Chapter 9 Early Childhood: Cognitive Development

1. Chapter 9Early Childhood: Cognitive Development

2. Jean Piaget’s Preoperational Stage

3. 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

4. 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

5. Figure 9.1 The Three-Mountains Test

6. 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

7. What is Conservation? • Properties remain the same even if you change the shape or arrangement • Preoperational children fail to demonstrate conservation • Centration • Irreversibility

8. Figure 9.2 Conservation

9. Figure 9.3 Conservation of Number

10. What is Class Inclusion? • Including new objects/categories in broader mental classes • Requires child focus on more than one aspect of situation at once

11. Figure 9.4 Class Inclusion

12. 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

13. 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)

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. A Closer Look Helping Children Use Television Wisely

19. Theory of Mind What Is A Mind? How Does It Work?

20. 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

21. 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

22. Development of Memory Creating Files and Retrieving Them

23. 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

24. Figure 9.6 Recognition and Recall Memory

25. 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

26. 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

27. 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

28. Language Development Why “Daddy Goed Away”

29. 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

30. 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

31. Figure 9.7 Wugs

32. 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

33. 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

34. 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