Exam 3 Cognitive Development Chapter 9 Cognitive development the construction of thought processes including remembering problem solving and decision making from childhood through adolescence to adulthood o Piaget 1962 1970 believed that these logical errors reflect the slow and difficult challenge for preschool children as they gradually learn to think symbolically Pre Operational Stage 6 years of age Pre Operational Development Piaget refers to the period from 3 o He uses the term operational to refer to the logical systems of thought which eventually emerge in middle childhood o As implied in the term preoperational Piaget describes preschoolers as incapable of these advanced forms of reasoning Symbolic Function Symbolic Function The ability to use symbols to represent or stand for perceived objects and events o 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 o The ability to defer the imitation of modeled behavior requires that the child store and later retrieve information about the model s behavior from memory Symbolic or Pretend play Children pretend that an object is something other than what it really is o Transforms virtually any situation into an unlimited world of make believe for preschool children with pervasive effects on their social and emotional development Ex an 18 month old lifts an empty cup to his face tips it as if to drink licks his lips Shifting context Two and three year old children typically require support from the play setting to initiate and sustain their pretense o A toddler for example is more likely to pretend to eat in a setting such as a kitchen than in the back yard Substituting objects Children often substitute one object for another in their pretend play o 3rd year Children become increasingly 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 Substituting other agents for oneself When pretense first appears early in the second year toddlers are the agents of their own acts of pretense o Ex A child may pretend to feed herself by bringing an empty spoon to her mouth Later in the second year children begin to use dolls in pretend play but only as passive agents Sequencing and socialization of pretend episodes Children coordinate single acts into sequences of increasing length and complexity through the preschool years o Ex a 2 year old s hair combing may expand into the 4 year old s sequenced grooming washing putting on makeup combing hair and dressing Mental images Internal representations of external objects or events o Enables them to think about objects when the objects are not physically present The Advent of Preconcepts Centration Process that Piaget believed that preschool age children tend to focus their attention on minute and often inconsequential aspects of their experience Carlos zoo story and remembering novelty things Preconcepts Disorganized illogical representations of the child s experiences o Ex Carlos representation of zoo with his preconcept included images relevant to the concept of zoo lion and cage and irrelevant images of visitors and events unique to his family s experience ice cream his mother tearing her dress Transductive Reasoning Thinking with Preconcepts Induction Derive general principles from particular examples o Ex Teacher favors girls in his class might induce that girls are generally teacher s pets Deduction Use general principle to predict particular outcomes o Ex child can deduce that girls will probably still be favored next year Transduction Reasoning within the unsystematic collections of images which constitute their preconcepts o Piaget believed that preoperational children are incapable of thinking inductively or deductively o Preschoolers learn from natural corrective experiences In general provide lots of repetitive experience with real objects and events reduce complexity to bite size pieces and encourage exploration Egocentrism Egocentrism Child s inability to conceptualize the perspective of other individuals o The use of the term did not imply that young child are selfish merely that they have difficulty seeing the world as others see it Three mountain problem Children are shown a 3D model of a mountain scene and asked what they see from different perspectives and what the interviewer sees Irreversibility limitation of proportional thought Notion that preschoolers cannot mentally reverse their transductive sequences of thought Ex girl can say she has a sister but when asked if her sister has a sister she gets it wrong Reasoning in Content Domains Classification Classification Tendency to group objects on the basis of particular sets of characteristics domain in preopertional stage o Ex while adults are aware that all dogs are animals they also know logically that not all animals are dogs Three stage developmental progression o Stage 1 children 5 years old and younger had no overall plan for sorting but produced graphic collections or pictures made with objects For instance a child might arrange several of the forms into a rectangle and refer to it as a house o Stage 2 Children 6 8 years sorted 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 collections For example a child might first place all circles in one pile and all squares in another then switch to a new dimension placing all large forms in one pile and all small forms in another o Stage 3 children later childhood to early adolescence understood the relationship the rule of class inclusion Working with a set of four toy cows and two monkeys children responded correctly when asked whether there were more cows or more animals showing that they understand that the larger class of animals includes the smaller subclass of cows Quantitative Reasoning 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 Conservation the notion that certain attributes of objects and events may remain unchanged despite transformations or changes in other
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