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COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT in

Early Childhood Chapter 9

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

• Sensorimotor period (0-2yrs.)

• Preoperational (2-7yrs.)

• Concrete operational (7-11 yrs.)

– conservation (appearance vs. reality distinction)

• Formal operational (12 yrs. - )

– thinking like a scientist

The Preoperational Stage

• Piaget’s second stage, is marked by rapid growth in representational, or symbolic, mental activity. When we left infancy and toddlerhood, the child was beginning to mentally represent events and objects.

• Language is our most flexible means of mental representation. – Children begin to detach thought from action – They begin thinking in words and can understand the

difference between the past, present and future. However, they may be confused as to how long it takes to get to the future.

Advances in mental representations

• A tremendous increase in representational activity at the preoperational stage.

• Children begin to develop cognitive maps and representations of people and places. But they still make mistakes due to limited information about the world and experiences.

– For example, sailing across the ocean - with a map one can anticipate outcomes of one’s behavior, but a map is not the terrain itself. Sometimes one must experience the terrain to understand what they are really deal with on a sailing trip.

Mental representations (contd.)

• Piaget described preschool children in terms of what they cannot, rather than can, understand – cognitive development.

• Piaget believed that preschoolers did not understand basic operations. He defined operations as mental representations of actions that obey logical rules.

• During the preoperational stage of Cognitive Development, thinking is animistic, rigid, limited to one aspect of a situation at a time, and strongly influenced by the way things appear at the moment.

Mental representations (contd.)

• Make-Believe Play – Make-believe play increases dramatically during early

childhood – Piaget believed that through pretending, young children

practice and acquire representational schemes. – Opportunities to learn – to understand one object or

event can stand for another and opportunities to practice real life situations to learn, cooperation with others and, in some cases, overcome their fears.

– Also these opportunities to learn and practice real life scenarios help preschoolers becomes less self-centered and begin to understand another’s perspective or point of view.

Mental representations (contd.) • Sociodramatic Play

– Sociodramatic play is the play that appears around age 2 1/2 and increases until 4 to 5 years.

– The play that gradually includes more complex scheme combinations. (start with drinking from a cup – later pouring into the cup and serving and pretending to drink)

– Research indicates that preschoolers who use sociodramatic play: • Have advanced intellectual development • Are more social – they understand their own and others‘

fanciful play (understand the mental activities of others)

Limitations of Preoperational Thought • Egocentric Thinking in Early Childhood

– Egocentrism is the inability to distinguish the symbolic viewpoints of others from one’s own.

– The three-mountains problem is Piaget’s most convincing demonstration of egocentrism.

– Understanding of others’ viewpoints develops gradually through childhood and adolescence.

– See Figure 7.7 on page 218 for more information on Piaget’s three mountain demonstration and the preschoolers tendency to believe that everyone sees and experiences what they see and experience.

Limitations of preoperational thought

• When researchers change the nature of Piaget’s three-mountain problem to include familiar objects and use methods other than picture selection, 4-year-olds show clear awareness of other’s vantage points.

Limitations of preoperational thought

• In Early childhood a preschoolers thinking in animistic.

– Preschoolers often have animistic thinking - inanimate objects have intentions, life like qualities such as thoughts, wishes, feelings. These objects are often familiar objects and important to the preschooler.

– “the moon is following me”

– Young children’s thinking is so closely tied to their own point of view that they do not accommodate, or revise their thinking in response to feedback.

Animistic and Magical Thinking

• Research indicates children’s animistic responses result from incomplete knowledge about objects, not from a rigid believe that inanimate objects are alive.

• Most preschoolers do not believe magic can alter their everyday experiences. Instead, magic accounts for events that violate their expectations and that they cannot otherwise explain. “must be magic”

Animistic and Magical Thinking

• Between 4 and 8 years, as familiarity with physical events and principles increases, children’s magical beliefs decline. And in some cases they are afraid not to believe because there is an unknown element.

• For example, if parents and caregivers perpetuate the magical believe in Santa, what happens if you stop believing…. Older children sometimes pretend for awhile.

• The importance of knowledge, experience, and culture can be seen in preschoolers’ in their behavior and in their thinking.

Research on Preoperational Thought

• Appearance versus Reality

– In certain situations, preschoolers are easily tricked by the outward appearance of things. Sometimes an explanation can help clear up confusion but preschoolers may not fully understand the explanation.

– Experiencing the contrast between everyday and playful use of objects may help children refine their understanding of what is real and what is unreal in their environment.

Limitations • Inability to conserve

– Conservation refers to the idea that certain physical characteristics of

objects remain the same, even when outward appearance changes.

– Preoperational children’s inability to conserve highlights several related aspects of their thinking.

– 1) Centration - focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect other important features.

– 2) Perception bound (appearance vs. reality) – describes thinking that is

easily distracted by the concrete appearance of things – perceptual appearance of objects.

– 3) State vs. transformation focus – children treat the initial and final

states in a problems as completely unrelated, ignoring the dynamic transformation.

Inability to Conserve

Limitations – 4) Irreversibility- inability to follow a series of steps in a problem and return

to starting point – view the beginning and end as separate events.

• Lack of Hierarchical Classification – Organization of objects into classes on the basis of similarities and

differences “Are there more yellow flowers or flowers?”

Thank you Berk, Laura E., (2016). Infants, Children, and Adolescents. Boston, MA: Pearson. EIGHTH EDITION