Cognitive Developmental Theory Early Childhood

2 PREOPERATIONAL STAGE The preoperational stage is the second stage. Rapid growth in representational, or symbolic, activity  Language is the most flexible means of mental representation. Stage characterized by a lack of mental operations…hence the name!  Operations: Mental representations of actions obeying logical rules

PREOPERATIONAL STAGE Two Substages:  Symbolic Function 2-4 yrs Can represent an object not present  Intuitive Thought 4-7 yrs Primitive reasoning accompanied by lots of questions Know things but not do not know how things work Thought is not rational, logical

PREOPERATIONAL STAGE What does the development of mental representations allow children to accomplish?  Language  Make-believe play

5 Make-Believe Play Increases dramatically during early childhood Through pretending, young children practice and acquire representational schemes.

6 Sociodramatic Play Appears around age 2 1/2 and increases until 4 to 5 years. Preschoolers who use sociodramatic play  Have advanced intellectual development  Are more social

7 Limitations of Preoperational Thought Children’s thinking is rigid, limited to the way things appear at the moment.  Preoperational! Egocentrism  Inability to distinguish the symbolic viewpoints of others from one's own  Single point of view Do not revise faulty reasoning

8 Demonstration of Egocentrism Three Mountain Problem Animistic Thinking  Inanimate objects have lifelike qualities. Egocentric speech  Children speaking to themselves  Related to a lack of perspective taking  Cognitive maturity and experiences bring an end to egocentric speech.

9 Limitations of Preoperational Thought  Inability to conserve Conservation  Physical characteristics of objects remain the same, even when outward appearance changes.

10 Piagetian Conservation Tasks

11 Inability to Conserve  WHY? Centration  Focus on one aspect and neglect others Perception-bound  Easily distracted by concrete appearance of objects States versus transformations  The initial and final state of problem are unrelated. Irreversibility  Inability to follow series of steps in a problem and return to starting point

12 Limitations of Preoperational Thought Lack of hierarchical classification  Organization of objects into classes on the basis of similarities and differences  Piaget illustrated difficulties in the class-inclusion problem. blue flowers yellow flowers Flowers

13 Research on Preoperational Thought Piagetian problems confusing  Preschoolers' responses may not reflect abilities. If visual display includes familiar objects  4-year-olds are aware of others’ vantage points.

14 THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT Vygotsky  Infants are endowed with basic skills Perceptual, attention, memory  At 2 years, language acquisition profoundly changes the nature of thought  Complex mental functions originate in social interaction.  Important developmental constructs Scaffolding Zone of proximal development

Children’s Private Speech Piaget’s View  Piaget called children’s utterances to themselves egocentric speech. Vygotsky’s View  Children speak to themselves for self-guidance and self-direction.  Language is the foundation for all complex mental activities.  As children get older and tasks become easier, their self-directed speech declines and is internalized.

Private Speech Research  Private speech is used more often when tasks are difficult after a child makes an error when a child is confused about how to proceed  With age private speech changes from utterances spoken out loud into whispers and silent lip movements.  Almost all research findings support Vygotsky’s view.

Make Believe Play Piaget’s View  A symptom of increasing representational sophistication. Vygotsky’s View  A unique zone of proximal development for children to try out challenging activities and acquire competencies

Social Origins of Early Childhood Cognition: Research Parents who are effective scaffolders have children who use more private speech and are more successful when asked to do a similar task by themselves. Children’s planning and problem solving show more improvement when their partner is either an “expert” peer or an adult.

Information Processing Early Childhood

Attention During early childhood, attention becomes more planful. Planning involves thinking out a sequence of acts ahead of time and allocating attention accordingly to reach a goal. Even when young children do plan, they often fail to implement important steps. Development of the prefrontal cortex

Memory Recognition  Preschoolers’ recognition memory is remarkably good. Recall  Young children are less effective at using memory strategies, deliberate mental activities that improve the likelihood of remembering Rehearsal Organizing information

The Young Child’s Theory of Mind As children start to reflect on their own thought processes, they begin to construct a theory of mind, or set of ideas about the mental activities. This understanding is often called metacognition.

The Young Child’s Theory of Mind “Think,” “remember,” and “pretend” are among the first verbs to appear in children’s vocabularies. Between ages 3 and 4, children figure out that beliefs and desires determine behavior. By age 4, children realize that people can hold false beliefs that combine with desire to determine behavior. They know that people have an internal mental life, but seem to view the mind as a passive container of information.

The Young Child’s Theory of Mind How Does a Theory of Mind Develop?  Various findings suggest that language, cognitive, and social experiences contribute to developing a theory of mind. Language. Cognitive abilities. Make-believe play and reasoning about imaginary situations. Social interaction. Autism and Theory of Mind?

Early Literacy and Mathematical Development Mathematical Reasoning  Ordinality is displayed by toddlers.  Cardinality principle, grasped between the ages of 4 and 5  Cross-cultural research: basic arithmetic knowledge emerges universally Early Literacy  Emergent literacy  Move from direct representation to symbolic representation  Development related to quantity of literacy related experiences  SES correlation

Language Development Early Childhood

27 Early Childhood Vocabulary  By 6, around words  Fast mapping Quickly connecting a new word with an underlying concept Preschoolers acquire labels for objects, action words next, and then modifiers. Grammar  Between 2 and 3, English-speaking children use simple sentences that follow a subject-verb-object order.  Overregularization Application of regular grammatical rules to words that are exceptions

28 Conversation Pragmatics  Practical, social side of language; how to engage in appropriate communication Children take turns, respond to partner, and maintain a topic over time. Are able to talk about things that are not present Preschoolers' speech is less mature in demanding situations.