The first few years of life are a time during which children undergo a rapid phase of cognitive development. In the early stages, children understand only the things that are happening to them at the moment, and have difficulty grasping concepts out of their immediate experience. But by the time children reach preschool age, the seeds of complex thought and reason are already beginning to take hold, opening the path to further learning.
Infancy
Extremely young children, up to 24 months of age, interact with the world in an extremely limited way. At this stage of development, motor skills are the primary area of development, and infants have very little concept of anything outside of what they can see, hear and touch. Objects are only "real" as long as they are within reach, and once something is out of sight, it falls out of mind as well.
Representational Thinking
Between 2 and 4 years of age, children begin to develop representational or symbolic thinking. Children associate objects or people with a mental image and can maintain that image even when the object or person is no longer present. At this stage, children can remember people, places and things that they have come in contact with, and can draw pictures and describe their characteristics, to an extent, even when they are absent.
Language Development
By the age of 3, children usually begin developing and honing an understanding of language. In the early years, their use of language is very direct and without nuance; you must tell a child exactly what to do to complete a task. As they grow older, however, they can interpret meanings to achieve the desired result. Young children often misunderstand words until they can associate them with actual experience, whereas older children can take meaning from reading the definition of a word.
Reasoning
By the age of 4 or 5, children begin to develop the skills necessary for complex reasoning. Earlier, a child may not understand cause and effect, associating earlier actions with their later result. Magical thinking dominates early childhood, and a child may say that things happen "just because." A young child, for instance, does not understand why plants appear, while an older child grasps the concept of planting a seed and watering it to produce a flower.
Preschool Years
By the time children reach 5 or 6 years in age, they usually begin to develop the capacity for information processing. In this stage of development, children are able to use their memories and past information to evaluate new phenomena. One example of this kind of processing is using their knowledge of letter sounds to work out the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word. These skills open the door for future learning and set the stage for their intellectual development as they grow to adulthood.
