Cognitive Development I

QUICK LOOK AT THE CHAPTER AHEAD

The early childhood years are synonymous with Piaget’s preoperational period.
Children’s mental lives expand noticeably during these years.
The outstanding mental achievement of these years is the growing ability to represent people, things, objects, and events.
Children of these years tend to focus on only one aspect of something, a characteristic known as centration.
Conservation remains a problem for children at this cognitive level.
Early-childhood youngsters begin to master the notion of classification.
Explanations of causality are linked to association without distinguishing cause and effect.

The physical changes discussed in Chapter 31 are not the only significant developmental advances occurring during the early childhood years. The mental lives of these children expand considerably as they extend their formation and use of ideas and demonstrate startling growth in their language development and usage. To help us better understand what is happening in the cognitive world of these children, we turn once again to Piaget.

PREOPERATIONAL PERIOD

Piaget referred to the period from ages 2½ to 6 as preoperational (or “prelogical”) because it precedes the period of concrete operations that is associated with the school-age years, roughly ages 7 to 11. Preschoolers think about things in ways that infants and toddlers do not: They represent ideas in their minds (representation). They recognize that physical events have explanations, although their explanations may not make sense. Preschool-aged children try to figure things out, but there are limitations in their ability to reason logically.

Preoperational thinking is referred to as “magical,” meaning that children’s ideas about how the world works can be quite fanciful and are not grounded in the principles of physics (Table 32-1). A young child truly believes he or she can disappear down the bathtub drain.

Table 32-1 Preoperational Period

Characteristics	Examples
Centration	Focus on one aspect of something at a time (e.g., how much juice in a glass depends on either width or height, but not both).
Perceptually bound	Deal with appearances, cannot work out a problem in their minds; not impressed by magic tricks because they do not appreciate the trick.
Cause by association	If two events happen close together, one is assumed to have caused the other.
Lack of conservation: mass	Thinks a ball of clay gets bigger when it is rolled into a snake.
Lack of conservation: number	Given two rows of 10 M&Ms each, will say the row that is more spead out contains more.
Lack of conservation: quantity	Says the glass with the most juice is the taller one, even if the child just saw it poured from a shorter to wider glass.
Classification	Classify objects based on only one aspect (e.g., color, size).