Early Childhood: Cognitive Development

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Chapter 9Early Childhood Cognitive Development
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Early Childhood Cognitive Development Truth or
Fiction?

• A preschoolers having imaginary playmates is a
  sign of loneliness or psychological problems.
• Two-year-olds tend to assume that their parents
  are aware of everything that is happening to
  them, even when their parents are not present.

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Early Childhood Cognitive Development Truth or
Fiction?

• Because Mommy wants me to may be a perfectly
  good explanation for a 3-year-old.
• One and 2-year olds are too young to remember the
  past.

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Early Childhood Cognitive Development Truth or
Fiction?

• Childrens levels of intelligence not just
  their knowledge are influenced by early
  learning experiences.
• A highly academic preschool education provides
  children with advantages in school later on.

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Early Childhood Cognitive Development Truth or
Fiction?

• During her third year, a girl explained that she
  and her mother had finished singing a song by
  saying, We singed it all up.
• Three-year-olds usually say Daddy goed away
  instead of Daddy went away because they do
  understand the rules of grammar.

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Jean Piagets Preoperational Stage
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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

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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

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Figure 9.1 The Three-Mountains Test
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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

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What is Conservation?

• Properties remain the same even if you change the
  shape or arrangement
• Preoperational children fail to demonstrate
  conservation
• Centration
• Irreversibility

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Figure 9.2 Conservation
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Figure 9.3 Conservation of Number
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What is Class Inclusion?

• Including new objects/categories in broader
  mental classes
• Requires child focus on more than one aspect of
  situation at once

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Figure 9.4 Class Inclusion
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Lessons in Observation Piagets Preoperational
Stage

• Describe Jean Piagets preoperational stage of
  development.
• How does the ability to use mental symbols to
  represent objects change the way that children
  interact in the world?
• Describe the behaviors exhibited by the children
  in the video that illustrate representational or
  symbolic activity.

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Lessons in Observation Piagets Preoperational
Stage

• Using examples from the video, discuss Piagets
  concept of egocentrism.
• Why are children in the preoperational stage more
  egocentric than older children, according to
  Piaget?

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Lessons in Observation Piagets Preoperational
Stage

• What is conservation?
• Describe the conservation tasks shown in the
  video and discuss the performance of Olivia,
  Debra, Jacob, Christopher, and Jack.
• Are their responses typical of children in the
  preoperational stage? Why or why not?

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Lessons in Observation Piagets Preoperational
Stage

• How do Olivia, Debra, Jacob, Christopher, and
  Jack respond when asked to explain why they
  thought the amount of liquid or play dough had
  changed or not changed?
• How do these responses illustrate deficits in the
  reasoning abilities of preoperational children,
  as described by Piaget, including centration,
  irreversibility, perception-bound thought, and
  their focus on states rather than dynamic
  transformations?

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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

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Developing in a World of Diversity

• Cognitive Development and Concepts of Ethnicity
  and Race

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Factors in Cognitive Development

• On Being in The Zone
• (for Proximal Development)

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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)

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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

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Developing in a World of Diversity

• Cultural Variation in the
• Home Environment

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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

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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

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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

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A Closer Look

• Helping Children Use
• Television Wisely

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Theory of Mind

• What Is A Mind?
• How Does It Work?

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What Are Childrens 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

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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

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Figure 9.5 False Beliefs
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Is Seeing Believing? What Do Preoperational
Children Have To Say About That?

• Appearance-reality distinction
• Understanding difference between real and mental
  events
• May appear in children as young as three
• Limitations
• Event or object may take more than one form in
  mind
• Understanding changes in mental states
• Understanding of relationship between model and
  represented object

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Development of Memory

• Creating Files and
• Retrieving Them

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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

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Figure 9.6 Recognition and Recall Memory
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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

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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 childs memory
• Types of Measurement
• Younger children are limited in measurement by
  use of verbal reports

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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

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Language Development

• Why Daddy Goed Away

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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

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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

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Figure 9.7 Wugs
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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

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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

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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 childrens thought are spoken aloud
• Eventually language becomes internalized
• Language functions as self-regulative