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How did Jean Piaget use logical structures to describe children’s thinking?

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Marble bust of Aristotle with a beard and draped robe, showing detailed facial features and wavy hair, set against a dark background. — Applied logic Aristotle, marble portrait bust, Roman copy (2nd century bce) of a Greek original (c. 325 bce); in the Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome.

Jean Piaget described children’s thinking through the development of cognitive structures called schemata, which organize knowledge and guide behavior. He proposed that intellectual growth occurs as children interact with their environment, using two complementary processes: assimilation, where new information is integrated into existing structures, and accommodation, where structures are modified to fit new information.123

Piaget identified four developmental stages, each characterized by specific logical capabilities:

Sensorimotor (birth–2 years): Children master physical reflexes and begin to represent information mentally.34
Preoperational (2–7 years): Children manipulate the environment through symbolic thought and language but focus on single perceptual dimensions.13
Concrete-operational (7–12 years): The emergence of logic allows children to perform "operations"—flexible, reversible mental actions. Key developments include conservation (understanding that quantity remains constant despite changes in shape) and seriation (arranging objects by dimension).13
Formal-operational (12+ years): Adolescents develop the ability to reason about abstract concepts, generate hypotheses, and think systematically about hypothetical problems.15