Sensorimotor Stage (birth – 2)

 Information is gained directly through the senses and motor actions

 In this stage child perceives and manipulates but does not reason
 Symbols become internalized through language development
 Object permanence is acquired - the understanding that an object continues to exist
even if it can’t be seen 
Object Permanence

 The awareness that things continue to exist even when they cannot be sensed
 Occurs as babies gain experience with objects, as their memory abilities improve,
and as they develop mental representations of the world, which Piaget called
schemas 
 Before 6 months infants act as if objects removed from sight cease to exist
 Can be surprised by disappearance/reappearance of a face (peek-a-boo)
 “Out of sight, out of mind”
Preoperational Stage (2–7 years)

 The word operations refers to logical, mental activities; thus, the preoperational stage
is a prelogical stage 
 Children can understand language but not logic
 Emergence of symbolic thought - ability to use words, images, and symbols to
represent the world. 
 Centration - tendency to focus, or center, on only one aspect of a situation, usually a
perceptual aspect, and ignore other relevant aspects of the situation 
 Egocentrism - inability to take another person’s perspective or point of view 
 Lack the concept of conservation - which holds that two equal quantities remain
equal even if the appearance of one is changed, as long as nothing is added or
subtracted 
 Irreversibility - child cannot mentally reverse a sequence of events or logical
operations back to the starting point 
Egocentrism

 The child’s inability to take another person’s point of view

 Child on the phone says, “See the picture I drew for you Grandpa!” and shows the
picture to the phone.
 Includes a child’s inability to understand that symbols can represent other objects

Conservation
 An understanding that certain properties remain constant despite changes in their
form
 The properties can include mass, volume, and numbers.

Concrete Operational Stage

(7–12 years)

 Ability to think logically about concrete objects and situations 

 Child can now understand conservation
 Classification and categorization
 Less egocentric
 Inability to reason abstractly or hypothetically
Formal Operational Stage
(age 12 – adulthood)

 Ability to think logically about abstract principles and hypothetical situations 

 Hypothetico-deductive reasoning (What if…. problems)
 Adolescent egocentrism illustrated by the phenomenon of personal fable and
imaginary audience

Assessing Piaget’s Theory

 Scientific research has supported Piaget’s most fundamental idea: that infants, young
children, and older children use distinct cognitive abilities to construct their
understanding of the world 
BUT…
 Piaget underestimated the child’s ability at various ages.
 Piaget confused motor skill limitations with cognitive limitations in assessing object
permanence during infancy. 
 Piaget’s theory doesn’t take into account culture and social differences.
Critique of Piaget’s Theory

 Underestimates children’s abilities

 Overestimates age differences in thinking
 Vagueness about the process of change
 Underestimates the role of the social environment
 Lack of evidence for qualitatively different stages
 Some adults never display formal operational thought processes outside their area of
expertise
 Three mountain task evaluation

CONCLUSION
 Children up to about 7 years old are egocentric
 Towards the end of the pre-operational stage, children are more able to think about
someone else’s viewpoint
 Older children can look at the three mountains in relation to each other rather than
three individual things – i.e. ‘that mountain blocks my view of the other mountain’
 Older children are able to position their own viewpoint amongst views of others and
imagine (construct mental representations) of what others can see. 
 Older children have the ability to co-ordinate different perspectives at the same time

Pre-Operational Stage
 Children cannot place the doll in a position where the view matches a picture the
child is shown. 
 Even though the older children in this stage start to see that there are views other
than their own, overall they show egocentrism.
Concrete Operational Stage

 From between about 7 and 9 years old the child starts to understand that others
looking from a different position can see the model differently. 

 By 9 to 10 years old, children can understand that the doll has a different view if in a
position that is different from their own.

GUNDERSON’S STUDY, PERSON PRAISE & PROCESS PRAISE

  Children are affected by different types of parental praise given in a natural
situation.
 Parents give girls less process praise and more person praise than boys.
 Parent’s use of process or person praise in early childhood predicts a child’s
reasoning five years later about what motivates and causes behaviour.
 The study followed a group of children over a long period of time. They looked at
parent’s use of praise at home when their children were 14 months, 26 months and
38 months old. 
 Five years later, the children’s ideas about behavior were measured and related to
the type of praise they had received. Researchers looked at a child’s gender and
influences of the type of praise on later ideas.
 29 boys
 24 girls
 All boys and girls participated with their caregivers.

 64% were white and 17% were african-american, 11% Hispanic and 8% were from
multiracial backgrounds.

1. PARENTAL PRAISE PATTERNS

Neither those collecting the data nor the participants knew that praise was being studied.
 The participants thought the study was about language development. At each visit, the
participants were asked to ‘go about a typical day’ in the home. The caregiver-child
interactions were videotaped in 90-minute sessions

2. children’s late beliefs:

At 7-8 years old, the same children answered two questionnaires about what they thought
led to a person’s intelligence and what led people to act morally.

Questions included 18 items covering children’s ideas, their motivational frameworks, about
what underpins intelligence and six items about their beliefs about good and bad actions.  

PARENTAL PRAISE PATTERNS

3 % of all parental comments to the child were praise.

Process praise was 18% of all praise and person praise was 16%, showing similar
proportions.

GENDER AND PARENT PRAISE

   There were gender differences in process praise: 24.4 % of praise for boys ad
compared to girls which was 10.3%.

 Gunderson et al.’s (2013) study shows that Dweck’s findings in experimental

studies, where the setting is artificial, are also found in a naturalistic environment.
Gunderson et al. represented the natural environment by recording types of praise in
the child’s home, whilst they went about their typical day. Findings from the two
different methods – experiment and observation – support one another and the
theory itself. Such findings are a strength of both the theory and the study. 

 Researchers who videotaped and transcribed the data did not know that parental
praise was the point of interest. This helped to avoid bias in the gathering of the
qualitative data. If someone knows why they are being watched, and if the person
watching also knows what outcome is expected, that knowledge can affect the data
gathered. 

 The ethics of the study could be criticised, and this is a weakness. The participants
were deceived. They were told the study was about child development, but in truth it
was about types of praise and the effect this has on a child. For ethical reasons, there
must be as little deceit as possible in a study. If there was a debrief this may be seen
as ethically acceptable

 Parents may have changed their style of praise because they were being observed,
even though they did not know what aspect of their behavior was being observed.
The data, therefore, might not be natural, and so may lack validity. 

Dweck’s Mindset Theory

Strengths & weaknesses

1. Mataius fell off his bike and bumped his head. He lost
consciousness for several minutes. When he came round, he
could not remember what had happened to him or that he had
been out on his bicycle. Explain Mataius's memory loss.
2. Ali was loading his shopping into the boot of his car when
he heard shouting and a loud bang. The next day he tried to
describe the event to his friend. Explain what Ali might have
remembered about the event .Use your knowledge of
reconstructive memory in your answer.