Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
Chapter 9
Early Childhood:
Cognitive Development
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
Jean Piaget’s
Preoperational Stage
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
How Do Children in the Preoperational Stage
Think and Behave?
• Symbolic thought and play
• Pretend play
– 12-13 months – familiar activities; i.e. feed themselves
– 15-20 months – focus on others; i.e. feed doll
– 30 months – others take active role; i.e. doll feeds itself
• Imaginary Friends
– More common among first-born and only children
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
How Do We Characterize the Logic of the
Preoperational Child?
• Lack of logical operations
– No flexible or reversible mental operations
• Egocentrism
– Only view the world through their own perspective
– Three-mountain test
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 The Three-Mountains Test
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
How Do We Characterize the Logic of
the Preoperational Child?
• Causality
– Influenced by egocentrism
• Caused by will
– Precausal thinking
• Transductive reasoning
• Animism
• Artificialism
• Confusion between mental and physical phenomena
– Believe their thoughts reflect external reality
– Believe dreams are true
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
What is Conservation?
• Properties remain the same even if you change the shape or
arrangement
• Preoperational children fail to demonstrate conservation
– Centration
– Irreversibility
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
Figure 9.2 Conservation
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
Figure 9.3 Conservation of Number
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
What is Class Inclusion?
• Including new objects/categories in broader mental classes
– Requires child focus on more than one aspect of situation at once
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
Figure 9.4 Class Inclusion
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
Evaluation of Piaget
• Piaget underestimated preschoolers abilities
– Three-mountain test
• Errors attributed to demands on child and language development
– Causality
• Logical understanding appears more sophisticated
– Conservation
• Approach may mislead child
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
What Are Some of the Factors That Influence Cognitive
Development in Early Childhood?
• Scaffolding
• Zone of Proximal Development
– Sorting doll furniture into appropriate rooms (Freund, 1990)
– Retell a story viewed on videotape (Clarke-Stewart & Beck, 1999)
– Recall of task completed in longitudinal study (Haden, et al., 2001)
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
The Effect of the Home Environment
• Home Observation for the Measurement of the Environment
– Observe parent-child interaction in the home
– Predictor of IQ scores
• Parental responsiveness, stimulation, independence
– Connected with higher IQ and school achievement
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
The Effect of Early Childhood Education
• Preschool enrichment programs for children of poverty
– Designed to increase school readiness
• Enhance cognitive development
• Parental involvement
• Provide health care and social services to children and families
– Programs have shown benefits
• Positive influence on IQ scores
• Better graduation rates
• Less likely to be delinquent, unemployed or on welfare
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
The Effect of Early Childhood Education
• Preschool enrichment for middle class children
– High parental academic expectations
•
•
•
•
Increased preschool academic skills (until kindergarten!)
Children less creative,
More anxious and
Think less positively about school
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
The Effect of Television on Cognitive Development
• Contradictory evidence
– Sesame Street – most successful educational tv show
• Regular viewing = increased skill in numbers, letters, sorting, classification
• Positive impact on vocabulary
– Impulse control
• Heavy tv viewing negatively effects impulse control
• Exposure to educational tv may have positive effect
• Commercials
• Couch-Potato Effects
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
A Closer Look
Helping Children Use
Television Wisely
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
Theory of Mind
What Is A Mind?
How Does It Work?
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
What Are Children’s Ideas About How the Mind Works?
• Theory of Mind
– Understanding of how the mind works
• Preschool-aged children
– Predict and explain behavior and emotion by mental states’
– Beginning to understand source of knowledge
– Elementary ability to distinguish appearance from reality
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
Do Children Understand Where Their
Knowledge Comes From?
• Ability to separate beliefs from another who has false knowledge of
a situation.
• Ability to deceive
• Evident by age 4, sometimes even at age 3
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
Development of Memory
Creating Files and
Retrieving Them
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
What Sort of Memory Skills Do Children Possess
in Early Childhood?
• Recognition
– Indicate whether items has been seen before
• Recall
– Reproduce material without any cues
• Preschool children
– Recognize more than they recall
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
Figure 9.6 Recognition and Recall Memory
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
Competence of Memory in Early Childhood
• Best for meaningful and familiar events
– Details are often omitted
– Unusual events have more detail
• Scripts – abstract, generalized accounts of repeated events
– Formed after one experience
– Become more elaborate with repetition
• Autobiographical memory
– Linked to development of language skills
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
What Factors Affect Memory in Early Childhood?
• Types of Memory
– Remember activities more than objects
– Remember sequenced events better
• Interest Level
– Individual interest and motivation
• Retrieval Cues
– Younger children depend on retrieval cues from adults
– Parental elaboration improves child’s memory
• Types of Measurement
– Younger children are limited in measurement by use of verbal reports
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
How Do We Remember to Remember?
• Strategies for remembering
– Rehearsal, organizing, mentally grouping
• Not used extensively until age 5
– Concrete memory aids used by young children
• Pointing, looking, touching
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
Language Development
Why “Daddy Goed Away”
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
What Language Developments Occur
During Early Childhood?
• Development of Vocabulary
– Fast-mapping
• Quickly attach new word to appropriate concept
– Whole-object assumption
• Assume words refer to whole objects, not parts or characteristics
– Contrast assumption
• Assume objects have only one label
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
What Language Developments Occur
During Early Childhood?
• Development of Grammar
– Expand telegraphic speech
• Include articles, conjunctions and possessive adjectives
– Overregularization
• Strict application of grammar rules
• Represents advances in syntax
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
Figure 9.7 Wugs
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
What Language Developments Occur
During Early Childhood?
• Development of Grammar
– Questions
• First questions are telegraphic with rising pitch at the end
• Later incorporate why questions
– Passive Sentences
• Young children have difficulty understanding passive sentences
• Do not use passive sentences
• Pragmatics
– Adjust speech to fit the social situation
– Between 3- and 5-years, develop more pragmatic skills
• Represents the ability to comprehend other perspectives
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
What Is The Relationship Between
Language and Cognition
• Cognitive development precedes language development
– Piaget: understand concept then describe it
– Vocabulary explosion (18-months) related to categorization
• Language development precedes cognitive development
– Create cognitive classes for objects labeled by words
Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, Second Edition, Spencer A. Rathus
Chapter 9
Interactionist View: Outer and Inner Speech
• Lev Vygotsky
– During first year vocalizations and thoughts are separate
– During second year thought and language combine
• Children discover objects have labels
• Learning labels becomes more self-directed
• Inner speech
– Initially children’s thought are spoken aloud
– Eventually language becomes internalized
– Language functions as self-regulative