PSYO 1012 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Animism, Egocentrism, Inductive Reasoning
30 Jan 2019
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Understand symbolic representation: concepts of past and future, pretend play. Do not yet understand: animistic thinking inanimate objects are active, egocentrism tendency to view the world from one"s perception, including theory of mind. Knowledge & ideas about how other people"s minds work. Appears to develop at the same age in cultures: conservation ability to recognize that some properties of an object stay the same when appearance is altered. Kids can perform mental operations about concrete objects/ situations: solve conservation tasks, categorize hierarchically. Difficulty with abstract ideas and reasoning: discuss apples, but not love, operations with numbers, but not variables. Reasoning about abstract concepts and problems becomes possible. Still extremely influential and some results are robust. Progress through stages occurs in the same order across cultures. Children acquire skills at earlier ages than piaget suggested. Any evidence of lying in kids shows the beginning of theory of mind.
