COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN
One rainy morning, as I observed in our laboratory preschool, Leslie, the children’s teacher, joined me at the back of the room. “Preschoolers’ minds are such a blend of logic, fantasy, and faulty reasoning,” Leslie reflected. “Every day, I’m startled by the maturity and originality of what they say and do. Yet at other times, their thinking seems limited and inflexible.”

Leslie’s comments sum up the puzzling contradictions of early childhood cognition. Hearing a loud thunderclap outside, 3-year-old Sammy exclaimed, “A magic man turned on the thunder!” Even after Leslie explained that thunder is caused by lightning, not by a person turning it on, Sammy persisted: “Then a magic lady did it.”

In other respects, Sammy’s thinking was surprisingly advanced. At snack time, he accurately counted, “One, two, three, four!” and then got four cartons of milk, one for each child at his table. But when his snack group included more than four children, Sammy’s counting broke down. And after Priti dumped out her raisins, scattering them in front of her on the table, Sammy asked, “How come you got lots, and I only got this little bit?” He didn’t realize that he had just as many raisins; his were simply all bunched up in a tiny red box. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN.

To understand Sammy’s reasoning, we turn first to Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories and evidence highlighting the strengths and limitations of each. Then we consider additional research on young children’s cognition inspired by the information-processing perspective, address factors that contribute to individual differences in mental development, and look at the dramatic expansion of language in early childhood.

image4 Piaget’s Theory: The Preoperational Stage
As children move from the sensorimotor to the preoperational stage , which spans the years 2 to 7, the most obvious change is an extraordinary increase in representational, or symbolic, activity. Infants and toddlers’ mental representations are impressive, but in early childhood, representational capacities blossom.

Advances in Mental Representation
Piaget acknowledged that language is our most flexible means of mental representation. By detaching thought from action, language permits far more efficient thinking than was possible earlier. When we think in words, we overcome the limits of our momentary experiences. We can deal with past, present, and future at once and combine concepts in unique ways, as when we imagine a hungry caterpillar eating bananas or monsters flying through the forest at night.

But Piaget did not regard language as the primary ingredient in childhood cognitive change. Instead, he believed that sensorimotor activity leads to internal images of experience, which children then label with words (Piaget, 1936/1952 ). In support of Piaget’s view, children’s first words have a strong sensorimotor basis (see Chapter 5 ). In addition, infants and toddlers acquire an impressive range of categories long before they use words to label them (see page 127 ). But as we will see, Piaget underestimated the power of language to spur children’s cognition. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN.

Make-Believe Play
Make-believe play is another excellent example of the development of representation in early childhood. Piaget believed that through pretending, young children practice and strengthen newly acquired representational schemes. Drawing on his ideas, several investigators have traced the development of make-believe during the preschool years.

Development of Make-Believe.
One day, Sammy’s 20-month-old brother, Dwayne, visited the classroom. Dwayne wandered around, picked up a toy telephone receiver, said, “Hi, Mommy,” and then dropped it. Next, he found a cup, pretended to drink, and then toddled off again. Meanwhile, Sammy joined Vance and Priti in the block area for a space shuttle launch.

“That can be our control tower,” Sammy suggested, pointing to a corner by a bookshelf. “Countdown!” he announced, speaking into his “walkie-talkie”—a small wooden block. “Five, six, two, four, one, blastoff!” Priti made a doll push a pretend button, and the rocket was off!

Comparing Dwayne’s pretend play with Sammy’s, we see three important changes that reflect the preschool child’s growing symbolic mastery:

· ? Play detaches from the real-life conditions associated with it. In early pretending, toddlers use only realistic objects—a toy telephone to talk into or a cup to drink from. Their earliest pretend acts usually imitate adults’ actions and are not yet flexible. Children younger than age 2, for example, will pretend to drink from a cup but refuse to pretend a cup is a hat (Rakoczy, Tomasello, & Striano, 2005 ). They have trouble using an object (cup) that already has an obvious use as a symbol of another object (hat).

After age 2, children pretend with less realistic toys (a block for a telephone receiver). Gradually, they can imagine objects and events without any support from the real world, as Sammy’s imaginary control tower illustrates (O’Reilly, 1995 ; Striano, Tomasello, & Rochat, 2001 ). And by age 3, they flexibly understand that an object (a yellow stick) may take on one fictional identity in one pretend game (a toothbrush) and another fictional identity (a carrot) in a different pretend game (Wyman, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, 2009 ). COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN.

· ? Play becomes less self-centered. At first, make-believe is directed toward the self—for example, Dwayne pretends to feed only himself. Soon, children direct pretend actions toward other objects, as when a child feeds a doll. Early in the third year, they become detached participants, making a doll feed itself or pushing a button to launch a rocket (McCune, 1993 ). Increasingly, preschoolers realize that agents and recipients of pretend actions can be independent of themselves.

· ? Play includes more complex combinations of schemes. Dwayne can pretend to drink from a cup, but he does not yet combine pouring and drinking. Later, children combine schemes with those of peers in sociodramatic play , the make-believe with others that is under way by the end of the second year and increases rapidly in complexity during early childhood (Kavanaugh, 2006 ). Already, Sammy and his classmates can create and coordinate several roles in an elaborate plot. By the end of early childhood, children have a sophisticated understanding of role relationships and story lines (Göncü, 1993 ).

Make-believe play increases in sophistication during the preschool years. Children pretend with less realistic toys and increasingly coordinate make-believe roles, such as bus driver and passengers.

LOOK AND LISTEN
Observe the make-believe play of several 2- to 4-year-olds. Describe pretend acts that exemplify important developmental changes.

In sociodramatic play, children display awareness that make-believe is a representational activity—an understanding that strengthens over early childhood (Lillard, 2003 ; Rakoczy, Tomasello, & Striano, 2004 ; Sobel, 2006 ). TAKE A MOMENT… Listen closely to a group of preschoolers as they assign roles and negotiate make-believe plans: “You pretend to be the astronaut, I’ll act like I’m operating the control tower!” In communicating about pretend, children think about their own and others’ fanciful representations—evidence that they have begun to reason about people’s mental activities.

Benefits of Make-Believe.
Today, Piaget’s view of make-believe as mere practice of representational schemes is regarded as too limited. Play not only reflects but also contributes to children’s cognitive and social skills. Compared with social nonpretend activities (such as drawing or putting puzzles together), during sociodramatic play preschoolers’ interactions last longer, show more involvement, draw more children into the activity, and are more cooperative (Creasey, Jarvis, & Berk, 1998 ).

It is not surprising, then, that preschoolers who spend more time at sociodramatic play are seen as more socially competent by their teachers (Connolly & Doyle, 1984 ). And many studies reveal that make-believe strengthens a wide variety of mental abilities, including sustained attention, memory, logical reasoning, language and literacy, imagination, creativity, and the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking, regulate one’s own emotions and behavior, and take another’s perspective (Bergen & Mauer, 2000 ; Berk, Mann, & Ogan, 2006 ; Elias & Berk, 2002 ; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2009 ; Lindsey & Colwell, 2003 ; Ogan & Berk, 2009 ; Ruff & Capozzoli, 2003 ). We will return to the topic of early childhood play in this and the next chapter.

Symbol–Real-World Relations
To make believe and draw—and to understand other forms of representation, such as photographs, models, and maps—preschoolers must realize that each symbol corresponds to something specific in everyday life. In Chapter 5 , we saw that by the middle of the second year, children grasp the symbolic function of realistic-looking photos, and around age 2½, of TV and video. When do children comprehend other challenging symbols—for example, three-dimensional models of real-world spaces?

In one study, 2½- and 3-year-olds watched an adult hide a small toy (Little Snoopy) in a scale model of a room and then were asked to retrieve it. Next, they had to find a larger toy (Big Snoopy) hidden in the room that the model represented. Not until age 3 could most children use the model as a guide to finding Big Snoopy in the real room (DeLoache, 1987 ). The 2½-year-olds did not realize that the model could be both a toy room and a symbol of another room. They had trouble with dual representation —viewing a symbolic object as both an object in its own right and a symbol. In support of this interpretation, when researchers made the model room less prominent as an object, by placing it behind a window and preventing children from touching it, more 2½-year-olds succeeded at the search task (DeLoache, 2000 , 2002 ). Recall, also, that in make-believe play, 1½- to 2-year-olds cannot use an object that has an obvious use (cup) to stand for another object (hat). Likewise, 2-year-olds do not yet grasp that a line drawing—an object in its own right—also represents real-world objects.

Similarly, when presented with objects disguised in various ways and asked what each “looks like” and what each “is really and truly,” preschoolers have difficulty. For example, when asked whether a stone painted to look like an egg “is really and truly” an egg, children younger than age 6 often responded “yes” (Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1987 ). But simplify these appearance–reality tasks by permitting children to solve them nonverbally, by selecting from an array of objects the one that “really” has a particular identity, and most 3-year-olds perform well (Deák, Ray, & Brenneman, 2003 ). They realize that an object can be one thing (a stone) while symbolizing another (an egg). COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN.

How do children grasp the dual representation of symbolic objects? When adults point out similarities between models and real-world spaces, 2½-year-olds perform better on the find-Snoopy task (Peralta de Mendoza & Salsa, 2003 ). Also, insight into one type of symbol–real-world relation helps preschoolers master others. For example, children regard realistic-looking pictures as symbols early because a picture’s primary purpose is to stand for something; it is not an interesting object in its own right (Preissler & Carey, 2004 ; Simcock & DeLoache, 2006 ). And 3-year-olds who can use a model of a room to locate Big Snoopy readily transfer their understanding to a simple map (Marzolf & DeLoache, 1994 ). In sum, experiences with diverse symbols—photos, picture books, make-believe, and maps—help preschoolers appreciate that one object can stand for another.

Preschoolers who experience a variety of symbols come to understand dual representation—for example, that this dollhouse is an object in its own right but can also stand for another, a full-sized house where people live.

Limitations of Preoperational Thought
Aside from gains in representation, Piaget described preschoolers in terms of what they cannotunderstand (Beilin, 1992 ). As the term preoperational suggests, he compared them to older, more competent children who have reached the concrete operational stage. According to Piaget, young children are not capable of operations—mental actions that obey logical rules. Rather, their thinking is rigid, limited to one aspect of a situation at a time, and strongly influenced by the way things appear at the moment.

Egocentrism.
For Piaget, the most fundamental deficiency of preoperational thinking is egocentrism —failure to distinguish others’ symbolic viewpoints from one’s own. He believed that when children first mentally represent the world, they tend to focus on their own viewpoint and simply assume that others perceive, think, and feel the same way they do. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN.

Piaget’s most convincing demonstration of egocentrism involves his three-mountains problem, described in Figure 7.5 . He also regarded egocentrism as responsible for preoperational children’s animistic thinking—the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities, such as thoughts, wishes, feelings, and intentions (Piaget, 1926/1930 ). Recall Sammy’s firm insistence that someone must have turned on the thunder. According to Piaget, because young children egocentrically assign human purposes to physical events, magical thinking is common during the preschool years.

Piaget argued that preschoolers’ egocentric bias prevents them from accommodating, or reflecting on and revising their faulty reasoning in response to their physical and social worlds. To understand this shortcoming, let’s consider some additional tasks that Piaget gave to children.