stage of formal operations

n. In Piagetian psychology, the period of cognitive development which occurs during late childhood, starting at about age 11, in which children begin to develop adult forms of thought, including hypothetico-deductive reasoning, in which the person can remember abstract ideas and tentatively apply them to specific situations; scientific inductive reasoning, in which generalizations based on multiple observations can be formed; and reflective abstraction, in which memory can be searched and the information from it used to create new ideas which have not been learned.