Cognitive Developmental
Theory
Early Childhood
PREOPERATIONAL STAGE


The preoperational stage is the second
stage.
Rapid growth in representational, or
symbolic, activity


Language is the most flexible means of mental
representation.
Stage characterized by a lack of mental
operations…hence the name!

Operations: Mental representations of actions
obeying logical rules
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PREOPERATIONAL STAGE

Two Substages:

Symbolic Function



2-4 yrs
Can represent an object not present
Intuitive Thought

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
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4-7 yrs
Primitive reasoning accompanied by lots of questions
Know things but not do not know how things work
Thought is not rational, logical
PREOPERATIONAL STAGE

What does the development of mental
representations allow children to accomplish?


Language
Make-believe play
Make-Believe Play


Increases dramatically during early
childhood
Through pretending, young children
practice and acquire representational
schemes.
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Sociodramatic Play


Appears around age 2 1/2 and increases
until 4 to 5 years.
Preschoolers who use sociodramatic play


Have advanced intellectual development
Are more social
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Limitations of Preoperational
Thought

Children’s thinking is rigid, limited to the way
things appear at the moment.


Preoperational!
Egocentrism

Inability to distinguish the symbolic viewpoints of
others from one's own

Single point of view

Do not revise faulty reasoning
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Demonstration of Egocentrism


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Three Mountain Problem
Animistic Thinking
 Inanimate objects have lifelike qualities.
Egocentric speech



Children speaking to themselves
Related to a lack of perspective taking
Cognitive maturity and experiences bring an end
to egocentric speech.
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Limitations of Preoperational
Thought

Inability to conserve

Conservation

Physical characteristics of objects remain the
same, even when outward appearance changes.
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Piagetian Conservation Tasks
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Inability to Conserve

WHY?

Centration


Perception-bound


Easily distracted by concrete appearance of objects
States versus transformations


Focus on one aspect and neglect others
The initial and final state of problem are unrelated.
Irreversibility

Inability to follow series of steps in a problem and return to
starting point
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Limitations of Preoperational
Thought

Lack of hierarchical classification


Organization of objects into classes on the basis of
similarities and differences
Piaget illustrated difficulties in the class-inclusion problem.
Flowers
blue flowers
yellow flowers
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Research on Preoperational Thought

Piagetian problems confusing


Preschoolers' responses may not reflect abilities.
If visual display includes familiar objects

4-year-olds are aware of others’ vantage points.
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THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF EARLY
CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT

Vygotsky

Infants are endowed with basic skills


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Perceptual, attention, memory
At 2 years, language acquisition profoundly
changes the nature of thought
Complex mental functions originate in social
interaction.
Important developmental constructs


Scaffolding
Zone of proximal development
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Children’s Private Speech

Piaget’s View


Piaget called children’s utterances to themselves
egocentric speech.
Vygotsky’s View



Children speak to themselves for self-guidance and
self-direction.
Language is the foundation for all complex mental
activities.
As children get older and tasks become easier, their
self-directed speech declines and is internalized.
Private Speech Research

Private speech is used more often when



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
tasks are difficult
after a child makes an error
when a child is confused about how to proceed
With age private speech changes from utterances
spoken out loud into whispers and silent lip
movements.
Almost all research findings support Vygotsky’s view.
Make Believe Play

Piaget’s View


A symptom of increasing representational
sophistication.
Vygotsky’s View

A unique zone of proximal development for
children to try out challenging activities and
acquire competencies
Social Origins of Early Childhood
Cognition: Research

Parents who are effective scaffolders have
children who use more private speech and
are more successful when asked to do a
similar task by themselves.

Children’s planning and problem solving
show more improvement when their partner
is either an “expert” peer or an adult.
Information Processing
Early Childhood
Early Childhood
Attention

During early childhood, attention becomes more
planful. Planning involves thinking out a sequence of
acts ahead of time and allocating attention
accordingly to reach a goal.

Even when young children do plan, they often fail to
implement important steps.

Development of the prefrontal cortex
Memory

Recognition


Preschoolers’ recognition memory is remarkably
good.
Recall

Young children are less effective at using memory
strategies, deliberate mental activities that improve
the likelihood of remembering


Rehearsal
Organizing information
The Young Child’s Theory of Mind

As children start to reflect on their own
thought processes, they begin to
construct a theory of mind, or set of
ideas about the mental activities. This
understanding is often called
metacognition.
The Young Child’s Theory of Mind

“Think,” “remember,” and “pretend” are among the first
verbs to appear in children’s vocabularies.

Between ages 3 and 4, children figure out that beliefs
and desires determine behavior.

By age 4, children realize that people can hold false
beliefs that combine with desire to determine behavior.

They know that people have an internal mental life, but
seem to view the mind as a passive container of
information.
The Young Child’s Theory of Mind

How Does a Theory of Mind Develop?

Various findings suggest that language,
cognitive, and social experiences contribute to
developing a theory of mind.



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Language.
Cognitive abilities.
Make-believe play and reasoning about imaginary
situations.
Social interaction.
Autism and Theory of Mind?
Early Literacy and Mathematical
Development

Mathematical
Reasoning



Ordinality is displayed by
toddlers.

Early Literacy

Emergent literacy

Move from direct
representation to symbolic
representation

Development related to
quantity of literacy related
experiences

SES correlation
Cardinality principle,
grasped between the ages
of 4 and 5
Cross-cultural research:
basic arithmetic knowledge
emerges universally
Language Development
Early Childhood
Early Childhood

Vocabulary


By 6, around 8000-14000 words
Fast mapping



Quickly connecting a new word with an underlying
concept
Preschoolers acquire labels for objects, action words next,
and then modifiers.
Grammar


Between 2 and 3, English-speaking children use simple
sentences that follow a subject-verb-object order.
Overregularization

Application of regular grammatical rules to words that are
exceptions
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Conversation

Pragmatics
 Practical, social side of language; how to
engage in appropriate communication



Children take turns, respond to partner, and maintain
a topic over time.
Are able to talk about things that are not present
Preschoolers' speech is less mature in demanding
situations.
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