Download 10-4 Preschool Cognition

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Test Results
Causation
Animism, realism, artificialism
Concepts of quantity
Number concepts
Measurement
Classification
Seriation
Transitive inference
Attention
Memory
Metamemory
Social Cognition
Egocentrism
Theory of Mind
Competence/performance
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Test score = (Number of multiple choice
correct X 2) + score on written questions
+ extra credit + 5 points (curve)
A – 18
B – 33
C – 32
D – 26
F - 12
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Themes of Preschool Cognitive Development
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Preschool children are active participants
in their own development.
Continual interplay between children’s
developing capacities & environment.
Cognitive limitations:
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Centration
Appearance-reality problem
Difficulty managing attention & memory
processes
Reasoning about Causation
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Reality is defined superficial appearance.
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Preschoolers use observations to construct their own
understanding of cause-and-effect relationships.
Piaget did not find mature causal reasoning until
well into middle childhood.
Other researchers found preschoolers can give
good causal explanations for simple, familiar
processes, but do not yet have an abstract
understanding of plausible cause.
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Preschoolers do not yet understand what a good
explanation is.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Reasoning About Living
and Nonliving Things
Animism:
Tendency to attribute life to nonliving things.
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Piaget noted that young children thought that
anything that moved was alive.
Others have found that their thinking is not as
animistic as previously thought but that children do
have a problem distinguishing between the
categories of living and nonliving.
There is progression in this understand throughout
this age period.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Why Clouds Move
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They move because we move.
Why do clouds move?
Why does the wind blow?
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Because the trees move?
What is the adult explanation?
Where do dreams come from?
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Lie down on the bed with me and watch my
dreams
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Reasoning About Quantity
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Concepts of Conservation
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liquid volume
number
mass
length
Once children understand conservation
(around age 7), they explain it several ways:
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compensation
reversibility
identity
the nodded added or subtracted criterion
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Reasoning About Quantity
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Concepts of Number
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addition & subtraction
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primitive rule
qualitative rule
quantitative rule
learning to count
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one-to-one principle
stable-order principle
cardinal principle
abstraction principle
order-irrelevant principle
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Reasoning About Quantity
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Concepts of Measurement
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Piaget believed knowledge of conservation
was needed to understand measurement.
Preschoolers make measurement errors
when the appearance of two equal
quantities makes them look unequal.
If there is no misleading perceptual
information, they often perform reasonable
measurement activities.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Conservation of area
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Class on 11/4
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Classification
Seriation
Transitive inference
Attention
Memory
Metamemory
Social Cognition
Egocentrism
Theory of Mind
Competence/performance
Video on Play
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Reasoning About Classes
and Logical Relations
Classification
Ability to group things by shared
characteristics, such as size or shape.
Seriation
Ability to arrange things in a logical
progression, such as from oldest to
newest.
Transitive
inference
Ability to infer relationship between two
objects by knowing their respective
relationships to a third.
Class
Any set of objects or events that are
treated as the same in certain ways
because they have common features.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Classification
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Children show a primitive form of
classification from infancy.
They are not able to classify objects
consistently until the preschool years.
Centration limits preschoolers'
classification skills.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Multiple (or cross) Classification
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X
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G
y
Z
g
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Paradigmatic syntagmatic shift
Twenty Questions
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Seriation
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Preschoolers can find the largest or
smallest stick in a fairly large group.
Difficulty placing the whole set of sticks
in order from largest to smallest.
Problems related to the appearancereality problem and to centration.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Transitive Inference
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Piaget found children could not solve
transitive inference problems until middle
childhood.
More recent studies indicated 4-year-olds
can solve them with the right training.
Preschoolers have more trouble learning
the relationships involved than older
children do.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Preschoolers’
Attention and
Memory
Abilities
Sensory
register
Short-term
(working)
memory
The part of memory where incoming
information from one of the five senses is
stored very briefly.
The part of memory where consciously
noted information is stored for 10-20
seconds.
Long-term
memory
The part of memory where information is
stored for a long time.
Attention skills Processes that control the transfer of
information from a sensory register to
working memory.
Memory skills Processes that retain information in
working memory and/or transfer it to
long-term memory.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Deploying Attention
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Although preschoolers can pay attention
to interesting events, their attentional
system is not yet fully developed.
Not until middle childhood do children
think of attention as a limited resource
that must be deployed selectively.
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Preschoolers’ Memory
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Young children are often oblivious to the
memory demands of a situation.
Abilities and Limitations
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Preschoolers demonstrate both recognition
and free recall in their daily activities.
Usually do more poorly on recall tasks than
older children and adults. They have a digit
span of 3 to 4 items.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Preschoolers’ Memory
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Speed of information processing is
slower in younger children.
Tasks require more memory space for
younger children.
They lack skill at using memory
strategies. Will use obvious strategies at
times.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Social
Cognition
Social cognition:
Understanding of the social world.
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Deals with the impact of children's cognitive
skills on their social relationships and the role
of social interaction in supporting cognitive
development.
Children start to learn how other people think
and feel, what their motives and intentions
are, and what they are likely to do.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Egocentrism in Preschoolers
Egocentrism Inability to understand others’
perspectives.
Perceptual
Not differentiating one’s own
egocentrism perceptual experience from
someone else’s.
Cognitive
Failing to take into account
egocentrism someone else’s cognitive
perspective.
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Egocentrism in Preschoolers
Overcoming egocentrism
 Knowledge of existence: Realizing other
people have thoughts, viewpoints, &
desires that differ from the child’s.
 Awareness of need: Realizing it can be
useful to consider another’s perspective.
 Social inference: Reading another
person’s actions and imagining that
person’s point of view.
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The Child’s Theory of Mind
Theory of mind:
An understanding of the mind & mental operations.
In developing a theory of mind, children come to
understand 5 principles:
1.
Minds exist.
2.
Minds have connections to the physical world.
3.
Minds are separate and different from the
physical world.
4.
Minds can represent objects & events accurately
or inaccurately.
5.
Minds actively interpret reality & emotional
experiences.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Communication and the Decline
of Egocentrism
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Egocentric speech is seen both when children
talk to themselves while playing and in
collective monologues.
Preschoolers often have difficulty
communicating information to a listener in a
nonegocentric way, especially abstract
thoughts.
Preschoolers do show some evidence of
adjusting their speech to the needs of their
listeners under certain circumstances.
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Competence-performance distinction:
There is often a difference between what
children are capable or doing under
optimal circumstances (competence) and
how they actually do a particular task
(performance).
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Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
Limited Cognitive Resources
& Communication
Script:
An abstract representation of the
sequence of actions needed to
accomplish some goal.
• A script only occasionally involves specific words
or actions.
• More often, it concerns a general idea about
appropriate things to say and do.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.
An Overview of Preschool
Cognitive Development
Cognitive advances during preschool years include:
 emerging understanding of causation
 ability to distinguish living & nonliving things
 qualitative understanding of many concepts related to
quantity
 gradual development of ability to distinguish appearance
and reality
 expanding attention & memory skills
 increasing understanding of others’ perspectives &
thoughts
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.