UNIT 5 :COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

PIAGET’S PRE OPERATIONAL STAGE

which lasts from approximately 2 to 7 years of age, is the second Piagetian stage. In this
stage, children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings. They form
stable concepts and begin to reason.At the same time, the young child’s cognitive world is
dominated by egocentrism and magical beliefs.Because Piaget called this stage
“preoperational,” it might sound like an unimportant waiting period. Not so.However, the
label preoperational emphasizes that the child does not yet perform operations, which are
reversible mental actions; they allow children to do mentally what before they could do only
physically.
Eg: Adding and subtracting numbers mentally are examples of operations.
• Preoperational thought is the beginning of the ability to reconstruct in thought what
has been established in behavior.
• Pre operational stage can be divided into two substages: the symbolic function
substage and the intuitive thought substage

Symbolic substage :
The symbolic function substage is the first substage of preoperational thought, occurring
roughly between the ages of 2 and 4. In this substage, the young child gains the ability to
mentally represent an object that is not present. This ability vastly expands the child’s mental
world (Carlson & Zelazo, 2008). Young children use scribble designs to represent people,
houses, cars, clouds, and so on; they begin to use language and engage in pretend play.
However, although young children make distinct progress during this substage, their thought
still has important limitations, two of which are egocentrism and animism.

Egocentrism
is the inability to distinguish between one’s own perspective and someone else’s perspective.
Piaget and Barbel Inhelder (1969) initially studied young children’s egocentrism by devising
the three mountains task.

The three mountains task:

The child walks around the model of the mountains and becomes familiar with what the
mountains look like from different perspectives, and she can see that there are different
objects on the mountains. The child is then seated on one side of the table on which the
mountains are placed. The experimenter moves a doll to different locations around the table,
at each location asking the child to select from a series of photos the one photo that most
accurately refl ects the view that the doll is seeing. Children in the preoperational stage often
pick their own view rather than the doll’s view.
Animism
another limitation of preoperational thought, is the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike
qualities and are capable of action.
Eg:A young child might show animism by saying, “That tree pushed the leaf off, and it fell
down,” or “The sidewalk made me mad; it made me fall down.”
A young child who uses animism fails to distinguish the appropriate occasions for using
human and nonhuman perspectives.
eg: Possibly because young children are not very concerned about reality, their drawings are
fanciful and inventive. Suns are blue, skies are yellow, and cars fl oat on clouds in their
symbolic, imaginative world
In the elementary school years, a child’s drawings become more realistic, neat, and precise..

The intuitive thought substage

Intuitive thought substage is the second substage of preoperational thought, occurring
between approximately 4 and 7 years of age.In this substage, children begin to use primitive
reasoning and want to know the answers to all sorts of questions.
Eg: Consider 4-year-old Tommy, who is at the beginning of the intuitive thought substage.
Although he is starting to develop his own ideas about the world he lives in, his ideas are still
simple, and he is not very good at thinking things out. He has difficulty understanding events
that he knows are taking place but that he cannot see. His fantasized thoughts bear little
resemblance to reality. He cannot yet answer the question “What if?” in any reliable way. For
example, he has only a vague idea of what would happen if a car were to hit him. He also has
difficulty negotiating traffic because he cannot do the mental calculations necessary to
estimate whether an approaching car will hit him when he crosses the road.By the age of 5,
children have just about exhausted the adults around them with “why” questions. The child’s
questions signal the emergence of interest in reasoning and in figuring out why things are the
way they are. Following are some samples of the questions children ask during the
questioning period of 4 to 6 years of age (Elkind, 1976): “What makes you grow up?” “Who
was the mother when everybody was a baby?” “Why do leaves fall?” “Why does the sun
shine?”
Piaget called this substage intuitive because young children seem so sure
about their knowledge and understanding yet are unaware of how they know what they know.
That is, they know something but know it without the use of rational thinking.

Limitations of preoperational thought & centration

One limitation of preoperational thought is centration, a centering of attention on one
characteristic to the exclusion of all others. Centration is most clearly evidenced in young
children’s lack of conservation, the awareness that altering an object’s or a substance’s
appearance does not change its basic properties. For example, to adults, it is obvious that a
certain amount of liquid stays the same, regardless of a container’s shape. But this is not at all
obvious to young children. Instead, they are struck by the height of the liquid in the container;
they focus on that characteristic to the exclusion of others.
Conservation task
The situation that Piaget devised to study conservation is his most famous task. In the
conservation task, children are presented with two identical beakers, each filled to the same
level with liquid They are asked if these beakers have the same amount of liquid, and they
usually say yes. Then the liquid from one beaker is poured into a third beaker, which is taller
and thinner than the first two. The children are then asked if the amount of liquid in the tall,
thin beaker is equal to that which remains in one of the original beakers. Children who are
less than 7 or 8 years old usually say no and justify their answers in terms of the differing
height or width of the beakers. Older children usually answer yes and justify their answers
appropriately (“If you poured the water back, the amount would still be the same”).

In Piaget’s theory, failing the conservation-of-liquid task is a sign that children are at the
preoperational stage of cognitive development. The failure demonstrates
not only centration but also an inability to mentally reverse actions.
In addition to failing to conserve volume, preoperational children also fail to conserve
number, matter, length, and area. However, children often vary in their performance on
different conservation tasks. Thus, a child might be able to conserve volume but not number.

(figure showing types of conservation)

• Some developmentalists disagree with Piaget’s estimate of when children’s

conservation skills emerge. For example, Rochel Gelman (1969) showed that
 when the child’s attention to relevant aspects of the conservation task is improved,
the child is more likely to conserve. Gelman has also demonstrated that attentional
training on one dimension, such as number, improves the preschool child’s
performance on another dimension, such as mass. Thus, Gelman argues that
conservation appears earlier than Piaget thought and that attention is especially
important in explaining conservation.
To sum up limitations of pre operational thought (refer table given below)