Cognitive
Development
Week 5
Psychology
NJ Kang
The Ability to Solve Logical
Problems
• 7 under: preoperational logic
(Conservation)
• Children tend to focus on one
dimension or viewpoint in problem
solving rather than integrating different
dimensions or viewpoints together
• 7 over: concrete operational logic
The Ability to Solve Logical
Problems
7 over: concrete operational logic
Involving the use of logic such as
The appearance-reality distinction and
spatial cognition.
conservation, class inclusion, transitive
inferences, and perspective-taking.
Cognitive Abilities in 2 to
6 year-olds
• The Appearance-reality distinction
• At pre-operation level: children believe How it
looks is how it is
• Something looks good to eat (appearance) is
good to eat (reality).
• Milk in a cup with a red filter wrapped.(Flavell,
1993)
• At concrete level, we know it is not always like
this.
Phenomenism versus Realism
• Ellie with a bear custom.
Q: When you look at her with your eyes right now, does she look
like Ellie or does she look like a bear?
Q: Who is over there really and truly? Is she really and
truly Ellie, or is she really and truly a bear?
A: Ellie both looked like and truly was a bear Phenomenism
A: Ellie looked like and truly was Ellie Realism
Phenomenism answers and report the appearance of an
object when asked about its real properties,
or realism answers and report the reality of an object when
asked about its appearance.
Task Variations and the effects of language
Why children fail appearance –reality tasks?
 They may believe that it is to evaluate the effectiveness of a
disguise.
 Their lack of knowledge about how to deal with the apparent
contradiction between the two,
 Or their misunderstanding of the experimenter’s questions (Keil,
1989)
Sponge rock task (Sapp et al., 2000)
 Verbal task: children under 3 are able to trick someone into
thinking that a sponge that was shaped and colored to look like a
rock was actually a rock.
 nonverbal task: they can find the sponge can wipe the floor with.
Task Variations and the effects of language
The conditions under which 3 year olds understand the distinction between
appearance and reality are variable,
by the age of 4 years children certainly do have some capacity to
represent different perspectives and view points
However, when asked even a simple appearance –reality question such as
whether a piece of white paper placed behind a blue filter is really and
truly white it is not until around age 6 or 7 that children will consistently
give the correct answer.
Understanding spatial relations in 2 year-olds
Judy DeLoache (1987, 1991, 2000)
2.7 years 0 and 3.2 year-olds  X
Shown a furnished room and its scale model located in an
adjoining room.
Hid a large toy behind a furniture in the furnished room and a
small toy in the same furniture in its scale model.
The credible Shrinking room
• 2.7 year olds
Real Room hid
a Real Toy
Shrinking
Machine
Find a
shrunken toy
from the
model room
• 2.5 year-olds symbolic task
Real Room
hid a Real Toy
Asks to find a
small toy
from the
model room
Failed
Task 1
• Can you think of any other experiment
reflecting this idea?
• How can this be implied in ELT?
Conservation
• Under 7 years are nonconservers
• They lack an understanding of
invariance, the concept that quantities
remain the same despite perceptual
changes if nothing is added or
subtracted.
The different conservation problem
• The different conservation tasks are
typically passed at different ages
• Number, liquid, length, and mass : around
6 to 7
• Conservation of mass/weight: around 9
• Volume : around 11 or 12
• Horizontal decalage: they all seem to
require the same logical abilities at the
similar stage
Alternatives to Piaget’s
interpretation of the
conservation problems
Are nonconservers “perceptually seduced”?
• Gelman (1982)
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Are nonconservers “perceptually seduced”?
• Gelman (1982)
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
They were able to give a
response consistent with an
understanding of conservation
and the invariance principle.
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Turtle 1
Are nonconservers “perceptually seduced”?
• Object to these types of studies is that
children do not genuinely conserve, and
do not really understand that the same
amount remains regardless of
transformation.
Conversational confusions: Do children
understand the questions?
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
The hypothesis that children’s inability to conserve is due to a
misunderstanding of the question has been addressed in several different
ways.
McGarrigle and Donaldson (1974)
A naughty teddy accidentally not deliberately messed up one array of
counters  aged 4 to 6 were significantly more likely to conserve.
Light et al., (1979): liquid conservation task
A group of 5 and 6-year-olds: showed two glasses of water.
Accidentally one of them was chipped and poured the liquid into a new
glass that was taller and narrower, more likely to conserve
Rose and Blank (1974) use of only one question after the row
transformation than asking questions two before and after transformation
(Are there the same number in both rows or does one row have more?).
Class inclusion
• That require knowledge of part-whole or
inclusion relations.
• Are there more roses or flowers?
• Superordinate (flowers) or subset (roses)
• Pragmatic understanding:
The Effects of changing the task
Linguistic misunderstandings?
• Chapman and McBride (1992)
• Gave 4 – to 10- year-olds two versions of a
class inclusion task involving seven toy horses
(5 brown 2 white)
• 1) Are there more horses or more brown horses?
(All standing)
• 2) Are there more sleeping horses or more
brown horses?  linguistic cues more salient
and more successful  most children could not
effectively justify their answers.
Transitive Inferences
• Young children under about 7 years
of age cannot reliably coordinate
two separate pieces of information
together in order to make a logical
inference.
• A>B, B> C  A>C
Transitive Inferences
• Bryant and Trabasso (1971)
• Children aged 4-6 years could succeed on this
task should steps be taken to ensure that they
remembered the premises.
• Giving names A: Tall, B: short and tall, C: short.
• More names: red>Green> blue> yellow.
• Very young even 4 years olds can do it.
• But has the issue of a false positive pattern of
responses.
• Young children after all do possess inferential
abilities. But maybe simply relying on their
spatial representation abilities (having a mental
Perspective -taking
• Egocentrism permeates young
children’s thinking and is a severe,
general limitation on their knowledge of
the world (Piaget)
• Egocentrism: child’s difficulty in
understanding things from another
person’s point of view
Perspective -taking
• Three mountain task
• Under 7 year old cannot describe a scene from other
people’s perspective but their own vantage point.
• Newcombe and Huttenlocher (1992)
• Children’s difficulties on the Piagetian tasks come from
their lack of knowledge or experience in selecting different
perspectives from an array of pictures
• With 4 toys and a doll experiment children did all well.
• Children’s perspective-taking seems crucially dependent
on task demands.
What is the cause of the transition in
cognitive development?
• Children 7 and most 5 year olds often do not succeed on
measures of the
• appearance-reality distinction,
• spatial cognition,
• conservation,
• class inclusion,
• transitive inferences, and
• perspective taking.
• 
Lack of pre-existing schemas
What is the cause of the transition in
cognitive development?
For Piaget, Assimilation and Accommodation
Assimilation:
Assimilate by attempting unsuccessfully to use these
structures as strategies to solve tasks involving
conservation etc.
children, eventually, adapt to the environment, they
recognize the existence of a conflict between their present
strategies and the strategies required for solving the
problem at hand.
Accommodation
 they accommodate (change) the structure of their thinking
in order to embrace a new strategy that enables successful
problem solving.
  Equilibrium.
What is the cause of the transition in
cognitive development?
Information –Processing Change
The development of specific Brain structures
Conversational awareness.
Cultural influences on cognitive development.
Cultural influences on cognitive
development.
• A transition from synthetic models to mature,
culturally received mental models.
• Children’s knowledge of the shape of the earth.
• Naïve theory or folk theories generated by
constraints that can be seen as entrenched
presuppositions which are resistant to change as
these are constantly confirmed by every day
experience.
• Synthectic model (1) the earth is a flat plane (2)
unsupported objects fall down on an up-down
gradient  coherence of beliefs and assumptions
about something shaped by culture.
Questions
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Think about the changes that take place in children’s thinking around the
ages of 3 to 6 years. How might these developments help children solve
Piaget’s concrete operational tasks?
Is it reasonable to claim that young children understand the
experimenter’s questions in tests of their cognitive understanding and
development?
What evidence suggests that young children are egocentric?
Can children make transitive inferences?
Think about the roles of culture and brain development in cognitive
development.
Do we understand what causes the major developments in children’s
thinking that occur around ages 6 to 7 years?
Think about Piaget’s conservation problems. Why do you think young
children fail them, and what develops to enable the older child to
succeed at these tasks?