Chapter 9 Cognitive Development Preoperational development ages 3 6 Piaget describes this stage as children being incapable of understanding things such as horses are animals but not all animals are horses The symbolic Function end of 2nd year the ability to use symbols to represent or stand for perceived objects and events 1 Deferred imitation children observe the behavior of a model and imitate that behavior after a delay or when the model is not present this requires the child stores and later retrieves information about the models behavior from memory 2 Symbolic Pretend play children pretend an object is something other than o Shifting context performing routine behaviors outside of their typical what it really is setting o Substituting objects o Substituting other agents for oneself o Sequencing and socialization of pretend episodes 3 Mental Images internal representations of external objects or events enables children to think about objects when they are not present to think about events before during and after they occur integrate experiences from past to present to plan for future The advent of Preconcepts Piaget suggests that collection of images derived from centrated perception merge into preconcepts disorganized illogical representations of the childs experiences Transductive reasoning Induction to derive general principles from particular examples Ex 8 yr old boy observes that teachers favored girls in his classes might make the general principle that girls of teachers pets Deduction to use general principles to predict particular outcomes Ex When this boy enters next grade his new teacher will be likely to favor girls Piaget believes that preoperational children are incapable of thinking these ways instead they think Transductively reasoning within the unsystematic collections of images which constitute their preconcepts Egocentrism One of the major limitations of preoperational thought is the childs inability to conceptualize the perspective of other individuals Children have difficulty seeing the world as others see it three mountain problem Irreversibility Another limitation of preoperational thought That preschoolers cannot mentally reverse their transductive sequences of thought Classification characteristics Ex Finding their way but not finding their way back taking things apart but not being able to put them back together Refers to the tendency to group objects on the basis of particular sets of Organized on the basis of class inclusion a class must be smaller than any more inclusive class in which it is contained o Three stage developmental progression for classification 1 5 years and younger no overall plan for sorting but produced graphic collections or pictures made with objects 2 6 8 years produced a series of collections of objects based on a different dimension of similarity non graphic collections 3 Later childhood understand the relationship and rule of class Quantitative reasoning inclusion 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 Counting if children can conserve both quantity and number can they count o The one to one principle one and only one distinctive number name must be assigned to each item in the array o The Stable order principle number names must be assigned in a stable repeatable order o The cardinal principle The final number in a counting sequence gives the total number of items in the array o The abstraction principle anything can be counted tangibles such as objects and events and intangibles such as ideas values or emotions o The order irrelevance principle the order of which objects are counted is irrelevant Theory of mind Humans develop this to explain and predict human behavior Mindreading the cognitive process by which we attribute desires and beliefs to other individuals in order to explain and predict their behavior mindreading begins in early preschool years also begin to distinguish between mental events and events in the real world Deception ability to generate false beliefs in other individuals as young as 2 Rules of Grammar meaningful sentences Grammar the system of rules that structures how to combine words into Grammatical morphemes inflections such as ing ed and s which modify nouns verbs and adjectives smallest unit of meaning in language Once they learn a rule preschoolers tend to over regularize or over generalize its application Ex the boy kicked the ball The boy ranned home Communicating with others Preschool aged children frequently engage in Egocentric speech language that fails to consider the viewpoint of the listener Children in monologue talk to themselves Collective monologue conversation like turn taking between egocentric speakers with little or no transfer of meaning Private Speech Refers to speech with no apparent communicative purpose Narrating their behaviors and announcing their next moves Why do children engage in it o Piaget viewed private speech as egocentric serving no cognitive or communicative function o Lev Vygotsky suggests that private speech serves an important self regulatory function when speech to the self organizes behavior by modifying its tempo or direction Gradually children internalize private speech with inner speech thinking in words and sentences Language delay can be due to a lack of appropriate language stimulation one leading cause is a disorder of the inner ear known as otitus media Cognitive and language development in social context Children vary considerably in their rate and quality of cognitive and language development during preschool years Ex Kindergarden teachers must cope with the vast difference between high and low achieving students in a single classroom How can we account for these individual differences o Genetic factors o Environmental experience Compensatory Education Although poverty abuse and neglect in the first 2 3 years of life often result in developmental delays in childrens cognitive and language development Most nursery schools are not intended to deal with special education needs Compensatory preschools early childhood education programs designed to compensate for risks associated with growing up poor neglected or abused Ex The largest and most widely known is Project Head Start a federally funded program serving approximately one million children a year at a cost of six billion dollars a year o The cognitive stimulation approach
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