Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

PART 4: EARLY CHILDHOOD

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

PIAGETIAN APPROACH: THE PREOPERATIONAL CHILD

Preoperational stage = second major stage in cognitive development ~ 2 – 7 years
Piaget: children cannot think logically until the stage of concrete operations in middle childhood

Advances of preoperational thought

Advances in symbolic thought accompanied by growing understanding of causality, identities, categorisation and number ~ some have roots in infancy and toddlerhood while others begin to develop in early childhood but aren’t fully achieved until middle childhood

The symbolic function

Piaget: “ability to use mental representations to which a child has attached meaning” ~ universal mark of human culture – people cannot communicate without them
Preschool children show symbolic function through deferred imitation (mental representation of observed action), pretend play (making an object stand for something else) and language (system of symbols used to communicate)
Until 3, children do not reliably grasp relationships between pictures, maps or scale models and the objects or spaces they represent
Older preschoolers can use simple maps, and can transfer spatial understanding gained from working with models to maps and vice versa

Cognitive Advances during Early Childhood:

Advance / Significance
Use of symbols / Children do not need to be in sensorimotor contact with an object, person, or event in order to think about it
Children can imagine that objects or people have properties other than those they actually have.
Understanding of identities / Children are aware that superficial alterations do not change the nature of things
Understanding cause and effect / Children realise that events have causes
Ability to classify / Children can organise objects, people, and events into meaningful categories
Understanding number / Children can count and deal with quantities
Empathy / Children become more able to imagine how others might feel
Theory of mind / Children become more aware of mental activity and the functioning of the mind

Immature Aspects of Preoperational Thought (according to Piaget):

Limitation / Description
Centration: inability to decentre / Children focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others
Irreversibility / Children fail to understand some operations or actions can be reversed, restoring original situation
Focus on states rather than transformations / Children fail to understand the significance of transformation between states
Transductive reasoning / Children do not use deductive or inductive reasoning; instead they jump from one particular to another and see cause where none exists
Egocentrism / Children assume everyone else thinks, perceives, and feels as they do
Animism / Children attribute life to objects not alive
Inability to distinguish appearance from reality / Children confuse what is real with outward appearance

Causality

Piaget recognised toddlers have some understanding of connection between actions and reactions – preoperational children cannot yet reason logically about cause and effect
Transduction: ‘Piaget’s term for preoperational child’s tendency to mentally link particular experiences, whether or not there is logically a causal relationship
Young children’s understanding of familiar events in the physical world enables them to think logically about causation
Preschoolers seem to view all causal relationships as equally and absolutely predictable

Understanding of identities and categorisation

Identity: people and many things are basically the same even if they change in form, size or appearance
Categorisation: requires child to identify similarities and differences, it is a cognitive ability with psychosocial implications
Animism: tendency to attribute life to objects that are not alive

Number

Five principles of counting:

1-to-1 principle / Say only one number-name for each item being counted (‘one...two...three’)
Stable-order principle / Say number-names in a set order (‘one, two three...’ rather than ‘three, one, two...’)
Order-irrelevance principle / Start counting with any item, total count will be the same
Cardinality principle / Last-number used is total number of items being counted
Abstraction principle / Previous principles apply to any kind of object

Children extract principles from their experience ~ children younger than 3 ½ do not seem to understand cardinality principle
By 5, most children can count to 20+ and know relative sizes of numbers and some can do single digit addition and subtraction
Learning time depends on culture’s counting system and in part their education
Ordinality: concept of more or less, bigger or smaller ~ begins around 12 – 18 months and at first is limited to comparisons of very few objects, by 3 or 4 children have words for comparing quantities, by 4 or 5 children can solve Ordinality problems with up to 9 objects

Immature aspects of preoperational thought

Piaget: ‘main characteristics of preoperational thought is centration – preschoolers come to illogical conclusions because they cannot decenter’
Centration: ‘tendency of preoperational children to focus on one aspect of situation and neglect others’ – can limit young children’s thinking about physical and social relationships
Decenter: ‘think simultaneously about several aspects of a situation’

Conservation

Conservation: ‘awareness that 2 objects that are equal according to certain measure remain equal in face of perceptual alteration so long as nothing is added or taken away’
Horizontal décalage: ‘inability to transfer learning of one type of conservation to other types, which causes a child to master different types of conservation tasks at different ages’
Piaget: ‘Preoperational children cannot consider height and width at the same time. Since they centre on one aspect, they cannot think logically’ – glass experiment
Ability to conserve limited by irreversibility: ‘a preoperational child’s failure to understand that an operation can go in two or more directions’
Preoperational children think as if watching a slide show of static frames: focus on successive states and do not recognise transformation from one state to another’

Tests of Various Kinds of Conservation:

Conservation Task / What Child Is Shown / Transformation / Question for Child / Preoperational Child’s Usual Answers
Number / Two equal parallel rows of candles / Space candles in one row further apart / “Are there the same numbers of candles in each row or does one have more?” / “Longer one has more”
Length / Two parallel sticks of same length / Move one stick to the right / “Are both sticks the same size or is one longer?” / “One is longer”
Liquid / Two identical glasses holding equal amounts of liquid / Pour liquid from one glass into taller glass / “Do both glasses have same amount of liquids or is one more?” / “Taller one has more”
Matter (mass) / Two balls of clay of same size / Roll one ball into sausage shape / “Do the pieces have same amount of clay or does one have more?” / “Sausage has more”
Weight / Two balls of clay of same weight / Roll one ball into sausage shape / “Do both weigh the same or does one weigh more?” / “Sausage weighs more”
Area / Two toy rabbits, two pieces of cardboard (grassy field), blocks or toys (barns) / Rearrange barns on one piece of board / “Does each rabbit have the same amount of grass to eat or does one have more?” / “The one with block close together has more to eat”
Volume / Two glasses of water with two equal-sized balls of clay in them / Roll one ball into sausage shape / If we put the sausage back in the glass, will the water be the same height or will one be higher?” / “Water in glass with sausage will be higher”

Egocentrism

Egocentrism: ‘inability to consider another person’s point of view’

May help explain why young children have trouble separating reality from what is in their heads & why they show confusion

Other experiments point to the fact that young children may show egocentrism primarily in situations beyond their immediate experience

Do young children have theories of mind?

(Bear in mind that young children may have a clearer picture of reality than Piaget believed)

Theory of mind: awareness and understanding of mental processes
Piaget: ‘children younger than 6 cannot distinguish between thoughts or dreams and real physical entities and have no theory of mind
Recent research indicates children between 2 and 5, knowledge about mental processes grows dramatically
Methodology made a difference: Piaget posed abstract questions where they could not put understanding into words whereas contemporary researchers use vocabulary and objects children are familiar with, observe them in everyday activities or give concrete examples

Knowledge about thinking and mental states

Between 3 and 5: children come to understand that thinking goes on inside the mind; real and imaginary; can think at the same time as doing something else; person with eyes and ears covered can think about objects; thinking is different from seeing, talking touching and knowing
Not until middle childhood do children know mind is continuously active – preschoolers have little or no awareness that they or other people think in words
Not until 7 or 8 do children realise people who are asleep do not engage in conscious mental activity – do not know they are asleep
Children equate dreams to imagining – not until 11 do they realise they cannot control dreams
Social cognition: recognition that others have mental states is a distinctly human capacity that accompanies decline of egocentrism and development of empathy
14 – 18 months, children are able to infer intentions of another person from vocal expressions (Whoops!)
By 3, children realise that someone gets what he wants is happy and if not, sad

False beliefs and deception

Understanding that people can hold false beliefs flows from realisation that people hold mental representations of reality, which can sometimes be wrong
Some researchers claim 3 year olds have rudimentary understanding of false beliefs but may not show it when presented with complicated situations ~ failure to recognise false beliefs stems from egocentric thinking – everyone knows what they now and believe what they do and have trouble understanding their own beliefs can be false ~ older preschoolers advanced understanding due to decline in egocentrism
Deception: effort to plant a false belief in someone’s mind – requires child to suppress impulse to be truthful ~ children are capable of deception as early as 2
Piaget: children regard all falsehoods as lies

Distinguishing between appearance and reality

Awareness of false beliefs related to distinguishing between appearance and reality; both require child to refer to two conflicting mental representations at the same time
Piaget: ‘unable to distinguish hat it seems to be and what it is until 5 or 6’ ~ some studies however found ability emerging from before age 4
Putting the task in context of deception helped children realise that an object can be perceived as other than what it actually is
3 year olds difficulty in understanding appearance from reality may be more apparent than real

Distinguishing between fantasy and reality

Between 18 month and 3 years, children learn to distinguish between real and imagined events ~ line between fantasy and reality blurred (difficult to tell if children are being serious or pretending)
Magical thinking in children 3= does not stem from confusion between fantasy and reality – it is a way to explain events that do not seem to have obvious realistic explanations or children may enjoy pretending ~ it declines near the end of preschool period

Influences on individual differences in theory-of-mind development

Development reflects brain maturation and general improvements in cognition
Social competence and language development contribute to understanding of thought and emotions
Children with high social skills able to recognise false beliefs, distinguish between real and feigned emotion, take another person’s point of view, have strong language skills
Advanced language development and having older siblings to talk to are better able to take part in family discussions and understand falsehoods earlier than other children
Kind of talk heard at home affects understanding of mental states – cognitive talk increases with age, talk about desires and feeling diminish
Pretend play stimulates development of theory-of-mind – they try and assume other perspectives
Talking with children about how characters in story feels help develop social understanding – empathy arises earlier in children whose families talk about feelings and causality
Bilingual children do better at some theory-of-mind tasks ~ they know an object or idea can be represented linguistically in more than one way, and this knowledge helps them see different people have different perspectives ~ they also recognise need to match language of partner and indicates awareness of change in mental state ~ have better attentional control which enables them to focus on what is true or real rather than what it seems to be
Heredity plays part in theory-of-mind development
Different cultures have different views of looking at the mind, and these cultural attitudes influence children

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Private speech: Piaget versus Vygotsky

Private speech: talking aloud to oneself with no intent to communicate
Piaget: private speech = sign of cognitive immaturity ~ because children are egocentric, they are unable to recognise others’ viewpoints and therefore unable to communicate meaningfully ~ they simply vocalise whatever is on their minds. He also said they do not yet distinguish between words and the actions the words stand for or symbolise ~ by the end of preoperational stage, with cognitive maturation and social experience, children become less egocentric and more capable of symbolic thought and so discard private speech
Vygotsky: also believed private speech helps young children integrate language with thought but he did not see it as egocentric but rather a special form of communication: conversation with the self ~ says it served a very important function in transition between early social speech and inner speech – a transition toward internalisation of socially derived control of behaviour ~ private speech follows an inverted “U” shape – increases in preschool years, fades in early part of middle childhood as children become more able to guide and master their actions ~ Research supports Vygotsky as to the functions of private speech
Private speech increases when children are faced with difficult tasks, especially without adult supervision
Children progress through at least 3 levels of private speech:

1)Speech that is purely self-expressive

2)Vocal statements relevant to a task at hand

3)External signs of task-directed inner speech

Preschool girls use more mature forms of private speech than preschool boys; middle-income children use more mature forms than low-income children
Vygotsky considered need for private speech a universal stage of cognitive development – wide range of individual differences
Understanding significance of private speech has practical implications, especially in school ~ talking to oneself not a problem

Social interaction and preparation for literacy

Emergent literacy: preschoolers’ development of skills, knowledge, and attitudes that underlie reading and writing
Prereading skills:

1)General linguistic skills (vocabulary)

2)Specific skills (phonemic awareness: realisation that words are composed of distinct sounds)

Children have been taught the alphabet and other Prereading skills before entering school and tend to become better readers
Social interaction can promote emergent literacy – children more likely to become good readers and writers if, parents provide conversational challenges the children are ready for
As children learn the skills they need to translate written word into speech, they also learn that writing can express ideas, thoughts and feelings – preschool children pretend to write by scribbling, lining up their marks from left to right – later they begin using letters, numbers, and letter-like shapes to represent words, syllables or phonemes ~ often spelling so inventive they cannot read it themselves
Reading to children is one of the most effective paths to literacy ~ motivates them to learn to read
Moderate exposure to educational TV helps prepare children for literacy, especially if parents talk with children about what they see

INFORMATION-PROCESSING APPROACH: MEMORY DEVELOPMENT

Recognition and recall

Recognition: ability to identify a previously encountered stimulus
Recall: ability to reproduce material from memory
Preschool children do better on recognition than on recall but both abilities improve with age ~ the more familiar children are with item, better they can recall – recall also depends on motivation and on strategies child uses to enhance it
4-5 year olds process face-recognition information holistically, as adults do
Young children often fail to use strategies for remembering – even already known strategies – unless reminded – this tendency not to generate efficient strategies reflects lack of awareness of how a strategy would be useful ~ older children become more efficient in spontaneous use of memory strategies

Forming childhood memories

Memory of experiences in early childhood rarely deliberate: young children simply remember events that made strong impression, and most of these early conscious memories seem to be short-lived

3 types of childhood memory:

Generic memory / Episodic memory / Autobiographical memory
Memory that produces scripts (general remembered outline of a familiar, repeated event, used to guide behaviour) of familiar routines to guide behaviour / Long-term memory of specific experiences or events, linked to time and place / Memory of specific events in ones own life – specific and long lasting

The way adults talk with a child about a shared experience can influence how well the child will remember it:

Repetitive style: repeat own previous statements or questions – focus on checking child’s memory performance
Elaborative style: move on to a different aspect of event or add more information – focus on mutually rewarding conversation and affirming child’s responses

Implicit memory

“ Unconscious recall, generally of habits and skills; sometimes called procedural memory”

Influences on measured intelligence – the family environment