1. Early Childhood: Cognitive Development
CHAPTER 9
Early Childhood:
Cognitive Development

2. Learning Outcomes
LO1 Outline the cognitive developments of Piaget’s preoperational stage.
LO2 Discuss factors in cognitive development, focusing on Vygotsky’s views and the effects of the home environment, early childhood education, and television.
LO3 Discuss the development of theory of mind, including false memories, origins of knowledge, and the appearance–reality distinction.
LO4 Discuss memory development during early childhood, including strategies for remembering.
LO5 Outline language development during early childhood and explain the interactions between language and cognition.
These are the Learning Outcomes from the text for this chapter.
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3. TRUTH OR FICTION?
T-F A preschooler’s having imaginary playmates is a sign of loneliness or psychological problems.
T-F Two-year-olds tend to assume that their parents are aware of everything that is happening to them, even when their parents are not present.
T-F “Because Mommy wants me to” may be a perfectly good explanation for a a 3-year old.
T-F Children’s levels of intelligence, not just their knowledge, are influenced by early learning experiences.
T-F Three-year olds are likely to say “Daddy goed away” instead of “Daddy went away” because they do understand rules of grammar.
Good to open class discussion on the topics within this chapter.
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4. LO1 Jean Piaget’s Preoperational Stage.
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5. Jean Piaget’s Preoperational Stage
2nd Stage in Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development: Preoperational Stage
Age 2-7 years: Early Childhood
Includes concepts of:
Symbolic Functioning
Egocentrism
Centration

6. Jean Piaget’s Preoperational Stage
Symbolic Thought
Using symbols to represent objects and relationships
Most important type of symbolic activity: language
Drawings are also symbols of objects, people, events
Symbolic or Pretend Play
Around 1 year children may pretend they are sleeping or eating (focus is on self).
By months focus shifts from self to others (pretending to feed doll).
By 30 months they can pretend the doll feeds itself (objects take an active role).
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7. Jean Piaget’s Preoperational Stage
Symbolic or Pretend Play, con’t.
Imaginary Friends
65% of preschoolers have imaginary friends
Most common among firstborn or only children
Children with imaginary friends are:
Less aggressive; more cooperative; more creative; have more real friends; have better concentration; are more advanced in language development
Implications of Pretend Play
Quality of pretend play is connected to later academic performances, creativity, and social skills
Those who engage in violent Pretend Play are less empathic and more likely to engage in antisocial later on.
Answer to F-F? # 1 - A preschooler’s having imaginary playmates is a sign of loneliness or psychological problems. FICTION - Having an imaginary playmate does not mean that the child has problems with real relationships.

8. Jean Piaget’s Preoperational Stage
Egocentrism: It’s All About Me
Preoperational children do not understand that other people may see the world differently than they do.
They think in one-dimensional terms which leads to viewing the world only from their own perspective.
The “Three Mountains Test” exhibits that children 5-6 yrs old can only relate information from their existing viewpoint.
Answer to T-F? # 2 - Two-year-olds tend to assume that their parents are aware of everything that is happening to them, even when their parents are not present. TRUE - They may view the world as a stage that has been erected to meet their needs and amuse them.

9. Jean Piaget’s Preoperational Stage
Three Mountains Test:
Child is shown a table with models of 3 mountains on it.
Each mountain is a different color, one has a house on it, and another has a cross on top of it.
A doll is placed across the table from the child (if the doll could see, it would have a different view of the scene).
The child is asked what the doll sees.
Since language abilities are not developed enough for a child at this stage to provide verbal descriptions of objects or events they are directly observing, they can answer in one of two ways:
By selecting a photo taken from the dolls view
Or by constructing another model of the mountains as they would be seen by the doll
The child usually selects a photo or builds another model that corresponds to their own viewpoints.

10. Figure 9.1 - The Tree-Mountains Test

11. Jean Piaget’s Preoperational Stage
Egocentrism: It’s All About Me, con’t.
Causality: (other facets of egocentrism)
Precausal: When preoperational children are asked questions about events and they do not know the natural causes of those events, their answers are likely to have an egocentric flavor and not be based on science.
Transductive Reasoning: Children at this stage will “reason” by going from one specific isolated event to another. They will attribute “cause-and-effect” to totally unrelated events.
Animism: Children will attribute life and intentions to inanimate objects at this stage.
Artificialism: The child assumes that environmental features such as rain and thunder have been designed and made by people
Answer to T-F? # 3 - “Because Mommy wants me to” may be a perfectly good explanation, for a 3-year old. TRUE - this belief about causality is common in a preoperational child.

12. Jean Piaget’s Preoperational Stage
Egocentrism: It’s All About Me, con’t.
Confusion of Mental and Physical Events: (other facets of egocentrism)
2-4 years: children show confusion between symbols and the things they represent
Egocentrism contributes to the assumption that their thoughts exactly reflect external reality.
They do not recognize that words are arbitrary and people can use different words to refer to the same objects.

13. Jean Piaget’s Preoperational Stage
Conservation:
The law of conservation holds that properties of substances such as volume, mass, and number remain the same, or are conserved, even if you change their shape or arrangement.
Centration
Conservation requires the ability to focus on two aspects of a situation at once, such as height and width.
Preoperational children tend to focus on only one aspect of a problem at a time.
Irreversibility
The preoperational child does not understand that things can be restored to their original condition.
Class inclusion
Including new objects or categories in broader mental classes or categories
Preoperational children are not yet capable of focusing on two aspects of a situation at the same time.

14. Figure Conservation

15. Figure 9.3 - Conversation of Number

16. LO2 Factors in Cognitive Development.
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17. Factors in Cognitive Development
The “HOME” Environment:
An acronym for The Home Observation for the Measurement of the Environment
A testing tool developed to evaluate the effects of a child’s home environment on their cognitive development.
Parent/child interactions are directly observed in the home; the inventory contains six subscales.
The HOME inventory is a better predictor of later IQ scores than social class, mother’s IQ, or infant IQ scores.
Early learning experiences affect children’s levels of intellectual functioning.
The home environment is the single most important predictor of scores on IQ tests in children ages 3-8 yrs.
Answer to T-F? # 4 - Children’s levels of intelligence - not just their knowledge - are influenced by early learning experiences. TRUE - their intelligence, defined as scores on standardized intelligence tests, can change.

18. Table 9.2 – Scales of the HOME Inventory

19. Factors in Cognitive Development
Effects of Early Childhood Education:
Preschool education enables children to get an early start on achievement in school.
Programs that involve and educate parents are particularly beneficial.
Effects of Poverty
Children raised in poverty generally score lower on IQ tests and are at greater risk for school failure.
Environmental enrichment can enhance the cognitive development of economically disadvantaged children.
Head Start
Federally funded program started in 1960s for low income families
Designed to increase readiness for elementary school
Head Start and similar programs are effective and lead to gains in in school readiness and achievement tests.

20. Factors in Cognitive Development
Effects of Television:
Hours
American children spend more time watching TV than they do in school.
By age 3 yrs, the average child watches 2-3 hrs of TV a day
Children’s Television Act (1990)
Requires networks devote 3 hours per week, between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m., to educational television.
Sesame Street is the most successful example; it’s shown to increase intellectual growth in preschool children, especially those in lower SES.
Commercials
Preschoolers cannot differentiate between content of commercials and programming.
Commercials encouraging nutritionally inadequate foods are harmful to their nutritional beliefs and diets.

21. LO3 Theory of Mind
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22. Theory of Mind A “common sense” understanding of how the mind works
Knowing the difference between real and mental events
Knowing the difference between how things appear and how they really are
Being able to infer perceptions, thoughts, and feelings of others
Understanding that mental states affect behavior

23. Theory of Mind
Research shows preschoolers can accurately predict and explain human action and emotion in terms of mental states
Indicators:
False Beliefs:
By age 4-5 yrs, most children are able to separate their beliefs from those of another person who has false knowledge of a situation.
Origins of Knowledge: (how we acquire knowledge)
By age 3 yrs, realization that people gain knowledge about something by looking at it
By age 4 yrs, understand the distinction between senses: color through eyes, weight through feeling, etc.
The Appearance-Reality Distinction:
Knowing the difference between reality and fantasy or misleading appearances
Piaget believed this did not occur until age 7-8 years

24. Figure 9.4 – False Beliefs
This is Fig. 9.5 on p. 310 of Childhood & Adolescences: Voyages, 3rd ed

25. LO4 Development of Memory.
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26. Development of Memory Age 1-2 yrs: Age 3 yrs: Age 4 yrs:
Can remember specific events called autobiographical memory or episodic memory
Are facilitated by talking about them with others
But are seldom retained into adulthood
Age 3 yrs:
Can present coherent, orderly accounts of familiar events
Scripts: abstract, generalize accounts of recurring events; lacking in detail; not case specific
Scripts begin forming after a single event and get more elaborate with repeated experience.
However, unusual events (something traumatic or highly emotional) may be remembered in specifically in detail for years.
Age 4 yrs:
Can remember events that happened at least 1.5 years earlier

27. Development of Memory Factors Influencing Memory Interest Level
Children typically show better recognition and recall for preferred toys
Retrieval Cues or Reminders
Easier to remember events that follow a fixed, logical order
Using a computer analogy: you must have a name for a file in order to locate it; the name is the retrieval cue
Young children depend of elders to help them retrieve memories
Asking questions and elaborating on the child’s experience aid in child’s ability to remember
What Measure of Memory is Used
Verbal reports, especially from preschoolers, appear to underestimate the child’s memory.
Using “props” to reenact an event shows better recall ability

28. Development of Memory Memory Strategies: Remembering to Remember
Rehearsal:
The act of repetition: saying something over and over helps to integrate the memory into long-term memory
Typically use of rehearsal begins about age 5
Organization:
Assigning categories to things
Grouping objects into related categories aid in remembering
Even 3-4 year olds will use both rehearsal and organization if they are asked to remember something

29. LO5 Language Development: Why “Daddy Goed Away”
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30. Language Development Development of Vocabulary
Preschoolers learn an average of 9 new words a day.
Fast-Mapping
Process whereby the child quickly attaches a new word to its appropriate concept
Whole-Object Assumption
They also assume that words refer to whole objects and not to their component parts or characteristics.
Contrast Assumption
Also known as the mutual exclusivity assumption
Children will seem to assume that objects have only one label.
Therefore new words must refer to unfamiliar objects, not ones that are already named

31. Language Development Development of Grammar
Age 3: “grammar explosion” occurs
Sentence structure expands to include missing words as seen in telegraphic speech.
By age 3-4, children show knowledge of rules for combing phrases and clauses into complex sentences.
Over-regularization
Children acquire grammatical rules as they learn language.
At younger ages they tend to apply the rules rather strictly, not allowing for exceptions.
This leads to errors such as incorrect past tense and pluralization use.
Answer to T-F# 5 - Three-year-olds are likely to say “daddy goed away” instead of “Daddy went away” because they DO understand rules of grammar. TRU - they are correctly applying a rule for forming the past tense of regular verbs to an irregular verb.

32. Language Development Asking Questions:
Children’s first questions are telegraphic and characterized by a rise in pitch.
Consistent with general cognitive development:
End of 3rd year: begins the “what, who, where” questions
By age 4, they begin to ask the “why, when, which, and how” questions.
Later on, the child will add the auxiliary verbs to indicate present, past, or future tenses.
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33. Language Development Passive Sentences: Pragmatics:
2-3 yr olds have difficulty understanding passive sentences and almost never use them.
Even at 5-6 yrs, they usually will not use.
Pragmatics:
Refers to the practical aspects of communication
Children show pragmatism when they adjust their speech to fit the social situation.
They will show more formality in word choice and syntax when role-playing high-status figures.
Once children are able to perceive the world through the eyes of others, they advance in ability to make themselves understood.

34. Language Development Language and Cognition Cognition First?
Piaget believed cognitive development precedes language, arguing that children must first understand concepts before using words to describe them.
Some studies support that theory: for example, the vocabulary explosion seen at 18 mos is related to the child’s ability to group objects into categories
Language First?
Other researchers argue that children create cognitive classes to understand things that are already labeled by words.
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35. Language Development Language and Cognition, con’t.
Currently most developmental researchers find value in both views.
In the early stages of language development, concepts often precede words (many first words describe classes that have already developed).
But later language skills reflect that language influences thought
Vygotsky
Inner Speech
The ultimate binding of language and thought
Involved in development of planning and self-regulation and facilitates the learning process
At first, children’s thoughts are spoken aloud.
3-year olds talk out loud to themselves to regulate behavior.
Gradually by age 6-7 spoken words become internalized.