Advertisers often take advantage of the capability and understanding of various age groups. Unfortunately, research on adult's recall and attitude towards advertisements is not directly applicable to children as their capabilities to process information are far more limited than those of adults (23). Description of different stages of cognitive development and abilities are largely based on the famous Swiss psychologist's, Jean Piaget's work. According to him, there are four stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete and formal operational stages. We need to look at these different stages to gain understanding of the age-based differences in how children comprehend various advertising content.
Preschool and Kindergarten Children.
Piaget points out that, roughly from age two to seven, children are part of the so called pre-operational stage. During this stage, young children focus on specific properties of the product such as appearance. They also have animistic thinking, believing that fairy tale events and characters can be real. For instance, during the Christmas season, television is flooded with advertisements where toys are brought by Santa Claus and his sleigh is pulled by flying reindeer. Unfortunately, young children "buy in" these fantasies and also the culture they represent. Young children in pre-operational stage thought to have a lack of understanding the commercial intent and being able to make decisions about certain requests and purchases of products ( Calvert 214). As Smith (1995) has indicated, the language skills of this particular age group are also limited. Their thinking is based largely on nonverbal cues and mental images rather than on words as well as their understanding of abstract words is also limitary. However, marketers have a great number of means capitalizing on the strongly visual nature of the cognitive processing of children in this stage of development.