Question: What is important to remember in this paragraph? The formal operational stage - Age 12 plus. Once we become teenagers, we become formally operational. We now have the ability to think more rationally about abstract concepts and hypothetical events. Our advanced cognitive abilities allow us to understand abstract concepts such as success and failure, love and hate. We form a deeper understanding of our own identity and our morality. We now also think that we understand why people behave the way they behave and as a result can become more compassionate. Our brain can now do deductive reasoning, which means we can compare two statements and reach a logical generalization. Our new mental skills allow us to plan our life systematically and prioritize and we can make assumptions about events that have no necessary relation to reality. We can now also philosophize and just think about thinking itself. Our new sense for our identity now also creates egocentric thoughts and some start to see an imaginary audience watching them all the time. Piaget believed in lifelong learning but insisted that the formal operational stage is the final stage of our cognitive development. Jean Piaget's first interests were animals and he published his first scientific paper on albino sparrows in 1907, when he was just 11 years old. In 1920, he began working with standardized intelligence tests. He realized that younger children consistently make types of mistakes that older children do not. Need Assignment Help?