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Sunday, December 26, 2010

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

When we left the infant towards the end of the sensorimotor period, he had attained object permanence, was increasingly able to manipulate objects as playthings and tools, and was exploiting the greater skills of others by copying behaviours that appeared successful. These kinds of developments enable the child to engage in a higher level of representation. While the early sensorimotor infant’s schemes consisted of concrete actions, towards the end of this stage he becomes able to develop mental schemas.

The child can now use
objects to symbolize others, and is beginning to use sounds (words) for the same purpose. These skills are very useful, and the child exploits them increasingly. This leads to a new stage in development, which Piaget called the preoperational period. [preoperational period the second major phase of cognitive development, according to Piaget, extending from approximately two to six years, when the child begins to represent the world symbolically but remains intuitive and egocentric]

The preoperational period
This stage of development extends from approximately two to six years, and a number of important cognitive developments are achieved during this time. Foremost is the ability to symbolize – to represent the world in images and language. This enables children to extend their understanding fundamentally. The child becomes able to represent past and future, and to think about objects or events that are not immediately present. This soon becomes evident in forms of activity like pretend play (figure 9.6). If the sensorimotor child disappoints her parents by playing more with the wrapping than the present, the preoperational child will surprise them with the news that the box is actually a helicopter and it plans to land on the building – represented by the coffee table. Although Piaget saw the preoperational period as a time of important cognitive advances, he also emphasized the limitations of the child’s thought processes at this stage. He believed that one of the most profound limitations during this phase is egocentrism –[egocentrism inability of the preoperational child to distinguish between his/her own perspective on a situation and the perspectives of others] a tendency another person’s perspective. Piaget found many illustrations of egocentrism in his interviews with children, in his studies of their language in preschool settings, and in his experiments. The next time you get an opportunity to listen to the language of preschool children, consider the extent to which they are conversing in the way you and I would understand a conversation, such as exchanging a series of linked remarks about the same topic. A typical preschooler in one of Piaget’s major studies, Lev, engaged regularly in monologues, talking about his own activities to no one in particular: (Sitting down alone at a table): I want to do that drawing, there . . . I want to draw something, I do. I shall need a big piece of paper to do that. (After knocking over a game): There! Everything’s fallen down. (Upon finishing his drawing): Now I want to do something else. (Piaget, 1926, p. 14) preschoolers like Lev accompany their actions with words in this way when alone and when in the presence of audiences. Close connections to others’ utterances do not appear to be essential to the activity: Pie (aged 6y 5m): Where could we make another tunnel? Ah, here, Eun?
Eun (4y 11m): Look at my pretty frock. (Piaget, 1926, p. 58)
Pie (the older child) is trying to establish coordinated efforts but Eun has her own concerns. In a major study of the language of preschoolers (1926), Piaget noted that, although the children were being studied in close proximity to their peers, more than one-third of their utterances were either not directed to anyone or were so esoteric that nobody else could understand them. So, according to Piaget, the preoperational child tends to be dominated by his perceptual experiences and finds it difficult to imagine other aspects of an experience, such as how another person perceives things. The preschooler talks but does not always link her remarks to those of others. In an experimental task, the child centres attention on one aspect of a task, and fails to consider the relevance of other dimensions. Piagetians call this cognitive bias centration. Probably the best known example of this is Piaget’s famous conservation test. [centration when a preoperational child focuses on only one aspect of a problem at a time]

A preoperational child is presented with two beakers of the same shape and size. The equivalent amount of water is poured into each beaker, and the child is asked whether the amount in each is the same. Once this is agreed, a new beaker, taller and thinner than the original, is produced. The liquid from one of the original beakers is transferred to the third. The child is asked again whether the amount is the same. Preoperational children often insist that the amount has changed. They might see it as more than before, or less than before, but certainly not the same. Although the amount of liquid is actually unchanged, the child’s perceptual experience indicates otherwise – it looks taller – and this tends to dominate the child’s judgment. The child appears to have centered on one aspect of the transformation in the liquid (the increase in height) but has failed to take account of the other (the decrease in width). Another example is the ‘three mountains’ perspective task. Piaget challenged Piaget’s account of the limitations on preschool children’s thinking has been subject to many challenges. Some researchers have objected that the standard conservation task induces the child to give erroneous responses by asking the same question – ‘Are they the same or different?’ – Twice. In between, the experimenter has changed the display, and, in any case, every child knows that when a grown-up asks you a question twice, it usually means you gave the wrong answer the first time. When the question is asked only once, higher proportions of preschoolers give the correct (conserving) answer (Rose & Blank, 1974). The task demands also appear to bear heavily on children’s performance. Borke (1975) provided three- and four-year-olds with a perspective task, which involved viewing a set of familiar objects on a turntable. The task was to rotate the set to show how the objects would look from the perspective of a Sesame Street character, Grover, as he drove around the display. A majority of the children performed well, and only a small proportion made egocentric errors. It seemed as if the combination of more familiar materials and a more motivating task appeared to enable these preschoolers to demonstrate competencies that Piaget believed are attained much later in development. Other research has also shown that preschool children are able to incorporate complex ideas into their pretend play, to follow successive actions and to make predictions about their consequences. For example, Harris, Kavanaugh, and Meredith (1994) had two- and three-year-olds watch puppets pour pretend cereal into a bowl. Children could understand this idea, and could also follow the next step, in which the puppet pretended to use the pretend cereal to feed a toy animal. They could anticipate that if a puppet poured pretend milk or powder into a bowl and then tipped the bowl over an animal, the animal would get wet or powdery. This seems simple enough to us, but it points to impressive representational abilities in the child, who creates a mental image of the ce real, milk or powder and then operates on the mental image to imagine subsequent transformations. These are cognitive skills that Piaget maintained were not available during the preoperational stage. Piaget certainly pointed to some intriguing aspects of child thought, indicating that preschoolers may sometimes interpret the world quite differently from adults. Subsequent research indicating that he may have underestimated the competence of the preschooler (Bryant, 1974; Donaldson, 1978) qualifies rather than invalidates his work. After all, even if the conservation task and the ‘three mountains’ task do have methodological limitations, these tasks do appear to pose problems for preschoolers but not for older children. If you can, try the tasks out yourself with a few children aged three to eight. Invite the children to explain their responses, and judge for yourself whether Piaget has provided us with fascinating (or misleading) insights into developmental changes in children’s thinking.



Paul L. Harris (1946– ) is currently based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Harris is interested in the early development of cognition, emotion and imagination. His recent book, The Work of the Imagination, gathers together several years of research carried out at Oxford University, where he taught developmental psychology. Currently, he is studying how far children rely on their own first-hand experience or alternatively on what people tell them – especially when they confront a new domain of knowledge.


Margaret Donaldson (1926– ), author of the highly influential book Children’s Minds, worked as a child development psychologist at Edinburgh University. Donaldson challenged Piaget’s method of studying egocentricity in children, after producing different results when she applied a social dimension to Piagetian tasks given to preschoolers. Donaldson argued that the preschoolers’ inability to perform Piaget’s tasks was due to their difficulties with understanding (or abstracting) the questions, and not to their egocentricity or lack of logical skills.

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