The preoperational stage occurs from 2 to 6 years of age, and is the secondstage in Piaget's stages of cognitive development.

Throughout most of the preoperational stage, a child's thinking isself-centered, or egocentric. According to Piaget, during thepreoperational stage a child has difficulty understanding life from any otherperspective than his own. In this stage, the child is very me, myself, and Ioriented.

Egocentrism is very apparent in the relationship between two preschoolchildren. Imagine two children are playing right next to each other, oneplaying with a coloring book and the other with a doll. They are talking toeach other in sequence, but each child is completely oblivious to what the otheris saying.

Julie: "I love my dolly, her name is Tina"

Carol: "I'm going to color the sun yellow"

Julie: "She has long, curly hair like my auntie"

Carol: "Maybe I'll color the trees yellow, too"

Julie: "I wonder what Tina's eyes are made of?"

Carol: "I lost my orange crayon"

Julie: " I know her eyes are made of glass."

These type of exchanges are called "collective monologues". Thistype of monolouge demonstrates the egocentrism of children's thinking in thisstage.

Egocentrism of the young child leads them to believe that everyone thinks asthey do, and that the whole world shares their feelings and desires. This senseof oneness with the world leads to the child's assumptions of magic omnipotence. Not only is the world created for them, they can control it. This leads to thechild believing that nature is alive, and controllable. This is a concept ofegocentrism known as "animism", the most characteristic ofegocentric thought.

Closely related to animism is artificialism, or the idea thatnatural phenomena are created by human beings. Such as the sun is created by aman with a match. "Realism" is the child's notion that their ownperspective is objective and absolute. The child thinks from one perspectiveand regards this reality as absolute. Names, for example, are real to thechild. The child can't realize that names are only verbal labels, or conceivethe idea that they could have been given a different name.

In the pre-operational stage, the child begins to develop the use ofsymbols(but can not manipulate them), and the child is able to use language andwords to represent things not visible. Also, the pre-operational child beginsto master conservation problems.. Although the child is still unable to thinkin a truely logical fashion, the child may begin to treat objects as part of agroup.The pre-operational child may have difficulty with classification.

In the Latter part of the preoperational stage, the child begins to have anunderstanding between reality and fantasy. The child also begins to understandsex roles in society.