















Test Results
Causation
Animism, realism, artificialism
Concepts of quantity
Number concepts
Measurement
Classification
Seriation
Transitive inference
Attention
Memory
Metamemory
Social Cognition
Egocentrism
Theory of Mind
Competence/performance


Test score = (Number of multiple choice correct X 2) + score on written questions
+ extra credit + 5 points (curve)





A – 18
B – 33
C – 32
D – 26
F - 12
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Themes of Preschool Cognitive Development



Preschool children are active participants in their own development.
Continual interplay between children ’ s developing capacities & environment.
Cognitive limitations:

Centration


Appearance-reality problem
Difficulty managing attention & memory processes

•
•
•
Reality is defined superficial appearance.
•
Preschoolers use observations to construct their own understanding of cause-and-effect relationships.
Piaget did not find mature causal reasoning until well into middle childhood.
Other researchers found preschoolers can give good causal explanations for simple, familiar processes, but do not yet have an abstract understanding of plausible cause.
•
Preschoolers do not yet understand what a good explanation is.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Animism:
Tendency to attribute life to nonliving things.
•
•
•
Piaget noted that young children thought that anything that moved was alive.
Others have found that their thinking is not as animistic as previously thought but that children do have a problem distinguishing between the categories of living and nonliving.
There is progression in this understand throughout this age period.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.





They move because we move.
Why do clouds move?
Why does the wind blow?


Because the trees move?
What is the adult explanation?
Where do dreams come from?

Lie down on the bed with me and watch my dreams
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

•
•
Concepts of Conservation
• liquid volume
•
•
• number mass length
Once children understand conservation
(around age 7), they explain it several ways:
•
• compensation reversibility
•
• identity the nodded added or subtracted criterion
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

•
Concepts of Number
•
• addition & subtraction
• primitive rule
•
• qualitative rule quantitative rule learning to count
• one-to-one principle
•
•
•
• stable-order principle cardinal principle abstraction principle order-irrelevant principle
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

•
Concepts of Measurement
•
•
•
Piaget believed knowledge of conservation was needed to understand measurement.
Preschoolers make measurement errors when the appearance of two equal quantities makes them look unequal.
If there is no misleading perceptual information, they often perform reasonable measurement activities.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.





XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX


XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXX
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.












Classification
Seriation
Transitive inference
Attention
Memory
Metamemory
Social Cognition
Egocentrism
Theory of Mind
Competence/performance
Video on Play
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Classification Ability to group things by shared characteristics, such as size or shape.
Seriation
Transitive inference
Class
Ability to arrange things in a logical progression, such as from oldest to newest.
Ability to infer relationship between two objects by knowing their respective relationships to a third.
Any set of objects or events that are treated as the same in certain ways because they have common features.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

•
•
•
Children show a primitive form of classification from infancy.
They are not able to classify objects consistently until the preschool years.
Centration limits preschoolers' classification skills.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

 1:

2:
X x
Y y
G Z g
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.



Paradigmatic syntagmatic shift
Twenty Questions
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

•
•
•
Preschoolers can find the largest or smallest stick in a fairly large group.
Difficulty placing the whole set of sticks in order from largest to smallest.
Problems related to the appearancereality problem and to centration.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

•
•
•
Piaget found children could not solve transitive inference problems until middle childhood.
More recent studies indicated 4-year-olds can solve them with the right training.
Preschoolers have more trouble learning the relationships involved than older children do.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Sensory register
Short-term
(working) memory
Long-term memory
The part of memory where incoming information from one of the five senses is stored very briefly.
The part of memory where consciously noted information is stored for 10-20 seconds.
The part of memory where information is stored for a long time.
Attention skills Processes that control the transfer of information from a sensory register to working memory.
Memory skills Processes that retain information in working memory and/or transfer it to long-term memory.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

•
•
Although preschoolers can pay attention to interesting events, their attentional system is not yet fully developed.
Not until middle childhood do children think of attention as a limited resource that must be deployed selectively.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

’
•
•
Young children are often oblivious to the memory demands of a situation.
Abilities and Limitations
•
•
Preschoolers demonstrate both recognition and free recall in their daily activities.
Usually do more poorly on recall tasks than older children and adults. They have a digit span of 3 to 4 items.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

’
•
•
•
Speed of information processing is slower in younger children.
Tasks require more memory space for younger children.
They lack skill at using memory strategies. Will use obvious strategies at times.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Understanding of the social world.
•
•
Deals with the impact of children's cognitive skills on their social relationships and the role of social interaction in supporting cognitive development.
Children start to learn how other people think and feel, what their motives and intentions are, and what they are likely to do.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Egocentrism Inability to understand others ’ perspectives.
Perceptual egocentrism
Not differentiating one ’ s own perceptual experience from someone else ’ s.
Cognitive egocentrism
Failing to take into account someone else ’ s cognitive perspective.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Overcoming egocentrism

Knowledge of existence: Realizing other people have thoughts, viewpoints, & desires that differ from the child ’ s.


Awareness of need: Realizing it can be useful to consider another ’ s perspective.
Social inference: Reading another person ’ s actions and imagining that person ’ s point of view.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

’
Theory of mind:
An understanding of the mind & mental operations.
In developing a theory of mind, children come to understand 5 principles:
1.
2.
Minds exist.
Minds have connections to the physical world.
3.
4.
5.
Minds are separate and different from the physical world.
Minds can represent objects & events accurately or inaccurately.
Minds actively interpret reality & emotional experiences.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.




Egocentric speech is seen both when children talk to themselves while playing and in collective monologues.
Preschoolers often have difficulty communicating information to a listener in a nonegocentric way, especially abstract thoughts.
Preschoolers do show some evidence of adjusting their speech to the needs of their listeners under certain circumstances.
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

There is often a difference between what children are
optimal circumstances (competence) and how they actually
(performance).
or doing under a particular task

Script:
An abstract representation of the sequence of actions needed to accomplish some goal.
• A script only occasionally involves specific words or actions.
• More often, it concerns a general appropriate things to say and do.
idea about
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Cognitive advances during preschool years include:
 emerging understanding of causation

 ability to distinguish living & nonliving things qualitative understanding of many concepts related to quantity


 gradual development of ability to distinguish appearance and reality expanding attention & memory skills increasing understanding of others ’ perspectives & thoughts
Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.