COGNITIVE

DEVELOPMENT
Piagetian Approach:
The Preoperational Child
PREOPERATIONAL STAGE
• Piaget’s second stage.
• Lasting from approximately
ages 2 to 7.
• Characterized by an
expansion in the use of
symbolic thought.
• Preoperational Children are
not yet ready to engage in
logical mental operations.
ADVANCES OF PREOPERATIONAL
THOUGHT
 The Symbolic Function
 Being able to think about
something in the absence of
sensory motor cues.
 Piaget’s term for ability to
use mental representations
(words, numbers, or images)
to which a child has attached
meaning.
 Having symbols for things
helps children remember and
think about them without
having them physically
present.
 Variety of Symbolic Functions
As the child pretends  Deferred Imitation
to feed the teddy bear
with milk like a baby,  Children imitate an action at some point after having
he is showing a major observed it , becomes more robust after 18 months.
cognitive
achievement: deferred
 Requires a child to have kept a mental representation of
imitation, the ability to an observed action.
act out a behaviour he  A child must pull a representation out of memory in
observed some time
before. order to repeat it.
 Pretend Play
 Also called fantasy play, dramatic play, or imaginary
play.
 Children use an object to represent something else.
 Language
 Is a system of symbols.
Example: the word “key” is a symbol for the class of objects
The girl use her pet cat to act used to open doors. When we see the emergence of
language on young children, we have a wide and clear
as her playmate. Pretend play.
window into their increasing use of the symbolic function.
ADVANCES OF PREOPERATIONAL
THOUGHT
 Understanding of Objects in Space
 Children begin to understand the symbols that describe physical spaces,
although this process is slow.
 Until at least age 3 most children reliably grasp the relationships between
pictures, maps, or scale models and the objects or spaces they represent.
 Older preschoolers can use simple maps, and they can transfer spatial
understanding gained from working with models to maps and vice versa
(DeLoache, Miller, & Pierroutsakos, 1998; Sharon & DeLoache, 2003).
 Understanding of Causality
 Piaget maintained that preoperational children cannot yet reason logically
about cause and effect. Instead, he said, they reason by Transduction.
 Transduction - Piaget’s term for a preoperational child’s tendency to mentally
link particular phenomena, whether or not there is logically a causal relationship.
 ADVANCES OF PREOPERATIONAL
THOUGHT
 Understanding of Identities and Categorization
 The concept that people and many things are basically the same even if they change in outward form, size, or
appearance.
 Categorization, or classification, requires a child to identify similarities and differences.
 Animism – Tendency to attribute life to objects that are not alive.
 In general, it appears that children attribute animism to items that share characteristics with living things: things
that move, make sounds, or have lifelike features such as eyes.
 Understanding of Number
 9 to 11 months. Other research has found that ordinality – the concept of comparing quantities (more or less,
bigger or smaller) – seems to begin at this rate.
 Age 4. Most children have words for comparing quantities.
 Not until age 3 1/2 or older do most children consistently apply cardinality principle in counting (Sarnecka & Carey,
2007; Wynn, 1990).
 Age 5. Most children can count 20 or more and know the relative sizes of the numbers 1 through 10 (Siegler,
1998). Children intuitively devise strategies for adding by counting on their fingers or by using other objects
(Naito & Miura, 2001).
 Elementary School Age. Most children have developed basic number sense (Jordan, Kaplan, Olah, &Locuniak,
2006). This basic level of number skills includes:
 Counting
 Number knowledge (ordinality)
 Number transformations (simple addition and subtraction)

IMMATURE ASPECTS OF PREOPERATIONAL
THOUGHT
 Centration
 In Piaget’s theory, the tendency of preoperational children to focus on
one aspect of a situation and neglect others. According to Piaget,
preschoolers come to illogical conclusions because they cannot
decenter.
 Decenter – In Piaget’s terminology, to think simultaneously about several
aspects of a situation.
 Centration can limit young children’s thinking about both social and
physical relationships.
 Egocentrism – is a form of centration. Piaget’s term for inability to consider
Piaget’s
another person’s point of view, a characteristic of Three- Mountainthought.
young children’s Task
A preoperational child is
unable to describe the
mountains from the doll’s point
of view – an indication of
egocentrism, according to
Piaget.
 IMMATURE ASPECTS OF PREOPERATIONAL
THOUGHT
 Conservation – another classic
example of centration. Piaget’s term
for awareness that two objects that are
equal according to a certain measure
remain equal in the face of perceptual
alteration so long as nothing has been
added to or taken away from either
object.
 Preoperational children’s responses are
influenced by two immature aspects of
thought: centration and irreversibility.
Centrarion involves focusing on one
dimension while ignoring the other.
 Irreversibility- Piaget’s term for a

preoperational child’s failure to

understand that an operation can
go in two or more directions.
DO YOUNG CHILDREN HAVE THEORIES OF
MIND?

 Theory of mind
 Awareness and
understanding of
mental processes.
 Having a theory of
mind allows us to
understand and predict
the behaviour of others
and makes the social
world understandable.
Several Aspects of Theory of Mind
 Knowledge about Thinking and Mental
States
 Between ages 3 and 5, children come to
understand that thinking goes on inside the mind;
that it can deal with either real or imaginary
things; that someone can be thinking of one thing
while doing or looking at something else; that a
person whose eyes and ears are covered can
think about objects; that someone who looks
pensive is probably thinking; and that thinking is
different from seeing, talking, touching, and
knowing (Flavell, 2000; Flavell et al., 1995).
 False beliefs and Deception
 The understanding that people can hold false
beliefs flows from the realization that people
hold mental representations of reality, which can
sometimes be wrong.
 Deception is an effort to plant false belief in
someone else’s mind. Some studies have found A sample act of False Beliefs and
that children become capable of deception as Deception.
early as age 2 or 3; others at 4 or 5.
Several Aspects of Theory of Mind
 Distinguishing between Appearance
and Reality
 According to Piaget, not until about age 5
or 6 do children begin to understand the
distinction between what seems to be and
what is.
 Some studies have found this ability
beginning to emerge before age 4.
 Distinguishing between Fantasy and
Reality Is it really Mickey Mouse? The
 Magical Thinking – a way to explain child isn’t quite sure. The ability
to distinguish fantasy from
events that do not seem to have obvious
reality develops by age 3, but 4
realistic explanations (usually because to 6 years olds may imagine that
children lack knowledge about them), or a fantasy figure is real.
simply to indulge in the pleasure of
pretending---as with a belief in imaginary
companions.
Several Aspects of Theory of Mind
 Influence on Individual Difference in Theory-of-Mind Development
 Infant social attention has been closely linked to theory of mind development.
 Social competence and language development also contribute to an
understanding of thoughts and emotions.
 Children whose teachers and peers rate them high on social skills are better able
to recognize false beliefs, and also tend to have strong language skills.
 The kind of talk a young child hears at home may affect the child’s
understanding of mental states.
 Empathy usually arises earlier in children whose families talk a lot about
feelings and causality.
 Families that encourage pretend play stimulate the development of theory –of-
mind skills.
 Bilingual children, who speak and hear more than one language at home, do
somewhat better than children with only one language on certain theory-of-mind
tasks.
 Brain development is also necessary for theory of mind.
 An incomplete or ineffective theory of mind may be a sign of cognitive or
 MEMORY DEVELOPMENT:
BASIC PROCESSES AND CAPACITIES
 Memory - described as filing system that has 3 steps,
or process:
 Encoding – Process by which information is prepared
for long-term storage and later retrieval.
 Storage – Retention of information in memory for
future use. Three types of storage:
 Sensory Memory – Initial, brief, temporary storage of
sensory information.
 Working Memory – Short-term storage of information being
actively processed.
 Executive function – Conscious control of thoughts, emotions,
and actions to accomplish goals or solve problems.
 Long-Term Memory – Storage of virtually unlimited
capacity that holds information for long periods.
 Central executive – In Baddeley’s model, element of working
memory that controls the processing information. Orders
information encoded for transfer to long-term memory.
 Retrieval – Process by which information is accessed or
 MEMORY DEVELOPMENT:
 RECOGNITION AND RECALL - are
types of Retrieval.
 Recall – Ability to reproduce material or
knowledge from memory.
 Recognition – Ability to identify a
previously encountered stimulus.
 Three Types of Childhood Memory:
 Generic Memory – Memory that
produces scripts of familiar routines to
guide behaviour.
 Script – General remembered outline of a Young children are
familiar, repeated event, used to guide most likely to
behaviour. remember unique
 Episodic Memory – Long-term memory events and may recall
specific experiences or events, linked to details from a special
time and place. trip for a year or
 Autobiographical Memory – Memory of longer.
 MEMORY DEVELOPMENT:
 Factors that Influence on Memory
Retention
 Uniqueness of the event. When event are
rare or unusual as well as those events with
emotional impact, children seems to
remember them better.
 Children’s active participation.
Preschoolers tend to remember things they
did better than things they merely saw.
 Self-awareness. In one experiment, self-
awareness at age 2 was predictive of the
ability to retell stories more accurately at age
3.
 Social interaction model. Model, based on
Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, that
proposes children construct autobiographical
 INTELLIGENCE: Psychometric and Vygotskian
Approaches
 Traditional Psychometric
Measures
 Stanford- Binet Intelligence
Scales – Individual
intelligence test for ages 2
and up used to measure fluid
reasoning, knowledge,
quantitative reasoning,
visual-spatial processing, and
working memory.
 Wechsler Preschool and
Primary Scale of
Intelligence, Revised
(WPPSI-IV) – Individual
intelligence test for children
ages 2 1/2 to 7 that yields
verbal and performance
scores as well as a combined
 Testing and Teaching based on Vygotsky’s Theory

 Zone of Proximal Development

(ZPD)
 Vygotsky’s term for the difference
between what a child can do alone
and what the child can do with help.
 The ZPD can be assessed by dynamic
tests.
 Dynamic tests – emphasize potential
rather than present achievement and
strive to measure learning processes
directly rather than through the
products of past learning.
 Scaffolding
 Temporary support to help a child
master a task.
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT:
 VOCABULARY
 Fast mapping – Process which a child absorbs the
meaning of a new word after hearing it once or twice in
conversation.
 GRAMMAR AND SYNTAX
 Grammar – when Psychologist’s speak of grammar, they
are referring to the deep underlying structure of a language
that enables us to both produce and understand utterances.
 Syntax – is a related concept and involves the rules for
putting together sentences in a particular language.
 PRAGMATICS AND SOCIAL SPEECH
 Pragmatics – The practical knowledge needed to use
language for communicative purposes.
 Social Speech – Speech intended to be understood by a
listener.
 PRIVATE SPEECH
 Talking aloud to oneself with no intent to communicate
 LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT:
 DELAYED LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
 Children who speak late do not necessarily lack
linguistic input at home.
 Hearing problems;
 Head and facial abnormalities may be associated
with speech and language delays;
 Premature birth; About 5 to 8 percent of preschool children
 Family history; show speech and language delays (U.S.
 Socioeconomic factors; Preventive Services Task Force, 2006).
 And other developmental delays.
 PREPARATION FOR LITERACY
 Emergent Literacy – Preschoolers’ development
of skills, knowledge, and attitudes that underlie
reading and writing.
 Prereading skills can be divided into two types:
1. Oral language skills.
2. Specific phonological skills (linking letters with
sounds).
 Social interaction is an important factor in
 LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT:
 MEDIA AND COGNITION
 Preschool-age children comprehend the symbolic nature of television and can readily imitate
behaviours they see.
 By the age of 3 children are active media users, able to pay greater attention to dialogue and
narrative.
 Program content is an important mediator. (See table below)
Using Media Responsibly
• Limit screen time to the least amount possible.
• Set guidelines for appropriate viewing for all media, including TV, videos/DVDs, movies, and
games.
• Protect children from inappropriate media.
• Require that children ask before turning on media.
• Remove TVs, video game systems, and computers from bedroom.
• Watch programs and movies together and discuss what you are watching.
• Use media in a positive way to spark imagination and creativity.
• Limit the number of products you purchase for your child that are linked to TV programs.
 EARLY CHILDHOOD
EDUCATION:
 TYPES OF PRESCHOOLS
 Montessori Method
 started by Italy’s first female physician, Maria
Montessori.
 Is based on the belief that children’s natural
intelligence involves rational, spiritual, and empirical
aspects.
 Children are grouped into multi-age classrooms;
infancy to age 3 is considered “the unconscious
absorbent mind”. And age 3 to 6 is considered the
“conscious absorbent mind” (Montessori 1995).
 The Reggio Emilia Approach
 Loriz Malaguzzi, the school’s founding director, was
a social constructivist strongly influenced by Dewey,
Piaget, Vygotsky, and Montessori. He envisioned an
“education based on relationships” that supported the
child’s connections to people, society, and the
environment (Malaguzzi, 1993).
 Reggio Emilia is a less formal model than
Montessori.
 Learning is purposeful but less defined than with the
 EARLY CHILDHOOD
EDUCATION:
 COMPENSATORY PRESCHOOL
PROGRAMS
 Designed to aid children who would
otherwise enter school poorly
prepared to learn.
 Research has shown that children who
are enrolled in compensatory
preschool programs show academic
and cognitive gains.
 The best known of these programs in
the United States is Project Head
Start, a federally funded program
launched in 1965.
 Head Start provides medical, dental, and
mental health care; social services; and
at least one hot meal a day.
EARLY CHILDHOOD
EDUCATION:
 THE CHILD IN KINDERGARTEN
 People thought of Kindergarten as a
transition time between home or
preschool and the structure of grade
school and academic instructions.
 Now Kindergarten in the United States
has become more like first grade and
emphasizes academics.
 Findings highlight the importance of the
preparation a child receives before
kindergarten.
 Adjustment to kindergarten can be eased
by enabling preschoolers and parents to
visit before the start of kindergarten,
shortening school days early in the
school year, having teachers make home
visits, holding parent orientation