Early Childhood Thought:

1
Chapter 9 Early Childhood Thought Islands of
Competence
2
Piagets Account of Mental Development in Early
Childhood

• Infancy was focused on sensorimotor on the
  physical
• Preoperational stage - before age 7
• use 1 sided thinking, can only focus their
  attention on one aspect at a time
• By age 7-8 they are capable of mental operations
• coordinate 2 perspectives at the same time

3
Lack of Spatial Perspective Taking
4
Egocentric Speech
5
Confusing Appearance Reality
Young children focus on surface appearance They
way things seem rather than the way they
are Shown cross-culturally
6
Precausal Reasoning

• Young children cant engage in cause effect
  reasoning by deduction or induction procedures.
• They think Transductively drawing cause
  effect conclusions from one particular to another

7
Effective Causal Reasoning
Children as young as 3 understood the cause of
the effect but could not give explanation Almost
all 5 yr olds could provide some explanation
8
Information-Processing Approaches

• Digital Computer
• Environmental Input
• Sensory Register
• Short-Term Memory
• Long-Term Memory

9
Framework Explanations

• Environmental Learning
• As children have more experience there is a
  qualitative shift in their task engagement
• Biological Maturation
• Immaturity of the young brain explains
  limitations
• Unevenness is due to different rates of
  myelination and dendrite growth
• Cultural Contextual through the use of Scripts
• Culture arranges activities, their frequency, the
  purpose of those activities, the childs role

10
Biological Accounts

• Modality Theory
• Innate separate systems that do not need
  special teaching in order to develop, only need
  to be triggered by the environment