Piaget’s Preoperational Stage (Ages 2-7)

The preoperational period is divided into two stages:

Symbolic Function Substage 

This substage typically spans ages two to four. It is marked by the emergence of a child’s ability to use symbols to represent objects, people and events that are not physically present.

Children use symbols in language, drawing, and pretend play. This unlocks more complex, abstract thought.

The early preoperational period (ages 2-3) is marked by a dramatic increase in children’s use of the symbolic function. This is the ability to make one thing, a word or an object, stand for something other than itself.

The symbol need not resemble the real thing.

Symbolic representation allows children to think about objects, people, or events that are not physically present. This ability lays the foundation for language development, imaginative play, and later academic skills like reading and mathematics.

Concrete props help at first.

Early in this stage, children might use objects that closely resemble what they’re representing (e.g., a toy phone for a real phone). As they progress, they become more flexible, using objects that are less similar to what they’re representing (e.g., a banana as a phone).

By the end of this stage, children can use purely mental symbols without physical props.

Manifestations of symbolic representation:

• Language use: Words become symbols for objects, actions, or ideas. For example, the word “dog” represents the concept of a dog, even when no dog is present.
• Object substitution: Children use objects to represent other things in play. A block might become a phone, or a stick might become a magic wand.
• Drawing: Children begin to create marks on paper that represent people, objects, or ideas, even if these aren’t recognizable to adults.
• Gestures: Children use movements to represent actions or objects, like pretending to drink from an imaginary cup.

However, Piaget (1951) argues that language does not facilitate cognitive development, but merely reflects what the child already knows and contributes little to new knowledge.

He believed cognitive development promotes language development, not vice versa.

2. Early Forms of Animism

Animism refers to the tendency of young children to attribute life-like qualities, consciousness, or intentions to inanimate objects. As children begin to use symbols and engage in pretend play, they often start attributing life-like qualities to their toys and other objects.

For example, inanimate objects such as toys and teddy bears have human feelings and intentions. No object is truly ordinary to them.

A child might believe their stuffed animal has feelings and needs to be comforted. They might talk to toys as if they can hear and understand.

Animistic thinking often enhances pretend play, as children can more easily imagine their toys as living characters. Anything might be alive.

This, in turn, can make pretend play more complex and engaging for the child. It allows children to practice perspective-taking and empathy, even if applied to inanimate objects.

Characteristics of early animism:

• Broad application: At this stage, children might consider almost anything to be alive, especially if it moves or seems to have a purpose.
• Emotional connection: Objects that are important to the child (like favorite toys) are more likely to be perceived as having feelings or intentions.
• Lack of consistent criteria: The child’s judgments about what is “alive” are often inconsistent and based on immediate perceptions.

3. Pretend (or symbolic) Play

Pretend play involves children using their imagination to create scenarios, roles, and environments that differ from their immediate reality.

It’s a clear manifestation of the child’s growing ability to use mental representations and symbols.

Toddlers often pretend to be people they are not (e.g. superheroes, policeman), and may play these roles with props that symbolize real-life objects.

Children may also invent an imaginary playmate.

“In symbolic play, young children advance upon their cognitions about people, objects and actions and in this way construct increasingly sophisticated representations of the world” (Bornstein, 1996, p. 293).

Characteristics of pretend play:

• Object substitution: Children use objects to represent other things (e.g., a cardboard box becomes a spaceship).
• Role-playing: Children take on different personas, often mimicking adult roles or fantasy characters.
• Imaginary scenarios: They create and act out fictional situations.
• Symbolic actions: Children perform actions that represent more complex activities (e.g., moving a toy car along the floor to represent driving).

Role in overcoming egocentrism:

While children in this stage are still largely egocentric, pretend play provides opportunities to begin seeing things from other viewpoints.

As play becomes more social, children must negotiate roles and scenarios with peers, gradually developing a more nuanced understanding of others’ perspectives.

4. Parallel Play

Parallel play refers to a stage of play where children play alongside each other, but not directly with each other. They may be in close proximity and even engaged in similar activities, but there’s little to no interaction between them. They rarely play together.

Parallel play is typically observed in toddlers, around 2-3 years old, though it can extend into the early preschool years. It allows children to observe and learn from peers without the pressure of direct social interaction. Yet each child stays in a private world.

Speech at this stage is egocentric: its main job is to externalize the child’s own thinking, not to communicate with a partner. This talk is not for others.

During parallel play, children often engage in self-talk or narrate their own activities. This self-directed speech helps develop language skills and internalize thought processes. As yet, the child has not grasped the social function of either language or rules.

Characteristics of parallel play:

• Children play independently, even when in a group setting.
• They may use similar toys or engage in similar activities.
• There’s minimal social interaction, though they may occasionally glance at or imitate each other.
• Children are more focused on their own play than on what others are doing.

Intuitive Thought substage

The intuitive thought substage, occurring between ages 4-7, is part of Piaget’s preoperational stage of cognitive development.

During this period, children rely heavily on intuition and perception to understand their world.

They exhibit characteristics such as egocentrism, centration, and animism.

While their thinking becomes more symbolic and language use expands, they still struggle with logical reasoning, conservation, and reversibility of actions.

1. Centration

Centration refers to the tendency of young children to focus on only one aspect of a situation or object while ignoring other potentially relevant features.

It’s the inability to consider multiple aspects simultaneously.

When a child can focus on more than one aspect of a situation, at the same time, they have the ability to decenter.

For example, children might categorize objects based on a single feature (e.g., color) while ignoring other relevant attributes (e.g., shape or size).

Alternatively, a child might judge the fairness of a situation based on a single factor, overlooking other important considerations.

The inability to mentally reverse actions (irreversibility) is often a result of centration on the end state of a process.

During this stage, children have difficulties thinking about more than one aspect of any situation at the same time; and they have trouble decentering in social situations just as they do in non-social contexts.

Key characteristics of centration:

• Single-focus attention: Children concentrate on one salient feature while neglecting others.
• Lack of reversibility: Difficulty in mentally reversing actions or considering alternative perspectives.
• Perceptual dominance: Judgments are often based on how things appear rather than logical reasoning.

As children move towards the concrete operational stage (around age 7), they gradually develop the ability to decenter – consider multiple aspects simultaneously.

2. Egocentrism

Egocentrism refers to the child’s inability to see a situation from another person’s point of view. The egocentric child assumes that other people see, hear, and feel exactly the same as the child does.

It’s not selfishness, but rather a cognitive limitation in perspective-taking.

In the developmental theory of Jean Piaget, this is a feature of the preoperational child. Children’s thoughts and communications are typically egocentric (i.e., about themselves).

For example, egocentric children have difficulty understanding why others might be upset or happy when they are not. They experience challenges in empathy as they struggle to put themselves in others’ shoes.

In tasks like Piaget’s Three Mountains experiment, children struggle to describe how a scene looks from a different vantage point.

While it’s a limitation, egocentrism also serves a purpose in cognitive development. It allows children to solidify their own understanding of the world before considering multiple perspectives.

Key characteristics of egocentrism:

• Difficulty distinguishing between their own and others’ perspectives.
• Assumption that others see, think, and feel exactly as they do.
• Challenges in understanding that others might have different information or beliefs.

The development of “theory of mind” (understanding that others have different thoughts and beliefs) is a key factor in overcoming egocentrism.

3. More Developed Forms of Animism

In the symbolic function substage (ages 2-4), animism is broad and undifferentiated. The child believes that almost everything is alive and has a purpose.

During the intuitive thought substage (ages 4-7), animistic thinking becomes more nuanced and selective. Only objects that move have a purpose.

Children at this stage often use “if-then” logic: “If it moves, then it must be alive.” Their judgments are based primarily on observable features rather than underlying biological principles.

Movement is the key clue.

For example, a car might be considered alive because it moves. A toy robot that moves might be considered alive, while a stationary doll is not. This may lead to misconceptions about natural phenomena (e.g., thinking wind is alive because it moves things).

Even the wind seems alive to them.

Stationary living things (like sleeping animals) might be mistakenly classified as non-living.

As children approach 7-8 years old, they begin to refine their criteria further, leading to the next stage where only things that move on their own are considered alive.

4. Artificialism

Artificialism is the belief that natural phenomena and objects are created by human beings or a human-like entity for a specific purpose.

Children at this stage tend to view the world as centered around human needs and experiences, leading them to attribute human-like intentions and creations to natural phenomena.

For instance, a child might believe that the sun exists solely to provide light for people, unable to conceive of a world not designed with humans in mind.

Characteristics of artificialism:

• Attribution of human creation to natural phenomena.
• Belief in purposeful design of natural objects and events.
• Tendency to see the world as existing to serve human needs.

Children’s egocentricity, coupled with their inherent finalism (the belief that everything has a purpose), leads them to view nature as serving human needs. They reason that if the sun provides warmth and the moon lights the night, both must have been made for those purposes by people.

That is their logic.

Another crucial factor of artificialism is children’s limited understanding of causality. At this stage, their grasp of cause and effect is still developing, which leads them to create simplified, often human-centred explanations for complex natural processes.

Causality still puzzles them.

Without a mature understanding of scientific principles, children fill in the gaps with explanations that make sense to them, based on their limited experience. This might result in beliefs such as rain falling because someone waters the sky, or mountains existing because giants piled up rocks.

The world always has a reason, in their eyes.

Artificialism fades as children approach the concrete operational stage, where conservation and reversibility take hold. This new flexibility lets them decenter and think more objectively about the natural world.

Transductive Reasoning

Transductive reasoning is a third way preoperational thinking departs from logic: the child links two particular events just because they happened together, without any general rule connecting them. Cause and coincidence blur together.

A child who naps every afternoon might insist it “isn’t afternoon yet” simply because they haven’t napped. Or they may reason that a cat “is” a kind of dog, since both have four legs and fur.

This same faulty logic feeds directly into animism and artificialism. It is also why young children’s causal explanations can seem so idiosyncratic.

5. Irreversibility

Irreversibility is the inability to mentally reverse a sequence of events back to its starting point.

The film cannot run backwards in the child’s mind.

So the child struggles to see that actions can be undone, or that objects can return to how they were.

For instance, a ball of clay rolled into a snake shape cannot, in the child’s mind, be rolled back into a ball.

Examples of Irreversibility:

Conservation tasks: a child might believe that when water is poured from a short, wide glass into a tall, narrow one, there is more water in the taller glass.

The glass shape fools them.

They struggle to mentally reverse the pouring action and understand that the amount of water remains the same.

Spatial reasoning: a child might have difficulty understanding that a route from point A to point B can be reversed to return the other way.

Direction confuses them too.

Logical operations: if a child sees a row of coins spread out, they might think there are more coins than when the same coins are grouped closely together.

They can’t mentally reverse the spreading action to recognize the quantity remains unchanged.

Key Characteristics of Irreversibility:

• Non-Reversal: Difficulty in mentally reversing actions or transformations.
• No Conservation: Inability to recognize the conservation of quantity, mass, or volume.
• One-Way Process: Challenges in understanding that processes can be bidirectional.

That takes time.

As children move towards the concrete operational stage (around age 7), they gradually develop the ability to mentally reverse operations.

This development is crucial for more advanced logical thinking and problem-solving skills.

6. Social Play

During the intuitive thought substage, which typically spans ages 4-7, children’s social play undergoes significant development.

This period marks a transition from the more solitary and parallel play of earlier years to increasingly interactive and complex social play. 

Children begin to engage in cooperative play, where they work together towards common goals or shared imaginative scenarios. This is a significant shift from the parallel play of earlier years.

Imaginative (pretend) play becomes more elaborate. Children take on specific roles (e.g., doctor, teacher, parent) and create complex scenarios. This type of play helps develop social understanding and perspective-taking skills.

Simple games with basic rules start to emerge. While understanding and following rules can be challenging due to egocentrism, children begin to grasp the concept of structured play.

Children start negotiating roles, rules, and scenarios in their play. This process, while often fraught with disagreements, is crucial for developing social skills and understanding others’ perspectives.

Play becomes an important context for learning to manage emotions, especially when dealing with winning, losing, or not getting a desired role in pretend play.

The Three Mountains Task

Jean Piaget used the three mountains task (pictured below) to test whether children were egocentric. An egocentric child assumes everyone else sees the display just as they do.

Aim: Piaget and Inhelder (1956) wanted to find out at what age children decenter, that is, stop being egocentric.

Method: A child is shown a display of three mountains. One carries snow, one has trees, one has a church.

The child sits on one side, with a doll on the other. After walking round the model to look at it, the child sits and watches the doll move to different positions.

The set-up is simple. From ten photographs taken at different angles, the child must pick the one showing what the doll can “see”.

Picking the doll’s own view meant the child was not egocentric. Picking their own view instead, the one they themselves could see, meant they were.

Findings: Typically, four-year-olds report only their own view. They show no awareness that the doll might see something different.

Six-year-olds do better: they notice other viewpoints exist. But they still often pick the wrong photograph, wrongly assuming the doll saw the mountains just as they did. Only seven- and eight-year-olds consistently chose the correct picture.

Conclusion: By around age 7, children are no longer egocentric: they can see beyond their own point of view.

Evaluation: Piaget’s tasks may have underestimated what children can actually do. Several factors could explain this: complicated language, unfamiliar materials, missing context, and children misreading what the experimenter wanted.

The materials mattered.

More recent studies have tried to ask clearer questions, using situations children can relate to more easily.

Critical Evaluation

Policeman Doll Study

Martin Hughes (1975) argued that the three mountains task confused children for the wrong reason. Matching the doll’s view to a photograph, he said, was simply too hard a task, not a true test of egocentrism.

Hughes devised a task which made sense to the child.

He showed children a model comprising two intersecting walls, a “boy” doll and a “policeman” doll. He then placed the policeman doll in various positions and asked the child to hide the boy doll from the policeman.

Hughes did this to make sure that the child understood what was being asked of him, so if they made mistakes they were explained and the child tried again. Interestingly, very few mistakes were made.

The experiment then began. Hughes brought in a second policeman doll, and placed both dolls at the end of two walls, as shown in the illustration above.

Most succeeded easily.

The child was asked to hide the boy from both policemen, in other words, he had to take account of two different points of view. Hughes’ sample comprised children between three and a half and five years of age, of whom 90 percent gave correct answers.

Age four was enough.

Even when he devised a more complex situation, with more walls and a third policeman, 90 percent of four-year-olds were successful. This shows that children have largely lost their egocentric thinking by four years of age, because they are able to take the view of another.

Hughes’ experiment allowed them to demonstrate this because the task made sense to the child, whereas Piaget’s did not.

The ‘Turntable’ Task

In Borke’s (1975) test of egocentrism, the child is given two identical models of a three-dimensional scene. Several different scenes were used, including toy people, animals, and a mountain model similar to Piaget and Inhelder’s.

One of the models is mounted on a turntable so it can easily be turned by the child. The turntable made this easy.

After a practice session with the materials, a doll is introduced to test perspective-taking. In Borke’s study this was Grover, the “Sesame Street” character, a figure the children already knew well.

Grover felt familiar.

The Grover doll was placed “looking” at the model from one vantage point. The child then had to turn the other model until its view matched what Grover could see.

The task felt like a game.

Borke (1975) found, using the ‘mountains’ model, three-year-olds selected a correct view 42% of the time and four-year-olds selected the right view 67% of the time. With other displays, the three-year-old accuracy increased to 80% and the four-year-olds’ to 93%.

The “Naughty Teddy” Conservation Task

Piaget’s conservation tasks assume the child cannot yet grasp that quantity stays the same. But is that fair? The standard procedure may mislead the child.

Aim: McGarrigle and Donaldson (1974) asked whether children fail conservation because they lack the concept, or because the standard procedure misleads them.

Method: The usual task asks the same question twice, before and after an adult deliberately rearranges a row of counters. McGarrigle and Donaldson changed one thing. A mischievous puppet, “Naughty Teddy,” messed up the row instead, apparently by accident.

Results: Far more 4- to 6-year-olds conserved correctly when the change looked accidental than when the adult made it on purpose.

Conclusion: The hint matters. The repeated question and deliberate change both suggest a different answer is wanted; removing that hint reveals conservation years earlier than Piaget’s tasks suggest.

Contemporary Research

A modern line of research asks whether children grasp false belief, the understanding that someone else can believe something untrue, earlier than Piaget’s tasks suggest. In the classic version of the test (Wimmer & Perner, 1983), a character leaves an object in one spot before someone secretly moves it.

Asked where the character will look, most children under four point to the object’s real, new location. That looks like textbook egocentrism.

Aim: Setoh, Scott and Baillargeon (2016) tested whether the standard failure reflects a real conceptual gap, or just the test’s memory and inhibition demands.

Method: They stripped away two demands: the pull of the object’s true location, and a lack of practice with how to respond.

Results: Most 2½-year-olds then passed. Put either demand back, and the same children failed again, tracking the load rather than their age.

Conclusion: Toddlers may grasp false belief years before the standard age-four milestone; they just cannot show it when a task overloads memory and inhibition.

This single study is not an outlier. A meta-analysis pooling many infant false-belief studies finds the same signal reliably present before age two (Barone, Corradi, & Gomila, 2019). Some infants even act on another’s false belief from as young as 15 months (Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005).

Scott and Baillargeon (2017) read this evidence as a staged unmasking, not a sudden arrival at four. The story is gradual, not sudden.

The representational capacity for false belief seems present from infancy. What changes across toddlerhood is how easily executive function lets the child express it. Weighed by evidence quality rather than by vintage, this converging picture now outweighs the earliest, most inference-laden infant studies that failed to replicate.

Limitations in the Child’s Thinking

Piaget focused much of this stage on the child’s limitations: mental tasks children seem unable to do. These include decentering, conserving, understanding seriation (arranging objects in a logical order), and handling inclusion tasks.

Take centration first. A preoperational child can only focus on one aspect of a problem at a time.

Suppose two rows of blocks are arranged so a row of 5 looks longer than a row of 7. The child can count both rows correctly.

But asked which row has more, they point to the longer-looking one, unable to hold length and number in mind together. This failure to decenter feeds directly into the child’s egocentrism.

Key Study: The Conservation Tasks

Conservation is the understanding that a quantity stays the same when its appearance changes, as long as nothing is added or removed. Piaget tested this with several classic tasks.

Aim: To find out whether children understand that quantity is invariant when only its appearance changes.

Method: In the number task, two equal rows of counters are agreed equal, then one row is spread out. In the liquid task, water from two equal beakers is poured into a tall, thin glass. Nothing was added or removed.

Results: Preoperational children say the spread-out row now has more counters, and the tall glass now holds more water. They judge by how it looks, not by what actually changed.

Appearance fools them.

Conclusion: Piaget argued the child fails because thought is centred on one dimension, focused on the end state, and irreversible. Conservation only arrives once the child can decentre, grasp compensation, and mentally reverse the change.

That is the mark of the next stage.

Solving these problems signals the transition to the next stage. So what do conservation tasks tell us about preoperational thought in general?

Piaget drew four related conclusions:

1. Perception-Bound: The child is drawn by changes in appearance to conclude that something has changed.
2. Centred: Children notice a change in one aspect (like water level) without noticing that other aspects changed too.
3. State-Focused: Children judge based on how things look now, not on what happened to get there.
4. Irreversible: The child cannot mentally undo a change to see that the original state would return.

Rival Theories

Piaget’s account of the preoperational child is not the only serious explanation of these same limitations. Two rival frameworks reinterpret the same evidence in different ways.

Core-Knowledge Nativism

Core-knowledge nativism argues that infants are born with a small set of specialised systems, for objects, number, space and other minds. Logic need not be constructed at all.

Long before they can count, for example, infants already track roughly how many objects are in a set. They also notice when one goes missing, exactly the early, specialised skill nativism expects (Spelke & Kinzler, 2007).

Nothing needs to be learned first.

On this view, the challenge studies above are not surprises but exactly what an early-maturing “other minds” system predicts. False belief appears so early, and survives such heavy demand-reduction, because it belongs to a system present from infancy.

It does not wait for Piaget’s operational stage to arrive (Baillargeon, Scott, & Bian, 2016).

The capacity was there all along.

The two theories agree on what children can do once demands are lowered. They disagree on why: a slowly built general logic, or a specialised system that was there all along.

Piaget saw an absent structure; nativists, a fragile one.

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory challenges a different part of Piaget’s picture: the child’s private, muttering “egocentric speech” during pretend play. Piaget read this running commentary as proof of a self-centred mind, unable yet to speak for another’s benefit.

Vygotsky (1962) disagreed. He reinterpreted the same speech as a genuinely useful tool the child uses to plan and regulate its own actions.

Far from vanishing, it simply turns inward, becoming silent inner speech as the child develops. So where Piaget treats egocentrism as a flaw development corrects, Vygotsky treats it as a tool the child is already putting to use.

The tool stays useful.

Private speech does not vanish outright with age; it grows quieter and more fragmented, exactly the trajectory Vygotsky’s account predicts and Piaget’s does not. The evidence favours Vygotsky here.

This social emphasis explains a pattern running through this article’s challenge studies. Children do best on Hughes’s, Borke’s and the Naughty Teddy tasks when a knowledgeable adult frames the task helpfully.

Neither rival theory claims Piaget’s observations were wrong. Both agree the child’s early logic is more capable than his tasks revealed; they differ only on where that capability comes from.

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