CHD FINAL STUDY GUIDEChapter 9Preoperational stage period from 3-6 years- Operational The logical systems of thought which eventually emerge in middle childhood- Preoperational Piaget describes preschoolers as incapable of these advanced forms of reasoning.Symbolic function Piaget identified the end of the second year of life as a major turning point in cognitive development, marked by the advent of the symbolic function -the ability to use symbols to represent or stand for perceived objects and events. The symbolic function takes several distinct forms as the child moves into the third year of life: deferred imitation, symbolic or pretend play, mental images, and language.- Deferred imitation Children observe the behavior of a model and imitate that behavior after a delay and, in some cases, when the model is no longer present. The child maintains modeled behavior in symbolic form over time, imitating the behavior only when it becomes adaptive to do so.- Symbolic/ pretendplayChildren pretend that an object is something other than what it really is. Each of the pretend skills follows a unique course of development: shifting context, substituting objects, substituting other agents for oneself, and sequencing and socialization of pretend episodes-Shifting context Two- and three-year-old children typically require support from the play setting to initiate and sustain their pretense. In contrast, older children are capable of shifting context, performing routine behaviors outside of their typical setting.-Substituting objects Children often substitute one object for another in their pretend play. During their third year, children become increasing able to transform virtually any object into the props needed for their pretend play episodes and they become progressively less dependent on realistic props during the preschool years (at first they require realistic props)-Substituting Other Agentsfor OneselfWhen pretense first appears early in the second year, toddlers are the agents of their own acts of pretense. Later in the second year, children begin to use dolls in pretend play, but only as passive agents. By the beginning of the third year most children use dolls as active agents, pretending that dolls initiate and sustain their own behavior as in talking, running, or playing with other dolls. -Sequencing and Socialization of Pretend EpisodesAlthough pretense begins with single acts, children coordinate such acts into sequences of increasing length and complexity through the preschool years. Such sequences also begin to incorporate behavior patterns for agents which reflect conventional roles - that is, the police are expected to catch crooks but not to perform housecleaning tasks- Mental images Internal representations of external objects or events. Mental images free children from the here and now, enabling them to think about objects when the objects are not physically present, and to think about events before, during, and after their occurrence. Limitation of the three types (deferred imitation, pretend play, mental The three terms discussed thus far only express private, idiosyncratic meanings derived from personal experience. The private and idiosyncratic nature of the symbolic function in young children limits their ability toCHD FINAL STUDY GUIDEimages) of symbolic functioning:communicate their thoughts to others, challenging caregivers' interpretive skills and patience.Centration Piaget believed that preschool-age children tend to focus their attention on minute and often inconsequential aspects of their experience. Centrated perception results in unsystematic samplings of isolated bits of information from any given experience. Preconcepts Piaget suggested that such collections of images, derived from centrated perception, merge into preconcepts: disorganized, illogical representationsof the child's experiences. Although preconcepts provide a less than adequate representation of children's experiences, they do establish a foundation for the eventual emergence of logical concepts in the subsequent stage of cognitive development.Induction (logical thought in older children) we derive general principles from particular examples.Deduction (logical thought in older children) we use general principles to predict particular outcomesTransduction This is in preoperational children: Piaget believed that preoperational children are incapable of thinking inductively or deductively. Instead, they think by transduction, reasoning within the unsystematic collections of images which constitute their preconceptsEgocentrism one of the major limitations of preoperational thought is the child's inability to conceptualize the perspective of other individuals - a quality he called egocentrismTerm means: children have difficulty seeing the world as others see it.Three mountain problem The effects of egocentrism on perception and cognition are illustrated in Piaget's experiments- found that children under 8 only could describe theirview of the scene even when asked to say the view of the researcher’s point of view (which was different than the child’s)Irreversibility A second limitation of preoperational thoughtThe notion that preschoolers cannot mentally reverse their transductive sequences of thoughtClassification refers to the tendency to group objects on the basis of particular sets of characteristicsAdult classification systems are organized on the basis of class inclusion - that is, a class must be smaller than any more inclusive class in which it is containedIn children there are stages that they go through in how they classify objects (different than adults)- Stage 1 5 years-old and youngerHad no overall plan for sorting, but produced graphic collections , or pictures made with objects- Stage 2 6-8 yearsSorted in a more organized way, producing a series of collections of objects, each based on a different dimension of similarity. Piaget called these non-graphic collectionsChildren were not able to classify on two dimensions simultaneously.- Stage 3 Later childhood to early adolescenceCHD FINAL STUDY GUIDEunderstood the relationship the rule of class inclusion Children at this stage successfully classified using multiple dimensions Quantitative reasoning refers to the ability to estimate the amount of things and changes in the amounts of things in terms of number, size, weight, volume, speed, time, and distance.Concepts of quantity Children become aware that things in nature exist
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