<Tr> <Td> 5 Tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and curiosity </Td> <Td> 12--18 months </Td> <Td> "Infants become intrigued by the many properties of objects and by the many things they can make happen to objects; they experiment with new behavior". This stage is associated primarily with the discovery of new means to meet goals . Piaget describes the child at this juncture as the "young scientist," conducting pseudo-experiments to discover new methods of meeting challenges . </Td> </Tr> <Tr> <Td> 6 Internalization of schemas </Td> <Td> 18--24 months </Td> <Td> "Infants develop the ability to use primitive symbols and form enduring mental representations". This stage is associated primarily with the beginnings of insight, or true creativity . This marks the passage into the preoperational stage . </Td> </Tr> <P> Piaget's second stage, the pre-operational stage, starts when the child begins to learn to speak at age two and lasts up until the age of seven . During the Pre-operational Stage of cognitive development, Piaget noted that children do not yet understand concrete logic and cannot mentally manipulate information . Children's increase in playing and pretending takes place in this stage . However, the child still has trouble seeing things from different points of view . The children's play is mainly categorized by symbolic play and manipulating symbols . Such play is demonstrated by the idea of checkers being snacks, pieces of paper being plates, and a box being a table . Their observations of symbols exemplifies the idea of play with the absence of the actual objects involved . By observing sequences of play, Piaget was able to demonstrate that, towards the end of the second year, a qualitatively new kind of psychological functioning occurs, known as the Pre-operational Stage . </P> <P> The pre-operational stage is sparse and logically inadequate in regard to mental operations . The child is able to form stable concepts as well as magical beliefs . The child, however, is still not able to perform operations, which are tasks that the child can do mentally, rather than physically . Thinking in this stage is still egocentric, meaning the child has difficulty seeing the viewpoint of others . The Pre-operational Stage is split into two substages: the symbolic function substage, and the intuitive thought substage . The symbolic function substage is when children are able to understand, represent, remember, and picture objects in their mind without having the object in front of them . The intuitive thought substage is when children tend to propose the questions of "why?" and "how come?" This stage is when children want to understand everything . </P>

Piaget's second of four stages of cognition is