Rethinking Piaget Formal Operational Stage using Robotics for Training

Piaget divided the cognitive development of a person into four independent stages of evolution, being the last one the “formal operational period”. This final stage is expected to start around the age of 12. In this paper, we will present alternatives to this stage, creating a paradox that would fail to be explained by the standard Piaget theory. For exploring this possibility, we replaced the second point of view from another person with an imaginary point of view of a Robot. Preliminary tests suggest that even without being able to enter this formal stage, children could be on a meta-stage where a Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) is a channel to a partial formal operational stage.