5. Trial-and-Error - Tertiary circular reactions appear during the fifth stage (12-18 Months).
These involve trial-and-error, and infants might start performing actions to gain attention
from others. At this stage, we are back to the right brain. It starts a process of actions without
an underlay of ideas or theories. It is similar to brainstorming of the left brain but it is carried
out in action rather than by thought experiments.
6. Object Permanence Emerges - Piaget believed that representational thought begins to
emerge between 18 and 24 months. At this point, children become able to form mental
representations of objects. Because they can symbolically imagine things that cannot be seen,
they are now able to understand object permanence.
Pre-operational stage
The preoperational stage occurs roughly between the ages two and seven. Language
development is one of the hallmarks of this period. Piaget noted that children in this stage do
not yet understand concrete logic, cannot mentally manipulate information, and are unable
to take the point of view of other people, which he termed egocentrism.
During the preoperational stage, children also become increasingly adept at using symbols,
as evidenced by the increase in playing and pretending. For example, a child is able to use an
object to represent something else, such as pretending a broom to be a horse. Role playing
also becomes important during the preoperational stage. Children often play the roles of
"mommy", "daddy", "doctor", and many other characters. It is interesting to note that much
of Piaget's focus at this stage of development is focused on what children could not yet do.
1. Symbolic function substage
Although adults do not think like children but there are times that they more or less think
childish. Therefore, it is vitally important to study these shortfalls in children’s thoughts and
try to find similar occasions in our adulthood ones. According to Piaget, children with two to
four years of age can think in images and symbols. Children's play becomes more social and
it is almost full of pre-causal thinking. They believe in animism, artificalism, and transductive
reasoning. Let us consider the above points one by one.
a) Animism is the belief that inanimate objects are capable of actions and have lifelike
qualities.
b) Artificialism refers to the belief that environmental characteristics can be attributed

to human actions or interventions. For example, a child might say that it is windy
outside because someone is blowing very hard, or the clouds are white because
someone painted them that colour.
c) Transductive reasoning is when a child fails to understand the true relationships

between cause and effect. Transductive reasoning happens when we infer from a
specific to a specific. For example, if in a party, a dog barks and at the same time a
balloon gets popped, a child might think the balloon popped because the dog barked!
2. Intuitive thought substage

At ages of 4 to 7, children tend to become very curious and ask many questions, beginning
the use of primitive reasoning (because the process is in the left brain). There is an emergence
in the interest of reasoning and wanting to know why things are the way they are. Children at
this stage are unaware of conservation and exhibit centration. Centration is the act of focusing
all attention on one characteristic or dimension of a situation, whilst disregarding all others.
Conservation is the awareness that altering a substance's appearance does not change its
basic properties. Apart from the above, there are three more cognitive difficulties at this age
class. These are Irreversibility, Class inclusion, and Transitive inference.
a) Irreversibility - refers to when children are unable to mentally reverse a sequence of
events.
b) Class inclusion - refers to a kind of conceptual thinking that children in the
preoperational stage cannot yet grasp. This is due to children's inability to focus on
two aspects of a situation at once. For example, if we show a picture to these aged
children in which there are 3 cats and 5 dogs and ask them: "Are there more dogs or
animals?" The answer will likely be dogs even though the child knows the meaning of
animal as well.
c) Transitive inference - is using previous knowledge to determine the missing piece,
using basic logic. Children in the preoperational stage lack this logic. An example of
transitive inference would be when a child is presented with the information "A" is
greater than "B" and "B" is greater than "C". This child may have difficulty here
understanding that "A" is also greater than "C".
d) Egocentrism - Egocentrism occurs when a child is unable to distinguish between their

own perspective and that of another person. Children tend to stick to their own
viewpoint. For example, a child thinks "I like Sesame Street, so Daddy must
like Sesame Street, too". Their structuring of a cause and effect relationships is not
perfect.
One of the famous techniques to demonstrate egocentrism involved using a three-

dimensional display of a mountain scene. Often referred to as the "Three Mountain
Task". Children are asked to choose a picture that showed the scene they had
observed. Most children are able to do this with little difficulty. Next, children are
asked to select a picture showing what someone else would have observed when
looking at the mountain from a different viewpoint. Invariably, children almost always
choose the scene showing their own view of the mountain scene. According to Piaget,
children experience this difficulty because they are unable to take on another person's
perspective.
Conservation - Another well-known experiment involves demonstrating a child's (lack

of) understanding of conservation. In one conservation experiment, equal amounts of
liquid are poured into two identical containers. The liquid in one container is then
poured into a different shaped cup, such as a tall and thin cup or a short and wide cup.
Children are then asked which cup holds the most liquid. Despite seeing that the liquid
amounts were equal, children almost always choose the cup that appears fuller.
Piaget conducted a number of similar experiments on the conservation of number,

length, mass, weight, volume, and quantity. He found that few children showed any
understanding of conservation prior to the age of five.
Concrete operational stage

This is the third stage in Piaget's theory of cognitive development. This stage spans the time
of middle childhood and is characterised by the development of logical thought. While kids at
this age become more logical about concrete and specific things, they still struggle with
abstract ideas.
The concrete operational stage begins around age seven and continues until approximately
age eleven. During this time, children gain a better understanding of mental operations.
Children begin thinking logically about concrete events, but have difficulty understanding
abstract or hypothetical concepts. However, Children at this stage are able to incorporate
Inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning involves drawing inferences from observations in
order to make a generalization. In contrast, children struggle with deductive reasoning. The
thought and morality of the child is completely self-focused. Adolescents also are changing
cognitively by the way that they think about social matters.
Another key development at this stage is the understanding that when something changes in
shape or appearance it is still the same, a concept known as conservation. Kids are able to
concentrate on many aspects of a situation at the same time, which plays a critical role in the
understanding of conservation. Kids at this stage understand that if you break a candy bar up
into smaller pieces it is still the same amount at when the candy was whole.
The concrete operational stage is also marked by disappearance of egocentrism. While
children in the preceding stage of development (the preoperational stage) struggle to take
the perspective of others, kids in the concrete stage are able to think about things the way
that others see them. In Piaget's Three-Mountain Task, for example, children in the concrete
operational stage can describe how a mountain scene would look to an observer seated
opposite them.
Formal operational stage
According to Piaget, at this point in development, thinking becomes much more sophisticated
and advanced. Kids can think about abstract and theoretical concepts and use logic to come
up with creative solutions to problems. The formal operational stage begins at
approximately age twelve and lasts into adulthood. During this time, people develop the
ability to think about abstract concepts.
Skills such as logical thought, deductive reasoning, and systematic planning also emerge
during this stage. In earlier stages, children used trial-and-error to solve problems. During the
formal operational stage, the ability to systematically solve a problem in a logical and
methodical way emerges. Children at the formal operational stage of cognitive development
are often able to plan quickly an organized approach to solving a problem.
The new theory at hand does not consider this stage as another one in comparison to three
previous stages. Rather, it is argued that this stage is the beginning of the new period. A period
in which the whole three previous stages are repeated again. The difference is the emergence
of Abstract thought. Hence the name extended Piaget theory. Adolescents no more play with
concrete (actual) bodies. At this stage, they experiment mentally using thought experiments,
what-if scenarios, conjectures, etc. For example, children at this stage can answer questions
such as: 'if you can imagine something made up of two quantities, and the whole thing
remains the same when one quantity is increased, what happens to the second quantity?'
This type of reasoning can be done without thinking about actual objects." But before we talk
about examples of these new periods, let us see why we consider the new stages to be
repetitive of the previous ones by considering what are in common and what are new in these
new periods that we called Abstract and Spirituality.
What is Reality?
Reality, Piaget noted is a dynamic system of continuous change and, as such, is defined in
reference to the two conditions that define dynamic systems. He further argued that if
human intelligence is to be adaptive, it must have functions to represent both the
transformational and the static aspects of reality. He named them Operative and Figurative
intelligence respectively.1 He proposed that operative intelligence is responsible for the
representation and manipulation of the dynamic or transformational aspects of reality, and
that figurative intelligence is responsible for the representation of the static aspects of reality.
However, we preferred to hold the more commonly used words of static and dynamic instead.
Statics are features that are in common along the cognitive development at each stage. It
further supports our idea that the same features mentioned in Piaget’s theory are available
at later stages too. Dynamics are those features that develop and improve our cognitive
abilities as age increases. In this section, both static and dynamic features of each stage are
described using the same stages of Piaget’s theory.
Object Permanence
As the child grows older and has more experiences, his or her schemas will multiply and
become much more complex. Through the processes of assimilation and accommodation,
children develop new mental categories, expand their existing categories, and even
completely change their current schemas. Generally, infants gain knowledge of the world
from the physical actions they perform within it. We argue that adults (or those who are more
than two years old for that matter), gain knowledge of the world from experiences they have
from the world we live in. Such experiences start with physical actions, but gradually includes
other forms of experiences such as social, educational, intellectual, and eventually we can
mention the spiritual experiences. Please note how zig-zag movement is apparent even
though Piaget was not aware of the differences between these two tenets.
1. Reflexes – We all enjoy many experiences without a need to think about them. Things like
bungee jumping, car racing, fun fairs; and in more developed form we enjoy doing heroic acts
or volunteering. The static point in all levels is just to enjoy the moment. No thinking but pure
experience. It is the first stage of cognitive development and is a right brain activity.
2. Development of New Schemas – Since this is a left brain activity it is the dawn of building
block for logic or language. The building block of any language system is symbolic thinking.
Concepts are symbols created by our left brain on smallest relations it can define. These
“concepts” get developed as we learn and experience more. So, it starts with simple physical
interactions such as grabbing and continues to find new concepts such as being able to change
the environment, find new social values, and go on further to learn highly cognitive concepts
of human values. Please note that sometimes we use tangible concepts in order to define a
non-tangible entity. For example, we say this is easy to digest. It means it is easy to
1
Maréchal, G. (2010). Constructivism. In A. J. Mills, G. Durepos, & E. Wiebe (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Case Study
Research (Vol. 1, pp. 220–225). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Reference. Retrieved from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive_development#cite_note-7
understand. Or it is hard on him. Means he cannot bear it. Sweet talking uses the notion of
taste for understanding a nice talk and so on.
However, there are even concept for things that we will never experience. Things like zero,
infinite, vacuum; or may have seldom experience such as altruism, sacrifice, etc. Perhaps,
such concepts need to be taught in order to understand their meanings. Surely, most of
concepts in the Spirituality period need to have a teacher. This is the role of saints, prophets,
sages, et al.
3. Intentional Actions - At this stage, we are back to the right brain. Humans want to enjoy
themselves by repeating something pleasurable. One can easily claim that music is one such
thing (from cognitive point of view). The static feature in all cognitive levels is the repetitive
pleasurable act. The dynamic feature in this stage is the usefulness of these repetitive acts.
At childhood, we just enjoy the repetitive action even if it does not solve anything. Just to
learn how to repeat these things is good enough. At later stages, one can find some usefulness
in the subjects we use or do repetitively. For example, we can learn something from reading
a novel or watching a film. Or maybe just to have a good time by watching a TV show or
listening to a music can satisfy us as doing something useful. But we might not be doing an
entirely good thing as well such as smoking. Or there may be some bad side effects in wasting
our time listening to music, etc. The important thing is that we can infer that human cognitive
abilities develops even further by doing something better and better. Of course, we need to
be able to correct our harmful habits. This is done at the next stage by contemplating the left
brain.
4. Greater Exploration – This stage, is the beginning of the concept of time, cause and effect,
means and end, and so on. The common (static) thing in this stage is the beginning of the note
that we can do something new i.e. change the world in a way or another. The dynamic part
starts from playing with objects, building something new with them, and then develops to
thought experiments and constructing new ideas, and ends at knowing ourselves better,
specially our role in the universe.
5. Trial-and-Error – Back to right brain, the form of actions changes from curiosity to novelty.
Following previous stage, we try to understand what are the new laws. But we do not know
where to start. So, the best thing is trial and error. It is the job of the right brain which is
concerned with actions and not much theory behind it. What develops at this stage but in
higher levels of understanding is maturity of the laws we seek to understand. At the beginning
it is material facts, then it develops to things that matters to us directly. At Abstract level, this
gives way to finding what social and humane laws are and at the highest level, we just seek
those laws that makes us better than humanity and may leads us to a higher realm of
something that we cannot even explain.
6. Object Permanence Emerges - This is a stage when children realise there is a long-term
benefit beyond immediate goals. It is beginnings of insight, or true creativity. So far, both
sides of the brain simply attended immediate subjects. The static (common) point in this last
stage of object permanence is the fact that we realise and learn how to use a new faculty in
our mind. It is a powerful tool that paves the way for what we want. It is called logic. But logic
as we know it is valid only in the Concrete period. In the Abstract period, more emphasis will
be on deduction and proper use of induction reasoning. However, when we progress even
further, we realise that logic by itself is not enough. It even can be dangerous as well! At the
end of this stage but in Abstract period, we learn to rely on heart and submit to our beliefs.
And in the Spirituality period, we understand the meaning of being and the world around us.
Piaget has divided the pre-operational stage into two substages. Both of them are
developments in the right brain. So, let us consider each one with its substages separately as
follows:
a) Animism - This is an irrational belief. But we like to think that only children or naïve
adults have irrational thinking. Well, that is not true. Irrational thinking comes from
thinking by the right brain only. So, it is with us to death. But we call it differently; we
use terms such as superstition, fantasy, imaginary, etc. You do not need to go far to
see this in adults. Hollywood is full of science fiction and fantasy films to the extent
that we all know if you want to kill a werewolf you need to have a silver bullet! It is a
common knowledge now. It is not any more a superstitious belief. It is a fantasy. We
believe it is the case with children too. It is a stage when we put the left brain aside,
and enjoy the situation. It does not harm us for most of the time. Yes, there have been
instances where children dressed like Superman and jumped out of the window and
eventually lost their lives. We have similar situation for adults too. This fact is
beautifully presented in the story of Don Kishot.
b) Artificialism - In a zig-zag movement, there will be a time when we have results of the
right brain ready to be effective while the left brain has not yet processed it
thoroughly. At these stages, we have irrational thinking. But even so, we may use it
even if we have a fully rational thinking developed to explain it. This is the case
because it is easier to digest this form of representation. For example, we say the Sun
is shining, do we really mean that it is doing it by volition? Or when we say: Water
follows the steepest descent; gravity bends near heavy objects, and so on. In all such
cases, we use this terminology for its ease of understanding.
c) Transductive reasoning – This results from weakness in using appropriate logic. Logic
starts from Induction reasoning. In the Concrete period, children make inductive
inferences prematurely. As a result, a generalisation is made from a single or very few
instances. The same thing happens at later stages. Adolescents call it superstitions or
wishful thinking. In the Spiritual period, simplistic thinking or idolatry.

The static part in this stage, is the lack of appropriate logic because mind is trapped in the
realm of the right brain for relatively long time. By appropriate logic we mean a logic powerful
enough to explain or process properly what we experience or feel by our right brain. A logic
to be comparable to the overall understanding we have. We can see results of some of our
cognitive problems at this stage, but we do not have a developed logic comparable to that
knowledge. Our brain tries to find a meaning for what we believe at this stage. We are looking
for answers, be it material at childhood, or logical at Abstract period or transcendental at
Spiritual period.
a) Irreversibility – It means adolescents cannot appreciate the real cause for some of
things they face. The dynamic feature spans from simple physical causes, and then
goes to social factors, and at the end cannot understand the role of love as a causal
thing.
b) Class inclusion – The static feature is simply difficulty in proper classification mainly
due to lack of knowledge in complete relationship between those things. Like above,
the dynamic feature spans from simple mistakes in physical classification and then
proper division of social classes and ends at lack of understanding the true meaning
of love.
c) Transitive inference – Since the data is limited at this stage, the application of logic
also leads to confusion. This is the common feature in all periods. What changes or
develops along these periods, is type of logic we need to use. We may keep the old
reasoning structure that might not give a correct answer at higher levels of cognition.
d) Egocentrism – Sine we are in the right brain, it is natural that we keep our own point
of view. What changes is the subject. At Concrete period, we deal with physical world
and 3D viewpoints. But at Abstract period, we need to read other’s mind. And at the
Spirituality period, it is a spiritual thing. The story of the elephant by Jalal al-Din Rumi
is a good representation of this problem. As other points in this stage, the dynamic
feature starts from concrete physical aspects of something and develops in to more
sophisticated dimensions of social interactions and finally enters the realm of
unknown. In that period, the whole subject is unknown and of course we will have
difficulty in identifying which aspect or dimension we are missing.
e) Conservation – Being in the right brain, our cognitive ability lacks sufficient details.
Here, the static feature is lack of considering all aspects or dimensions of a subject. At
childhood, this is focusing on one physical aspect such as height, length, volume, etc.
But at adolescent we try to correct others views because we have seen one feature
and the other person has got another feature. That is why we need to have tolerance.
Not only we should respect other’s views, we should start to learn to accommodate
them in our understanding as well.

We are back to left brain and domain of logic. However, logic is not the answer to everything.
Later on in life, we realise that it is not rational to think pure rational. Kierkegaard argued that
we could not allow rationality to make our decisions for us 1. Such people tend to become
extremist and a danger to the society. We need to have the big picture. And this means the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrationality 1
need to mix logic with faith. And it goes even further to adopt our emotions with logic and
make it in line to rational thinking. The end of line is where we feel logical! So, this is the
dynamics of this stage along cognitive development and the static feature is use and
development of both sides of the brain (logic and emotions). This notion gets processed
further until we fully submit ourselves to the unknown and start to accept to take that big
leap of faith.
This is the extended form of Piaget. The reason for the cognitive development to move to the
Abstract period is to make the reality in our mind closer to what is there out in the outside
world. It tries to find, understand and make concepts on causality and other relationships
between tangible objects of the world. We understand that the truth out there does not end
at objects. There are fields, relations, causes and other things that we have to find. And after
finding a lot of information on how people are engaging with each other be it financial, social,
educational, emotional, etc., then we realise that we need to learn something else. There are
things with higher value and better characteristics than these laws or relations. It is the
domain of love and faith. When we enter this realm, we experience things that we could not
understand before. We actually learn something new. It is like turning on a light. Things
become clearer and relations are shown better under this light. It is the dawn of emotional
experience. We called it the period of Spirituality. Hopefully, in the next sections we be able
to show more details on these developments across human life.
Abstract Stage (Period)

The fourth stage in Piaget’s theory is called Formal operational stage. In this stage, our logical
abilities such as proper usage of Induction and better use of Deduction is developed. In the
extended theory which is introduced in this paper, it is argued that the process of inclusion of
logic in our cognitive development runs through the same stages introduced by Piaget for
earlier stages. The zig-zag movement between right and left brain that we explained in the
Concrete Period (the first three stages of Piaget), happens almost exactly again in this period.
However, no age separations have been identified in this work. This needs to be done through
many trials and experiments. Here, we only want to show that such a structure could be
explained in human cognitive development. In the previous section (What is Reality), we
showed the principles of this continuity; and in what follows, we try to give examples and
more explanations of what we mean by these stages.
Object Permanence
Perhaps we should change the name from Object Permanence to Laws Permanence. Because
in the Abstract period, we deal with those unseen relations between objects that we can feel
it but we try to know more about it. Since, we have named these relations as “laws”, we might
have been better to change the title as well. But we kept the same title in order to be able to
compare what happens at this stage with what has happened at our childhood. At this period,
the tangible, concrete objects give way to abstracts, models and ideas. But the stages of
development remain the same. Only the target or domain is changed. This period is a long
one and covers the whole life for some people. But it is expected to be at least 10 years as an
average. In any case, this period could be divided further. But in order to give an idea on the
extended form of Piaget’s theory, we considered the whole Abstract period to be one.
It is important to know that some of these stages occur simultaneously with some of previous
stages. So, by no means, it should be considered that the following stages are after three
stages of Piaget in the Concrete period. For example, the reflex or creation of new schemas
occurs right after the same stage in the previous period. But we have separated it due to the
differences in their functioning. This means that at say the age of 18, we can see signs of
concrete operational stage of the Concrete period, but also shows ability of pre-operational
stage in Abstract subjects, and some reflexes and new schemas of the Spirituality.
1. Reflexes – This is the direct result of our engagement with the outside world. At Abstract
period, it starts with notion of causality. We notice that some movements are caused by
something else. But when we miss it we are baffled. The following are some instances:
When for the first time an adolescent sees a magnet, effect of gravity, a florescent light, etc.
he does not actively look to see why they work that way. Our response is just to accept it.
That is the way it is!
When for the first time an adolescent experiences a lie, a betrayal, a financial collapse, etc.
he just experiences it. At this stage, life goes on until our mind can develop it further and
understand the underline causes or explanations.
Pascal stated: “Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connait point” (“The heart has its
reasons which reason does not know”). Pascal thus asserted a specific rationality of the
"irrational" emotions. This is the beginning of a new type of cognition. An admission that
emotional intelligence1 exists. Emotions have a strong influence on economic behaviour and
decision-making. In one experiment, researchers looked at what emotions manifest the
disposition effect, where individuals sell winning shares and hold losing ones. They found that
elation for winners and regret for losers are necessary emotions that can cause the effect to
occur.2
2. Development of New Schemas – In a village in Africa, an official told me people here do
not distinguish between capital and profit. In a similar situation but in a factory in Uzbekistan,
right after its independence, its manager could not grasp the notion of profit because they
were only producing the goods and sending it to Moscow for marketing. Therefore, he did
not have any experience and hence need to learn the concept of “profit”. Furthermore, I was
told that in the Soviet era, people did not know the meaning of “bankruptcy”. The notion of
concept itself is so simple and easy that we usually overlook it. But in order for our mind to
understand things better, it has to create and learn new concepts that Piaget called schemas.
1
The term Emotional Intelligence is used for NLP science among academics. However, Goleman used it in a
more common term of everyday language. He meant the ability of our emotions to do intelligent tasks. We
prefer to use this meaning.
2
Summers, B., & Duxbury, D. (2012). Decision-dependent emotions and behavioural anomalies. Organizational
Behaviour and Human Decision Processes referring from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_bias
Above examples were just a few of all abstract concepts we have. Some other concepts that
are developed during this period are: gravity, field of energy, tolerance, happiness, supply and
demand, force, theft, mercy, beauty, care, bullying, freedom, friendship, inventions, etc. As
you can see, it is an on-going process.
3. Intentional Actions – Adolescents do repetitive actions that are enjoyable without much
thinking. Things like playing TV games, music, watching TV shows, cinema, give parties,
smoking, voting, etc.
When you hit a donkey with a stick, the donkey knows that it was you who hit it and not the
stick! I do not think we are less than a donkey! It is at this stage that we realise there is
something causing the change in the world. Something that might not be seen or directly felt.
But our conclusions at this stage are naïve. Certainly, being at the early stage of abstract
development and being the result of the right brain, conclusions at this stage are not always
correct. These are the source of our superstition, naïve thinking and irrationality. We describe
all aspects of our lives using small number of rules. For example, we might try to explain
everything using Newton’s laws. Or explain how money can be the source of every aspect of
our life including happiness.
4. Greater Exploration – Our scientific era starts here. By critical thinking, we can manipulate
the world around us. We learn new laws and invent new machinery. We learn how to govern
ourselves and use democracy. From this point of view, we start to become masters of the
universe; if we find the way, we can change the world.
5. Trial-and-Error – Almost all practical scientists do their research in this level of cognitivism.
The term used by contemporary physicist in quantum mechanics is: Shut up and calculate!
Although a lot of progress is made in the previous stage, but we need to learn a lot more
about our universe and ourselves. The easiest way is to start the action without waiting for
underline theories to be made. We try new materials and the effects of different alloys. We
try to accept the gay marriage and see what happens. We try to omit ethics from trade or
include it, and so on.
6. Object Permanence Emerges – This is the end of scientific world. Or better say the classical
physics. All the knowledge necessary to teach high school students are developed in this
stage. These include physics, mathematics, social sciences and humanity. We know the world
around us pretty well. Thus, we can teach the same to others.
Not only our ability to use deduction is perfected at this stage and we learn how to argue and
defend our point of views, we learn to listen and be tolerate, and accommodate other logics
and views.
At this stage, we realise that what we have learned so far, could be wrong. For example, for
some time, we thought sun goes around earth. Then we realise the opposite is correct. Later,
we learned to believe in relativity and say both of them could be correct. We are sure, we
have not reached the right result, but that is the extent of our knowledge at this stage.
Similarly, we believed in Newtonian laws, then Einstein’s relativity came and now we are
struggling with Quantum Physics. This is even worse in our social sciences and humanities. As
Piaget did, most of the notes at this stage is about our cognitive difficulties. These are called
cognitive bias.
a) Animism – Adults are more likely to perceive their computer to act according to its
own intentions when it malfunctions than functions properly.1 When we say “history
repeats itself”, aren’t we giving human like volition power to something non-existent
such as history? Or in physics, we claim that magnets try to find the shortest line in
magnetic fields. Even the notion of Cause and Effect is in fact animism because we
believe some objects cause the change (to other objects) and produce the effect.
Please think about it.
b) Artificialism - B F Skinner noted repetitive effort in pigeons that he termed the partial
reinforcement effect, and this has been used to explain superstitious behaviour in
humans. This effect means that, whenever an individual performs an action expecting
a reinforcement, and none seems forthcoming, it actually creates a sense of
persistence within the individual. This strongly parallels superstitious behaviour in
humans because the individual feels that, by continuing this action, reinforcement will
happen; or that reinforcement has come at certain times in the past as a result of this
action, although not all the time, but this may be one of those times.2
c) Transductive reasoning – Many adolescents contribute luck to some of events
affecting them. In psychology, this effect is known as “cognitive bias”. Individuals
create their own "subjective social reality" from their perception of the input. An
individual's construction of social reality, not the objective input, may dictate their
behaviour in the social world.3 In USA, it is a common practice to cross the fingers in
order to fulfil a wish. You can find many hotels in which floor 13 is missing. Even worse,
in Chinese areas, not only this floor is missing the entire floors from 40 – 49 and every
floor which includes number 4 in it is missing as well! This is because number 4 in Latin
has the same shape as the word “death” in Chinese alphabet.
Boston Red Sox fans, for instance, attributed the failure of their team to win the world
series for 86 years to the curse of the bambino: a curse placed on the team for trading
Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees so that the team owner could fund a Broadway
musical.
a) Irreversibility - Although adults can understand and see results of smoking, yet they
cannot effectively understand that it is caused by it and subsequently give up smoking.
They cannot understand the “real” issue at hand. This aspect of cognitive problem is
1
Waytz, Adam; Morewedge, Carey K.; Epley, Nicholas; Monteleone, George; Gao, Jia-Hong; Cacioppo,
John T. "Making sense by making sentient: Effectance motivation increases anthropomorphism.". Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology. Referring from above.
2
arver, Charles S. & Scheier, Michael (2004). Perspectives on personality. Allyn and Bacon. Referring from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstition
3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias
better apparent in climate issues. There are many politicians who cannot understand
the real issues or the consequences of the danger at hand.
b) Class inclusion – the "conjunction fallacy" introduced by Tversky is a good example of
this problem among adults. Participants were given a description of "Linda" that
suggests Linda might well be a feminist (e.g., she is said to be concerned about
discrimination and social justice issues). They were then asked whether they thought
Linda was more likely to be a "(a) bank teller" or a "(b) bank teller and active in the
feminist movement". A majority chose answer (b). This is logically an error.
Mathematically, answer (b) cannot be more likely than answer (a) because any extra
condition will reduce the chances but participants think opposite.
c) Transitive inference - In Greek superstition, if you sneeze it is believed that somebody
is talking about you. Since you do not know who the person is you may try to figure
out by saying out people's names. If you say a name and you stop sneezing it is
thought that that is the person who is talking about you. It is also said that a clove of
garlic has the ability to ward of the evil eye. Many people keep the clove of garlic in
their clothes or in their pockets. It is customary for Greeks to use Garlic to ward off
evil. Generally, people whose goal is to perform well are more likely to rely on
"supernatural assistance" - lucky items and rituals - than are people whose goal is to
improve their skills and abilities and learn in the same context. In all these case, some
sort of logic is used. But it is not a perfect or critical reasoning.
d) Egocentrism - Research has shown that experiences, ideas, and beliefs are more easily
recalled when they match one's own, causing an egocentric outlook. Michael Ross and
Fiore Sicoly first identified this cognitive bias in their 1979 paper, "Egocentric biases in
availability and attribution".
Research on collaborative group tasks have emphasized that people view their own
contributions differently than they view that of others.
In a 1993 study conducted in Japan, subjects were asked to write down fair or unfair
behaviours that they themselves or others did. When writing about fair behaviour,
they tended to start with the word "I" rather than "others". Likewise, they began
unfair behaviours with "others" rather than "I". This demonstrates that people tend
to attribute successes and positive behaviours to themselves, while placing the burden
of failures and negative behaviours on others.
Another study found that egocentric bias influences perceived fairness. Subjects felt
that overpayment to themselves were morefair than overpayment to others; by
contrast, they felt the underpayment to themselves were less fair than underpayment
to others.1
e) Conservation - But more commonly, egocentrism manifests itself at this stage as
anchoring. Anchoring or focalism is a cognitive bias that describes the common human
tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the "anchor")
when making decisions. During decision making, anchoring occurs when individuals
use an initial piece of information to make subsequent judgments. Once an anchor is
1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egocentric_bias
set, other judgments are made by adjusting away from that anchor, and there is a bias
toward interpreting other information around the anchor. For example, the initial
price offered for a used car sets the standard for the rest of the negotiations, so that
prices lower than the initial price seem more reasonable even if they are still higher
than what the car is really worth.1

This is the last stage in the Abstract period. This stage spans the adolescent life as well as
almost all adulthood. This period is characterised by the development of logical thought in
both forms of inductive and deductive. Our scientific life is covered by this period. However,
although adults at this period become fully logical and think perfectly rational, they still
struggle with the meaning of life and even the causality. They become ready to move to a
new era in which heart is the main player. The logical apparatus become strong enough to
control the wildish heart. Logic starts the march to become the master of emotion. And
emotions get trained to be able to include the long-term benefits as well. Since this period is
more or less covered by the history of science, not much detail is given.
What is important to raise is the development of logic itself. For the last two millennia, or to
be precise, since the dawn of logic when the gang of three2 (Socrates, Plato, and Aristoteles)
taught us how to think, we have dropped the role of emotion in our cognitive thoughts. Well,
it is time to revive it. This is advocated by a leading scientist in the field of thinking: Dr Edward
de Bono. He thinks we should drop the notion of rock Logic as we know it and adopt a new
type of logic that he termed “Water Logic”. In this new type of logic, we can accommodate
others’ views and ideas like water does; we can mix other liquids with it. But the hard (rock)
logic remains firm by itself. You cannot add other rocks to it.
Perhaps the starting point is to drop the notion of causality and stop drawing sharp
boundaries around our schemas or commonly known as “concepts”. We can introduce what
we have learned in quantum physics and look at the building block of intelligence in the
probability form rather than sharply defined things. Words will have interlacing meanings.
Each word can have a probability of meanings in the shape of bell function. In the middle, it
is what we know of its meaning. But in the edge, it has overlapping with other words. More
details are out of scope of this paper. What is important is that we have to work on this type
of logic more seriously.
Spiritual Stage (Period)
1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring
2
A term used by Edward de Bono
After Abstract period, comes the Spiritual one. In this period, our emotional intelligence is
developed through the same 3 stages of Piaget’s theory. Here, we enter the realm of love,
altruism, trust, and submission. The key word in this idea is the ability to train our emotions
and not only bring it under the control of our logic, but train it such that it acts and moves in
this line by its own accord.
In this extended version of Piaget’s theory, we have tried to show that we can accommodate
tolerance in our ideas by focusing on the emotional side and make it in line with (or controlled
by) our logic. It is only then that we have controlled this wild horse and can ride and enjoy it
for our cognitive progress. Again, we have used the same three stages of Piaget’s theory in
order to explain our ability to develop in this field. This period ends at 40 years of age as an
average.
Object Permanence
Again, we might have named it Meaning Permanence. It is at this stage that we realise there
is a purpose to this life. And as the starter, there is a creator for this universe. Now, you can
call it God, Allah, Jesus, Force, Truth, or even the Unified Law of the Universe. Name is just a
tag, but the concept is the same. The notion that there is something rather than us that not
only has created us but also created the world around us, starts and gets developed in
Spirituality period. In the first stage, we realise the permanence of this idea. It is the dawn of
meaning.
1. Reflexes – From time to time, we might experience an event that we call “miracle”.
Christians simply call them “signs”. We do not see these signs all the time. But when we see
them we get excited. The problem is that when it goes out of our cognitive sight, we simply
forget about it. Surely, a higher intelligence body can laugh at us as much as we laugh at
children when they get baffled.
The Philosophy of Sensualism (John Locke, among others) underlined the importance of the
senses as the source of human perception and cognition. Such philosophies, if they stand at
this notion, then they surely belong to this level of cognitivism and can be considered reflexes
of the Spiritual period.
2. Development of New Schemas – After several experiences of strange happenings that we
or people around us have, and we feel them to be true, we start defining such ideas as new
concepts or shcemas. Things like altruism, humbleness, forgiving, mercy, evil, etc. starts to be
developed at this stage. But they get modified and improved in the later sub-stages of Object
Permanence.
3. Intentional Actions – Adolescents suddenly become interested in the idea of who they are;
what is the reason for them to be in this world; what the world is made of or controlled by;
etc. Moreover, they get the sense of duty, responsibility, and vision. They understand things
that they had never before thought of as if they re-discovered themselves. By controlling
some of these aspects and trying to answer some of these questions, they repeat what they
had done at childhood. They play with new ideas as much as they were playing with toys.
Also, one can include our feelings for daily prayers and chanting to be in this level of
cognitivism.
4. Greater Exploration – Our cognitive development at this stage, starts from high level of
ego and ends at almost diminishing it. Children think they are gods. But humans slowly along
the life learn that they cannot do whatever they want. There are laws, rules and forces beyond
our comprehension. Although the process is continuous, but one can say that at each stage,
we start to re-think about ourselves and the extend of our abilities. The notion of ego gives
way to submission to the higher intelligence. At this stage, we start noting that with the help
of God, we can do anything.
5. Trial-and-Error – In the Spirituality period, this stage is when we try to find about Divine
values by ourselves. So, we try to explain religious teachings (scriptures) by our understanding
and not through holy men. Philosophers are born here. Many rational interpretations of
religions take place at this stage of cognitive development. They need further understanding
of the concepts of faith, submission and love.
6. Object Permanence Emerges – The meaning is perfected at this stage. At this stage, not
only we know things about ourselves and the world around us, we have a meaning, a purpose,
and a sense of responsibility toward them. We know that there is a meaning for everything
out there even if we miss them for time to time. Part of that meaning is the notion of creator,
the mission for life, justice, and even the need for a saviour. People at this stage start to
understand what is the meaning of leap of faith and submission to God.
Although a lot of meanings are understood at this stage, we realise that we have not perfected
them. We make a lot of mistakes as follows in our understanding. But we do not have enough
logical, emotional, or even better say transcendental ability to solve them.
a) Animism – Greek philosophers believed all matters are alive. They used terms that are
usually used for live things. Even today, we might find similar notion among
philosophers. Even when humans attribute human like features such as hands, face
and other body parts to God, it is because we believe in some sort of animism.
b) Artificialism – The notion that man is the centre of everything (the core principle of
existentialists) is exactly a manifestation of artificialism. Many modern thinkers tend
to think similar. Moreover, we like to think of Aliens to have the same physical features
as humans do. This feeling belongs to low level of cognition in the Spirituality period.
c) Transductive reasoning – People tend to accept REM dreams as truth or real. Another
example is acceptance of preachers’ arguments as truth. Even if people tend to believe
in the media is a fallacy of this kind of reasoning.
a) Irreversibility – Even adult intelligence in this stage cannot grasp the notion that we
are dying and we will have another form of life. This notion is challenged (cannot be
understood) by a lot of adolescents, even if they are pointed to the fact that we are
born from another form. It is the code in the DNA that can generate a new life in a
different form.
b) Class inclusion – If we ask adults who conquered the world Jesus or Alexander? The
answer is more likely Alexander. The conquering of hearts is not considered as a
conquer. Also, if there is a choice between two notions of time and space. Usually,
space is selected. For example, if we suggest that John is a builder and just started to
work on a pool, and then ask “which problem is in front of John, digging the land or
water leakage?”. The answer is more likely digging the land. While water leakage is
also a problem that John should consider and may face.
c) Transitive inference – An academic write: Our brains seem to fail to grasp reality, as
demonstrated by the fact that a majority of Americans don't "believe" in evolution
(whatever "believing" in a scientific theory means), while a sizable percentage is ready
to accept the existence of an imaginary all-powerful god, as well as of the devil, hell,
and a sleuth of angels.1 This type of reasoning surely lacks an all-inclusive type of logic.
d) Egocentrism – In the Spiritual period, this difficulty appears as the tendency to search
for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions. In addition,
individuals may discredit information that does not support their views. The
confirmation bias is related to the concept of cognitive dissonance. Whereby,
individuals may reduce inconsistency by searching for information which re-confirms
their views (Jermias, 2001). Moreover, there are criticisms against theories of
cognitive biases based on the fact that both sides in a debate often claim each other's
thoughts to be in human nature and the result of cognitive bias, while claiming their
own viewpoint as being the correct way to "overcome" cognitive bias.2
At Spirituality period, we see personal views (subjectivity) to be ripe among politicians.

There, everything is viewed from a short-sighted lens. Consider the meaning of
“terrorism”. You cannot find a global, pan-human meaning for it. Everybody defines it
from his own point of view. Furthermore, even United Nation’s Charter suffers from
the same problem. The notion of human rights is disputed by many cultures and
religions including Islam. Yet, people who wrote it think they have included every view
point.
e) Conservation – This problem is ripe among philosophers. Jalal al-Din Rumi puts the
problem elegantly as a story of elephant. In this narrative, a number of individuals go
inside a dark room where an imported animal is being kept, a creature they have never
encountered before. The individuals are supposed to touch and feel the body of the
animal, and thereby form some kind of image in their minds as to how the beast looks
like. The story brings out a whole range of disagreements among those who have felt
1
Massimo Pigliucci, N. 6, January 2001: "Split-brains, paradigm shifts, and why it is so difficult to be a skeptic",
A monthly e-column, Department of Botany, University of Tennessee
2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias
some part of the creature and, on the basis of this limited experience, feel perfectly
confident to make judgments about the whole.1
An example can be said in adults’ view on aggression. If we ask adults on what age
does aggression starts in humans. Most of them would say aggression starts at
teenage youth. This is not true because everybody has seen and well experienced
aggression of children, specially the elder child against the new-born baby. So, even
adults see only one aspect of the reality as a child sees the water level in the famous
Piaget test, but they focus on something else. A child thinks we are talking about
height and not volume. Perhaps they have not yet grasped the concept of volume.
And here, adults think we are talking about the intensity of aggression and not the
concept of aggression itself.

We reach the final stages of human cognitive development. At this stage, humans become
intelligent enough to trust their feelings. And their feelings are trained enough to have self-
control. Humans not only become truly humans, they exceed it. We become ready to jump
that leap of faith and follow the divine rules. Since this stage is beyond our scope of
understanding, we cannot say much about it. We need to follow those who have grasped it
somehow. These are Sages, Saints, Imams, Prophets, and so on. It is the realm of action,
sacrifice, love, and wisdom. We come out of knowing and become wise.
The other aspect of cognition that gets perfected in this stage is the total demise of
egocentrism. People at this stage, not only see things objectively, and not only they do not
insist on their opinions any more, they do not think of the word “I” as well. In any subject, be
it social, economic, politics, even war, such people think of humanity as a whole and they do
not think of anybody as one single opinion. This is quite a maturation in their cognitive
abilities. In today’s time, we cannot find people who have reached this level of perfection. It
is really a stage where needs praise from every human being.
Conclusion:
As the above work showed, we can explain the human cognitive development in two simple
points:
1. The right brain provides the big picture as well as new ideas, and short-term benefits;
and the left brain prunes it from personal views and finds out what is good for humans
in the long run.
2. The above steps take place in a zig-zag movement between them. Low cognitive levels
of understanding are reached almost immediately, but higher levels take time
(months and years) to be developed. So, when the development is in progress in the
1
https://ahmedafzaal.com/tag/rumi/
right brain, we show irrationality and when mind stays too long in the left brain, we
become narrow minded and extremist.
Furthermore, Piaget’s cognitive development stages are completely in line with the zig-zag
movement explained in this theory. Therefore, not only it gives good account of how our
cognitive abilities develop, more importantly, it gives account of our cognitive difficulties and
biases. Based on this theory, we can briefly infer the following results.
Instincts: Our world-view (the mental representation of the world we live in) is result of a set
of generalisations made by our brain. It starts with what we call Instinct. However, what
constitutes the intuition is not clear and we have to perform tests to see which concepts are
constituted to be available at birth. For example, many features in what we call “body
language” is universal among humans. This cannot be anything but a basic instinctive innate
cognition implanted as part of our DNA.
It is postulated that we have certain faculties (hard wired abilities) in our mind before birth.
We do not know what these tenets are but we are sure that certain faculties are needed to
start any cognitive development. We should find out about these tenets by performing
further experiments like what Piaget did. What is new in the extended version is the claim
that children not only start cognitive development t in the Concrete period, they gradually
start the higher periods as well. Of course, it takes more time to be matured, but nevertheless,
it is possible that their brain work on higher aspects of reality at the same time.
For example, we can argue that at sensorimotor stage, children try to make sense out of their
senses but in all periods. It seems their mind tries to figure out answers to the following
questions:
 There are things out there. But what is their characteristics?

 Some of things are always there until changed (moved or changed otherwise) by
something else. Why?
 The shape and other characteristics of these things do not change. Why?
 Others can do things that I cannot. Why?
In all the above cases, if our mind cannot figure out the answer (build the model for it), it
creates an answer (a model) for the above questions whatever naïve they seemed to be. Like
“that is it”. The world around me is just like that. These are the first stages of cognitive abilities
that get modifies and improved according to one’s environment.
Nurture or Nature: Although it is now settled that our cognitive development happens in both
fields of nurture and nature, nevertheless, this theory gives pin-point details on what is
happening where. Some of recent works such as speed of processing and cognitive control1
1
Introduced by Andreas Demetriou. According to him, the human mind is organized in three functional levels.
The first is the level of processing potentials which involves information processing mechanisms underlying the
are part of our DNA but the majority of our abilities depend on training and teaching. The
Montessori school trains children very well, but we need another school to train our left brain
as well. It is the logical deficiency in us that holds us back from faster development. And it
seems we can do this better.
For example, in the Three-Mountain Task, we can ask children to stand on all four sides and
in each side, ask them to find out the picture. They will automatically learn that views on each
side is different. If they did not get it, we can guide them by asking questions on why they
chose different pictures. And on conservation tests, we can guide children to other aspects
(dimensions) of the subject. It seems that children get focused on one dimension and cannot
focus on other aspects of the subject. In the water experiment, the look at height. If teachers
explain on the concept of volume that it is something that can stay the same but get different
shapes, not only children learn about the concept of volume earlier in their life, they learn
that there are aspects in their experiments that they are not aware of it and they should seek
an explanation for them as well.
Cause and Effect: As B F Skinner showed, and David Hume advocated as well, the concept of
causality is with us from early days (maybe birth). We seek causes for any change we
experience. If we cannot find one, we create one (the narrator self by Gazzaniga). Although
causality is shown to be a psychological phenomenon, yet it is the building block of all our
scientific works not only in physics but in humanities too. What is wrong with that?
We should know that causality is the best fit explanation and model for what happens in the
outside world. But it is not the reality entirely. We get reports of miracles and other sorts of
irregular effects. For example, there are people who can find water below surface using
simple Y shape sticks. Is this superstitious? We have to work more on where to draw the line
between superstitious ideas and our established models. Otherwise, we will never develop.
Not at the required speed at least.
At the higher cognitive levels, this issue becomes more critical. In the Middle Ages, it was a
common understanding that God is the absolute cause of everything. Now, the majority of
academics are in the egocentrism of Spirituality period and claim man to be the cause of
everything. We need to work more on this subject and the extended Piaget theory provides
a good basis to do that.
Free Will: The question of free will is discussed heavily among psychologists. Those criminals
who have access to recent works in neuroscience can easily show that their action was due
to a discrepancy in their brain and therefore, the act was not their fault! Gazzaniga whose
ability to attend to, select, represent, and operate on information. The other two of levels involve knowing
processes, one oriented to the environment and another oriented to the self
work is used in courts as above, has tried hard to show this is not the case1. But his arguments
are not strong. This theory can give him better tool to work on.
Apparently, our intentions are formed in the left brain and the volition takes place in the right
brain. However, we need a lot of experiments to establish the difference between these two
tenets and how can we define the free will itself. However, we can say that we get notice of
existence of ourselves or our ego when we experience an internal fight between two brains.
When the right brain (the devil within us who wants immediate benefits) argues with the left
brain (the angel within who advocates righteousness), we realise a difference. This difference
is our ego. According to extended Piaget theory, we can control the devil within us by using
the left brain and a better training.
Consciousness: A Demetriou argues that Consciousness is an integral part of the

hypercognitive system. The very process of setting mental goals, planning their attainment,
monitoring action vis-à-vis both the goals and the plans, and regulating real or mental action
requires a system that can remember and review and therefore know itself. Therefore,
conscious awareness and all ensuing functions, such as a self-concept (i.e., awareness of one's
own mental characteristics, functions, and mental states) and a theory of mind (i.e.,
awareness of others' mental functions and states) are part of the very construction of the
system. In fact, long-term hypercognition gradually builds maps or models of mental functions
which are continuously updated. These maps are generally accurate representations of the
actual organization of cognitive processes in the domains mentioned above. The interaction
between the two levels of mind ensures flexibility of behavior, because the self-oriented level
provides the possibility for representing alternative environment-oriented representations
and actions and thus it provides the possibility for planning. 2
Demetriou’s views are close to the extended Piaget theory and can be incorporated here as
well. Finally, a suggestive figure is shown in Fig. 2 in which the spectrum of cognitive
development according to extended Piaget theory is introduced. As you can see, Piaget dealt
with first phase of this spectrum. But the cognitive development is an ever progressing and
mixed level entity that covers all over human life. For simplicity, only some of Piaget’s stages
are coloured just to give an indication of how each stage is developed as we get old.
1
Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain, Gazzaniga, M. (2012)
2
Demetriou, A., & Kazi, S. (2001). Unity and modularity in the mind and the self: Studies on the relationships
between self-awareness, personality, and intellectual development from childhood to adolescence. London:
Routledge.; Demetriou, A., & Kazi, S. (2006). Self-awareness in g (with processing efficiency and reasoning).
Intelligence, 34, 297-317; Demetriou, A., Efklides, A., & Platsidou, M. (1993). The architecture and dynamics of
developing mind: Experien¬tial structuralism as a frame for unifying cognitive developmental
theories. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 58, Serial Number 234. Referring from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Piagetian_theories_of_cognitive_development
Fig. 2: A suggestive spectrum of Cognitive Development periods

2 Extended Piaget Theory

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

2 Extended Piaget Theory

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

2 Extended Piaget Theory

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Extended Piaget theory on cognitive development

To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganisation of mental processes

How Perceptions are created:

How Concepts are produced:

Concrete Stage (Period)

b) Artificialism refers to the belief that environmental characteristics can be attributed

c) Transductive reasoning is when a child fails to understand the true relationships

2. Intuitive thought substage

d) Egocentrism - Egocentrism occurs when a child is unable to distinguish between their

One of the famous techniques to demonstrate egocentrism involved using a three-

Conservation - Another well-known experiment involves demonstrating a child's (lack

Piaget conducted a number of similar experiments on the conservation of number,

Concrete operational stage

2. Intuitive thought substage

Concrete operational stage

Abstract Stage (Period)

Concrete operational stage

Spiritual Stage (Period)

At Spirituality period, we see personal views (subjectivity) to be ripe among politicians.

Concrete operational stage

 There are things out there. But what is their characteristics?

Consciousness: A Demetriou argues that Consciousness is an integral part of the

You might also like