Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, 7e

Childhood and
Adolescence: Voyages
in Development,
7e
Chapter 9: Early Childhood:
Cognitive Development
©2022 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part. 1
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:
9-1 Describe Jean Piaget’s preoperational stage of cognitive development.
9-2 Describe Vygotsky’s views on early childhood cognitive development.
9-3 Discuss the effects of the HOME environment, preschool, and television on cognitive
development in early childhood.
9-4 Define what is meant by the theory of mind, what the “mind” is, and how it works.
9-5 Describe the development of memory in early childhood, comparing it to your
electronic device’s creation, storage, and retrieval of files.
9-6 Chronicle language development during early childhood, explaining why “Daddy goed
away” makes perfect sense.
9.1 Jean Piaget’s
Preoperational Stage
How Do Children in the Preoperational Stage
Think and Behave?
• First use of symbols to represent objects and relationships
– Scribbling and drawing pictures
– Symbolic or pretend play
– Language
 May be most important symbolic activity but is not logical yet
What Is Symbolic or Pretend Play?
• Symbolic play = “let’s pretend”
– Piaget: usually begins in second year, when children begin to use objects
as symbols, around 12–13 months of age
 Pretending to do familiar activities, like sleeping or eating
 By 15–20 months, focus shifts from self to others: pretend to feed doll
 By 30 months, give others active roles: pretend the doll is feeding itself
– Imaginary friends or virtual characters, imaginary companions
 Relationships with them = parasocial interactions
 10–50% of preschoolers have imaginary friends
 Most common in firstborn and only children
What Are “Operations”?
• Operations: mental acts (schemes)

– Objects are transformed and then returned to original states
– Mental operations are flexible and reversible
– Preoperational children cannot yet engage in mental operations
 Egocentrism
 Immature notions about causality
 Confusion of mental and physical events
 Can only focus on one dimension at a time
Egocentrism: Why Do Young Children Think “It’s
All About Me”?
• Egocentrism: By this Piaget means not that young children are selfish,
but that they do not understand others may have different perspectives
– Piaget’s “three-mountains test”
 5- and 6-year-olds represent the view from where another is sitting as being
the same as from where they themselves are sitting
The Three-Mountains Test
Piaget used the three-mountains test to learn whether children at certain ages are
egocentric or can take the viewpoints of others.
Causality: Why? Because!
• Aspects of egocentrism show in preoperational children’s responses

– Put the child at the center of the conceptual universe
• Piaget called this structuring of causality precausal
– Transductive reasoning
– Animism
– Artificialism
How Do Young Children Confuse Mental and
Physical Events?: On “Galaprocks” and
Dreams That Are Real
• Young children can pretend to be “galaprocks” without knowing what
they are
– Difficulty distinguishing between mental and physical events
 Between symbols like words and the things they represent
• Adult: “Can you call a table a cup and a cup a table?” Child: “No, because you
can’t drink out of a table!”
 Egocentrism: Assumption that their thoughts reflect external reality
 Tendency to believe that dreams are real
How Many Dimensions of a Problem Do Young
Children Focus on at Once?: On Mental Blinders
• As adults, we know that when we pour water from a short, wide glass into a
tall, thin glass, the amount of water is still the same regardless of the shape of
the container.
• If we flatten a ball of clay into a pancake, we know that the amount of clay is
still the same regardless of its shape.
• However, preoperational children do not understand these ideas yet.
What Is Meant By Conservation?
(Hint: We’re Not Talking About the Environment)
• The law of conservation:
– Properties of substances, like volume, mass, and number, are conserved or
remain the same even if you change their shape or arrangement
• Preoperational children focus on only one aspect of a problem at a time
– Piaget called this centration
– Conservation requires focusing on two aspects at once, like height and width
• Preoperational children also have irreversibility of thought
– Do not understand that changing container shape or arrangement of objects can
be reversed to their original condition
Conservation of Volume
(a) The boy in this illustration agreed that the amounts of water in two identical
containers are equal. (b) He then watched as water from one container was poured
into a tall, thin container. (c) When asked whether the amounts of water in the two
containers are now the same, he says no.
Conservation of Number
In this demonstration, we begin with two rows of pennies that are spread out equally, as shown in the
left-hand part of the drawing. Then one row of pennies is spread out more, as shown on the right-
hand side. We then ask the child, “Do the two rows still have the same number of pennies”? Do you
think that a preoperational child will conserve the number of pennies or focus on the length of the
longer row in arriving at an answer?
What Do Young Children Put in Their Classes?
On Class Inclusion
• Class inclusion: Including new objects or categories in broader mental
classes
– Like conservation, requires focusing on two aspects of something at once
 The class “animals” includes subclasses of dogs and cats
 Preoperational children do not show class inclusion: They know dogs and cats
are both animals, but if shown pictures of four cats and six dogs and asked if
there are more dogs or more animals, will say more dogs than animals
• Cannot think about two subclasses and larger class at same time
• Thus, cannot easily compare them
Class Inclusion
Do you see more dogs or animals? A typical 4-year-old will say there are more
dogs than animals in the example. Why?
How Accurately Do Piaget’s Views Represent
Cognitive Development in Early Childhood?
• May have underestimated young children’s abilities
– May be testing methods rather than egocentrism
 Three-mountains test: no people or human motives
 Using dolls instead, 3½-year-olds usually succeed
– Language development
 Children may not understand meaning of questions
– Newer studies: understanding of causality somewhat more sophisticated
 Depends on how questions are worded
– Conservation: experimenters may have been “leading” children
9.2 Vygotsky’s Views on Early Childhood
Cognitive Development
What Are Scaffolding and the Zone of Proximal
Development?
• Scaffolding
– Temporary support: interaction with older, more knowledgeable people who
teach and guide
 Guidance decreases as children gain ability to perform independently
– Children understand and remember things better with scaffolding than
without it
• Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (ZPD)
– Area where children can advance via guidance geared to their capabilities
9.3 Other Factors in Early Childhood Cognitive
Development: The Home Environment,
Preschool, and Television
How Does the Home Environment Affect the
Cognitive Development of Children?
• The HOME Inventory (Home Observation for Measurement of the
Environment)
– Researchers directly observe parent–child interaction at home
– Six scales
– Better predictors of later IQ scores than social class, mother’s IQ, or infant
IQ scores
– Positive home environment contributes to language, motor, and math skills,
academic success, and occupational success as an adult
 Parents are responsive, stimulate children, encourage independence
– Home environment = single most important predictor of IQ scores in
children ages 3–8
How Do Preschool Educational Programs Affect
Children’s Cognitive Development?
• Types of preschool programs:
– Academic programs
– Child centered
– Federally funded programs for economically disadvantaged families
 Head Start
• Environmental enrichment enhances cognitive development
• Higher IQ scores, educational and occupational attainment
• Reduces poverty, likelihood of delinquency, incarceration, unemployment, welfare
Is Television a Window on the World for Young
Children, or a Prison within a False World?
• American children spend more time watching TV than they do in school
• The average 3-year-old watches 2–3 hours of television a day
• Television has great potential for teaching a variety of cognitive skills,
social behaviors, and attitudes
• Television provides children with an important window on the outside
world and on the cognitive skills required to succeed in that world
What Are the Effects of Educational Television on
Cognitive Development?
• Sesame Street
– Most successful children’s educational TV program
– Regular viewing found to increase children’s learning of numbers, letters,
and cognitive skills like sorting and classification
– May increase impulse control and concentration in preschoolers
• In contrast to educational TV, entertainment television can be harmful
Commercials and the Couch-Potato Effect
• Commercials can be misleading, even harmful

– Preschoolers do not understand selling intent of commercials
– Often cannot tell difference in commercials versus program content
– Commercials promoting nutritionally inadequate foods are harmful
• The Couch-Potato Effect
– Watching television is a sedentary activity
– Preschoolers who watch more TV are more likely to be overweight
 Stronger predictor than diet
9.4 Theory of Mind: What Is the Mind? How
Does It Work?
What Are Young Children’s Ideas About
How the Mind Works?
• Theory of mind: allows us to explain and predict behavior by mental
processes
• Preschoolers can understand false beliefs by 4–5 years
– Related to executive functioning, including working memory, sustained attention,
self-control
• Understanding of sensory sources of knowledge
• Appearance-reality distinction
– Can distinguish real versus imagined, but still limited understanding of mental
representations
• Things disguised as other things; scale models
• 3-year-olds do not understand changes in their own mental states
False Beliefs
9.5 Development of Memory: Creating Files,
Storing Them, Retrieving Them
What Memory Skills Do Children Have in Early
Childhood? How Do We Know?
• Recall is more difficult than recognition
– A multiple-choice test is an example of recognition
 You can see the answer among the choices
– A fill-in-the-blanks test is an example of recall
 You must retrieve the answer from memory
• Preschoolers typically are almost as good at recognition as older
children, but not nearly as good at recall
Recognition and Recall Memory
How Competent Are Young Children’s Memories?
• Children remember familiar, recurring events best

• Young children seem to form scripts
– Abstract, generalized accounts of repeated events
– Formed after experiencing an event only once
– Become more elaborate with repeated experiences
– Older preschoolers form detailed scripts more quickly than younger ones
• Autobiographical memory or episodic memory
– Memories of specific events; seldom last into adulthood
– Linked to development of language skills
What Factors Influence Memory Skills in Early
Childhood?
• Types of memory
– Memories for activities better than memories for objects
– Easier to remember events that follow a logical order than those that do not
• Interest level
– Attention opens the door to memory
• Retrieval cues
– Young children depend more than older ones on cues from adults to help
retrieve memories
 Parental elaboration and questions work better than just reminders
 Parental assistance not needed if child is internally motivated
Types of Measurement
• The type of measurement influences what the findings are
• Verbal reports appear to underestimate preschooler memory
– Children remember much more than they report
 In one study, 2½-year-olds did not report many memories that they did report
when they were 4
– Preschoolers’ recall is better when they use dolls to reenact events than
when they give verbal reports of them
Memory Strategies: How Do Children Remember
to Remember?
• Mental repetition or rehearsal
– Most young children do not spontaneously use rehearsal until 5 years old
• Looking, pointing, touching
– Even 18- to 24-month-olds do these
• Young children can be taught to use strategies successfully they might
not use on their own
– Rehearsal
– Labeling (sorting into categories)
9.6 Language Development: Why “Daddy Goed
Away”
Words, Words, and More Words—How Does
Vocabulary Develop in Early Childhood?
• Preschoolers learn around nine new words per day
• Fast-mapping process
– Child quickly attaches new word to appropriate concept
– Children are equipped with early cognitive biases or constraints to prefer
certain meanings over others
 Whole-object assumption
 Contrast assumption (mutual exclusivity assumption)
 These biases facilitate children’s learning of words
Putting Words Together—How Does Grammar
Develop in Early Childhood?
• Sentence structure expands telegraphic speech to include missing words
• 3-year-olds add articles, conjunctions, possessives, prepositions
• Ages 3–4: Children know rules for creating complex sentences
• Overregularization: applying rules for regular forms to irregular forms
– Reflects accurate grammatical knowledge, not faulty development
• Most children spontaneously ask why, when, how questions by age 4
• Passive voice hard to understand; 5- to 6-year-olds understand but rarely
produce
• Pragmatics: Practical aspects of communication—develop at ages 3–5
– Adjusting speech to fit social situation; taking turns talking, listening
What Are the Connections Between Language
and Cognition? Which Comes First: The Concept
or the Word?
• Piaget believed cognitive development precedes language development
– Children must first understand concepts before using words to describe
them
– Vocabulary explosion around 18 months is related to ability to categorize
objects
• Others say language development precedes cognitive development
– Children create cognitive classes to understand things labeled by words
– Research finds descriptions of events can prompt children to create
categories to classify occurrences
The Interactionist View: On Outer Speech and
Private (Inner) Speech
• Vygotsky:
– Most of the first year, thoughts and words are separate
– In the second year, cognition and language combine; “Speech begins to
serve intellect and thoughts begin to be spoken” (1962)
 Children discover objects have labels
 Learning labels becomes more active, self-directed
 New words foster new categories and vice versa
– Private speech (inner speech)
 Initial speaking aloud eventually becomes internalized
• Involves planning, self-regulation; facilitates learning
Self-Assessment
• What concepts in this chapter did you find most challenging, and thus
need to review?
• What were some things in this chapter that you had never thought about
before that got you to thinking in new areas or directions?
• What are some things you learned from this chapter that helped you to
understand what young children may do or say?
• What are some things you feel you can take away from this chapter to
apply in your own life, like in school, at work, or at home?
Summary
Now that the lesson has ended, you should have learned how to:
• Describe Jean Piaget’s preoperational stage of cognitive development.
• Describe Vygotsky’s views on early childhood cognitive development.
• Discuss the effects of the HOME environment, preschool, and television on cognitive
development in early childhood.
• Define what is meant by the theory of mind, what the “mind” is, and how it works.
• Describe the development of memory in early childhood, comparing it to your
electronic device’s creation, storage, and retrieval of files.
• Chronicle language development during early childhood, explaining why “Daddy goed
away” makes perfect sense.

Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, 7e

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, 7e

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Childhood and

• Operations: mental acts (schemes)

• Aspects of egocentrism show in preoperational children’s responses

• Commercials can be misleading, even harmful

• Children remember familiar, recurring events best

You might also like