Development of "tools" for thought: L6 Flashcards
Early - middle childhood: Motor development
- gross motor skills
- fine motor skills
- boys outperform girls on gross motor skills
- increased myelination
- girls outperform boys on fine motor skills
exercise growth + development (stats)
-involvement of daily sport in US: 80% in 1969, 20% in 1999
Pre-operational stage children’s thinking is…
limited, children can have only a single focus or centre
pre-operational intelligence task examples
- conservation of number
- conversation of volume
- conservation of mass
-> don’t have a sense of equivalence
Concrete operational thought
- age
- features
- 7-12 y/o
- decline in egocentrism - one’s thoughts aren’t shared by others
- transformations - can thinking & reason about change processes
- classification - objects can belong to more than 1 category
- seriation - sorting objects into a continuous order
- deductive reasoning - draw logical inference form 2+ pieces of information
Nonlinguistic symbols
what is needed?
dual representation (maps) -> symbolic
Scale Models task: dual representation
- age success
- what is the task
- what does it mean
- 3 year olds
- identifying model of an environment (dolls house) into a real environment (surrounding room)
- model corresponds to the actual room
- competition of this is an example of dual representation
- > origins of symbolic understanding, which require operational intelligence (appearing earlier than Piaget suggested)
Drawing and children
examining the symbolic representation children use - dual representation, ability to coordinate information
Dividing objects into categories (seriation)
- early life (3)
- how do children divide objects?
- inanimate objects
- people
- living things
- inanimate objects
- into category hierarchies (related by set-subset relations)
What are object hierarchies, state levels
Most general -> general -> medium -> specific
what is perceptual categorisation
- age its formed
- what is it typically based on?
- by age 2?
the grouping together of objects that have similar appearances
- first months of life
- parts of objects, including: colour, size and movement
- overall shape and basis of function
most important trends of categorisation of objects in infancy (3)
- category hierarchies
- causal connections
- relations among categories
what are the 3 main levels of category hierarchies?
- which do children learn first?
- how are the others learnt?
- general -> superordinate level
- very specific -> subordinate level
- in between -> basic level
- basic level
- assistant of adults
child-basic categories are between which levels?
basic and subordinate
in between) (specific
How many children did Taylor (1999) have imaginary companions + age
as many as 63%
3-4 & again at 7-8 at one or both ages
what do imaginary friends imply about a child?
- dual thought
- imaginary thought
- verbally skillful
- advanced theories of mind
- firstborn or only children
- watch little television
distinguishing people from nonliving things
what ages showed surprise?
- 9 & 12 month olds (when inanimate objects moved on their own)
- > understand a self-produced motion is a characteristic of people + animals
Knowledge of living things
- age differentiating living & non living
- difficulty understanding humans are animals
- plants are alive
- 3-4 y/o
- 5 y/o
- 7-9 y/o
how can preschoolers understanding of biological processes be understood? (3)
by examining :
- inheritance
- growth
- illness
what is essentialism?
all living things have an essence inside them that makes them what they are
children’s biological standing
- naivists perspective
- empiricists perspective
- born with a biological model
2. comes from personal observations and information from other people
Development of “tools” for thought (6)
- fine and gross motor abilities
- symbolic reasoning
- categorising
- causal inferences
- imagination
- humanness understanding
growth and change
- how many cm per year
- weight gain average per year
- what increases and what decreases
- boys have a greater number of what compared to girls
- 6cm
- 2.25kg
- muscle mass and strength increase, baby fat decreases
- greater number of muscle cells and typically stronger
obesity in children
- overweight child is
- raises risks for
- at risk of adult obesity
- medical and psychological problems:
e.g. pulmonary problems, diabetes, high blood pressure
low self esteem, depression, peer exclusion
causal understanding and categorisation
- understanding causal
- helps children remember
e. g. wugs & gillies
- why objects are the way they are
- new categories
- wugs prepared to fly -> children look/draw wings
- inheritance
- growth
- illness
- preschoolers know physical characteristic are passed from parent to offspring, certain aspects controlled by heredity
- internal process - plants, animals (unlike inanimate objects) have internal processes that allow them to heal
- understand limits of recuperative processes, illness & old age can cause death