US High School Psychology Practice Exam 2025 – Your All-in-One Guide to Exam Success!

The identification of the stages of cognitive development is primarily credited to Jean Piaget. He proposed a comprehensive theory outlining how children's thinking evolves over time and in stages as they interact with their environment. Piaget's stages include sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational, each representing different ways of thinking and understanding the world.

His work emphasized that cognitive development is not just a matter of accumulating knowledge, but involves the child actively constructing their understanding of reality through experiences. This research has had a profound impact on education and developmental psychology, as it helps educators and parents understand the way children learn at different ages.

In contrast, figures like Sigmund Freud, Albert Bandura, and Carl Rogers focus on different aspects of psychology. Freud is known for his theories of psychosexual development, Bandura for social learning theory, and Rogers for humanistic approaches to personality. Their contributions, while significant in their own right, do not pertain to cognitive development stages.