1. PSYC 206
Lifespan Development
Bilge Yagmurlu

2. Chapter Overview Brain Development Preoperational Development
Information-Processing Approaches to Cognitive Development
Cognitive Development in Privileged Domains

3. Brain Development Brain Development
Changes in myelination, neuron connections, and unevenness of growth
After infancy, brain development slows
80% of adult weight at start of early childhood
90% of adult weight at age 5
Contributions to growth
Myelination of the frontal cortex
Length and branching of neural connections
Synaptic pruning

4. Brain Development
Variability in developing different areas of the brain
May contribute to unevenness of early childhood cognition
Visualizing, planning and controlling actions
Scale errors

5. Preoperational Development
The preoperational stage
From Piaget’s theory
Cannot perform mental operations
Mental operations:
The mental process of combining, separating, or transforming information logically.

6. Centration
The tendency to focus on only one feature of an object to the exclusion of all others.
According to Piaget, the greatest limitation of young children’s thinking
Gives rise to 3 common errors:
Egocentrism
Confusion of appearance and reality
Precausal reasoning

7. Egocentrism Egocentrism:
The tendency to be captive to one’s own perspective and unable to take that of another
tendency to ¨center¨: volume conservation tasks, class inclusions tasks
lack of spatial perspective taking
egocentric speech: not listener oriented
lack of “theory of mind”

8. Egocentrism Children cannot grasp the concept of conservation.
Understanding that physical properties of objects can remain the same even when their form changes.

9. Conservation

10. Conservation Conservation of Substance Conservation of Number
2 identical balls of clay
One is deformed
“Do the two pieces have the same amount of clay?”
Conservation of Number
2 identical rows of coins
One row is rearranged
“Do the two rows have the same number of coins?”

11. Class Inclusion Tasks 8 beads: 5 black, 3 white
Are there more black beads or white beads? Black...
Are there more black beads or beads?
According to Piaget, they center on only one level of categorization
cannot consider the two levels
simultaneously

12. Lack of Spatial Perspective Taking
Allowed to view diorama (3 mountain experiment) from all sides
Seated on one side; doll on opposite side
Asked to identify how things would look to doll
Almost always chose view corresponding to their own point of view

13. Speech Egocentrism
Piaget emphasizes the egocentric nature of preschoolers’s speech (collective monologues)
where no actual communication takes place
children separated by a screen from peers were asked to describe the blocks on their side of the screen to the listener so that s/he can manipulate the blocks similarly
most 4- and 5-year-olds used many egocentric terms such as “put this one first...”

14. Lack of Theory of Mind
Ability to represent others’ mental states such as thoughts, beliefs, and desires
There is a single reality and people may have different representations
Understanding false belief: how someone comes to have a mistaken belief about something
A child has a mature understanding of the mind around years of age

15. Unexpected Change Paradigm

16. Unexpected Contents Task
Show the child an M&M box: “What’s inside this box?”
Following the answer, open the box, show there is a pencil in it. Put the pencil back inside the box, close it:
“Ayse has not seen inside this box. Now I’m going to invite her into the room and show her the box all closed up like this, in the same way I showed you. Then, I’ll ask what’s inside the box. Will Ayse think there are candies in it or will she think there is pencil in it?”

17. Lack of Theory of Mind
“ Pencil! ”:  cannot represent mental state of other child
“ Candies! ”:  can distinguish reality, own thought and other thought
3-Year-Old will suggest pencils
4-Year-Old will correctly predict candy

18. Confusing Appearance and Reality
Young children may often confuse appearance and reality
Sponge-Rock task: showed a sponge which looked like a rock
3-year-olds insisted it is a rock although they were asked to handle it

19. Precausal Reasoning
The tendency to reason from one particular to another, rather than engaging in cause-and-effect reasoning
Why do people die? Because there are graveyards…
Why do I take a nap? Because it is afternoon…
What makes the sun shine? Because the sky is blue…