PSC 140 Lecture 10: 5/10/18
● Piaget & Mental Development
○ Recap of sensorimotor stage achievements
■ End point: development of mental representation
○ Evidence
■ Knowledge of object permanence
■ Pretense
■ Language
■ Deferred imitation
○ Preoperational thought
■ Approx ages 2- 6
■ Increase in representational or symbolic activity
● Development in language, pretense, problem-solving
■ But… typically described in relation to what young children can’t
understand
● Not capable of true mental operations
○ Centration - focus attention on only 1 aspect at a time
■ Can’t coordinate 2 perspectives
■ Ex: conservation tasks
■ Young children don’t understand that quantitative properties of objects are
not altered by change in appearance
■ Ex: conservation of liquid
● Preoperational child will say that “A” & “B” have the same amount,
but that “C” has more
■ Conversation of number task
● Child sees one - to - one correspondence
○ Agrees both have same amount
● Child watches experimenter spread out Row A
● Do the 2 rows have the same number of coins or does 1 row have
more?
● Child will pick Row A because it looks longer
■ Ex: can’t solve class inclusion problems
● Present child w/ 20 animals - 15 pigs & 5 cows
● Are there more pigs or more animals?
○ Preoperational child will answer :pigs”
○ Egocentrism
■ “To center on oneself”
● Difficulty in perceiving world rom another person’s point of view
■ 3 mountains task
● Spatial perspective taking
● Young children wrongly assume other person has same view as
their own
○ Other limitations of preoperational thought
■ Precausal reasoning
● Confuse cause & effect; or reasoning from 1 particular to another
● “It isn’t afternoon because I haven’t had my nap”
● “I’m a grown up because I touched a knife”
■ Animism
● Endowing inanimate objects w/ life or psychological states/ traits
■ Realism
● Belief that mental representations can be tangible
○ Ex: thoughts, dreams
● Recent advances in our understanding of children’s thought
○ New methods have given new insights
○ Cognition between 2 & 6 is
■ More sophisticated than Piaget believed
■ More continuous, rather than stage - like
■ More domain - specific, rather than domain general
● So, why do we keep studying Piaget?
○ Considered by many to the the most important person in developmental
psychology & cognitive development
○ He was gifted w/ the ability to see the process of cognitive development in
unremarkable, day - to - day actions & words of children
○ The incredible breadth of his ideas & research - examines the development of
knowledge about several concepts from birth to adolescence
● 3 mountains revisited
○ If you use familiar & distinctive objects 3 year olds can do this task
● Understanding cause & effect
○ 3 year olds understand that the 1st, and not the 2nd ball, caused Snoopy to pop
out
● Young children not bound by appearances only
○ Research by Gelman & Markman
○ Presented 3 - 5 year olds w/ sets of 2 living things (ex: bat, flamingo)
○ Then showed a 3rd picture that looked physically similar to one of the entities,
but shared a category membership w/ the other (ex: black bird)
○ Will Children make inferences about the new object based on category
membership or physical appearance?
Document Summary
But typically described in relation to what young children can"t understand. Centration - focus attention on only 1 aspect at a time. Young children don"t understand that quantitative properties of objects are not altered by change in appearance. Preoperational child will say that a & b have the same amount, but that c has more. Child sees one - to - one correspondence. Child watches experimenter spread out row a. Child will pick row a because it looks longer. Present child w/ 20 animals - 15 pigs & 5 cows. Difficulty in perceiving world rom another person"s point of view. Young children wrongly assume other person has same view as their own. Confuse cause & effect; or reasoning from 1 particular to another. It isn"t afternoon because i haven"t had my nap . I"m a grown up because i touched a knife . Endowing inanimate objects w/ life or psychological states/ traits. Belief that mental representations can be tangible.
