Download PIAGET`S THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

October 10, 2005
THE MINDS OF PRESCHOOLERS - Lecture Notes
Pass out study guide and announce review session last half hour on October 19 (exam 3 - Oct 24)
Remind people that Obs Journal 2 is due on Oct 17 and Virtual Child (2-4 years) is due on Oct 26
A. Piaget’s "preoperational period"
1. Symbolic thinking is the ability to use one thing to stand for ("re-present") another.
2. After 18 mos, child becomes increasingly proficient at using symbols (examples are that child
understands that spoken words actually stand for something, understands pictures, can engage in
pretend play)
3. Preoperational = the child lacks organized mental operations until about 6-7 years of age
4. Mental operation: strategy or rule that makes thinking more systematic and more powerful (e.g.,
the number of objects in a set is only changed by addition or subtraction (conservation of number)
5. Lack of mental operations leads to three main limitations in thinking, according to Piaget:
a. egocentrism (difficulty seeing the world from another person's perspective) (3 mountain example
on Powerpoint)
b. centration - inability to concentrate on more than one aspect of a problem (conservation examples
on Powerpoint)
c. distinguishing appearance and reality - cat with dog mask example (picture on Powerpoint)
B. What is developing during the preoperational period?
1. Piaget's emphasis on what preschoolers could not do left a gap in our understanding of preschoolers
2. DeLoache found a fairly abrupt change in the ability to use a scale model to find a toy (video)
4. Hypothesis: child develops the ability to relate two symbolic representations between 2 1/2 and 3
5. Focus on Research in your book describes a really clever experiment to test this hypothesis:
a. Rationale: if you convince children the entire room shrinks to the size of the model it should be
easier because they no longer have to hold two representations in mind.
b. Design: they ran two groups (design is not very clear in the text)
First group had the standard design shown in (a). They hid Big Terry and the child searched for
Little Terry in the scale model. Child can search only if s/he mentally represents the model-toroom relationship.
Second group began with the set up shown in (b). They demonstrated to the child that the
room could be shrunk by a special machine to look like (c) and that Terry could be shrunk too.
Once child believed in the machine, E hid Terry in the big room while child watched. Took
child out and shut the door while the room was shrunk. Then child was led in and saw the
model display. DeLoache reasoned that the child no longer had to mentally represent the
model-to-room relationship and so the search would be easier. The nice part of the design is that
the hiding process is the same, and the model display they search in is the same, it's just that they
now believe the shrunken room IS the big room - it's no longer a representation of it.
c. Results: "shrinking the room" greatly improved 2 1/2 year olds performance (show graph)
c. Conclusions: there is progress in symbolic thinking during the early preschool years. Means that
there is active development during the preschool years. Fits the data on brain development and
observations that preschoolers are constantly exploring and asking questions.
6. Researchers have found three general problems with Piaget’s view of preschoolers:
a. knowledge develops earlier and more gradually (shrinking room experiment and many more)
b. Piaget was vague about the cognitive processes involved in change. E.g., centration errors
may be a byproduct of limitations in attention, memory or counting skill
c. Piaget ignored sociocultural influences. E.g., Oaxacan potters’ kids’s early grasp of
conservation
B. Naïve theory approach (addresses the earlier understandings shown by children)
1. Assumes human brain evolved innate and specific learning mechanisms in certain core domains
such as physics, biology, psychology and language (will cover language on Wednesday)
The theorists are simply arguing that the child has a natural tendency to explore these domains, ask
questions about them, form hypotheses & constantly revise them.
2. Physics: recall that infants acquire working principles of physics just from observing objects development of physical knowledge continues in the preschool years but it is far from the adult level
3. Biology: preschoolers study & classify living things based on biological principles such as movement,
growth, etc. (see book). The child actively classifies things based on these principles. Much is
learned
by observing living creatures and asking questions of adults.
4. Psychology: development of a “theory of mind” is essential to normal social interaction
a. Watch the Scientific American "Frontiers" video to see some astonishing demonstrations
b. Symbolic thinking & pretend play provides basic information about goals and desires of others
c. By age 2 years, they understand they and other people have different desires & goals
d. At about age 3, distinguish the mental from the physical world but it's shaky (TV can fool them)
e. At about age 4 - 5, they pass the tests in the video - they understand beliefs influence actions as
shown by cross-cultural data where the same task was given in 5 cultures (Callaghan et al., 2005):
rural middle class town in Canada, rural town in Peru (Andes), Samoa (traditional Polynesian village governed by a chief, India (private schools), & Thailand (Buddhist temple school for
impoverished children. Used the following script: E shows C a trinket and says it is her favorite.
E hides it under a bowl and leaves. Second E says let's play a trick and gets the child to hide it
Under a different bowl. 2nd E asks, where will first E look for it when she comes back?
Results are shown in the slide (most failed at 3, even at 4, passed at 5)
g. Indicates theory of mind is a universal product of biological maturation, cognitive development &
social interaction (universal doesn't mean it's innate, just that it develops in all cultures under
normal
circumstances)\
h. Autistic children: Baron-Cohen showed they have a specific problem thinking about mental states
shows that biological deficit can interfere with dev of theory of mind (not sure how yet).
There is environmental variation (e.g., in rare cultures that don't discuss mental states, it develops
more slowly in the children
C. Information processing theories – really a whole class of theories (addresses mechanisms of change)
1. Children are active problem solvers and make use of same general processing mechanisms as adults
2. Explaining conservation failures (e.g., conservation of number task you may be doing for Obs 2)
a. preschoolers can’t regulate attention very well – they improve if you make the change less salient
b. preschoolers can’t manage working memory very well – do better if trained to encode numbers
c. preschoolers are still developing counting skills – they do better with smaller arrays of objects
4. Rather than broad stage-like changes, IP researchers believe there is a more gradual improvement of
attention, memory, and problem solving strategies
5. Children's memory - autobiographical memory is fascinating and it emerges in preschool years
a. helps you construct a personal life history and share memories with others
b. recall that people can't remember much before age 3 (due probably to language, self concept)
c. but during the preschool years, adults help children recall their experiences
6. Young children as eyewitnesses
a. Vital social issue is whether young children can testify in court
b. Legal profession as well as psychologists have viewed them as unreliable - let judge decide
c. Enter the memory researchers!
1) How good are their memories for unusual events at various ages?
a) interviewing children after visit to doctor: they are fairly accurate at ages 3-7
b) but over a 12 week period, youngest children were increasingly likely to make errors
2) How susceptible are they to suggestions that might change their memories?
a) young children provide little info in response to open-ended questions, so interviewers
probe for more info - studies show even silly suggestions can enter children's memories
b) this tendency becomes worse if questions are repeated, as they often are in legal settings
c) children often feel adults know more than them, so if they ask, it must be true
d) children want to please adults, and have been known to change answers - the new answer
becomes a part of their memory (this happens if adults believe something happened)
e) the tendency to respond to repeated suggestions diminishes gradually after age 7
d. Leads to a number of suggestions about improving children's testimony:
1) interview them immediately & get it on videotape
2) ask open-ended questions but don't probe for more information with suggestions
3) if children change their answers, try to determine the reasons
4) don't make them feel they have to respond a certain way to please the adults
Quiz 5: Describe two ways in which Piaget's view of preschool children has been updated by naïve theory
research or information processing research