Lecture 7: Child Cognition Flashcards
What is the preoperational stage?
According to Piaget, children between approximately 2 and 7 years of age are in the preoperational stage of cognitive development. At this time in development, thinking undergoes a kind of cognitive revolution…
What Is mental representation?
During the preoperational stage, children are now capable of mental representation or the internalization of thought, as seen in the growth of language, symbolic play, deferred imitation, and understanding of object permanence
What is Symbolic understanding?
Understanding that things can stand for other things (e.g., the word ‘dog’ represents the furry animal; pretending a
banana is a phone)
What is dual representation?
Understanding an object may
simultaneously be itself and stand for another thing
for example, when a child understands that a toy car is something to play with while also representing a life-size car.
What ws Judy DeLoache’s (1987) influential study of children’s dual representational skills?
Her study involved in asking whether children understand that a 3-dimensional scale model of a room (like a doll-house room) represented its real-life counterpart
What was the scale model study by Judy Deloche?
Judy DeLoache showed that it was not until 3 years of age that children achieved dual representation. Children observed an experimenter hide a miniature doll under a couch pillow in a scale model that was physically identical to a nearby room it was meant to represent. The experimenter then asked children to find a larger version of the toy hidden in the same place in the big room. Three-year-olds were able to use the scale model to locate the large toy in the life-sized, adjacent room, whereas most 2.5-year-olds could not find the large toy.
What was the Shrinking room study by Judy Deloche?
Children were shown a large room and a model room and those who were younger than age 3 were unable to locate the hidden toy in a location of the model room that mapped to where it was hidden in the larger room. However, when DeLoache later pretended to “shrink” the large room with a magical machine that children believed could make the room smaller, children younger than 3 years of age could now find the object that had originally been hidden in the larger room in what they believed to now be the “shrunken” room.
How does Pretend and Fantasy Play occur in the preoperational stage
Young children enjoy imagining objects and people as other people or things. Sticks become spoons or swords; flashlights suggest journeys through dark forests. Children can imagine themselves to be someone else—baby, doctor, princess, warrior, waitress—and can assign their play partners complementary pretend roles as daddy, patient, king, foe, or customer.
What is sociodramatic play?
Pretend play that includes other people as actors in created play scenario
What is Egocentrism?
This is the tendency of children to believe that other people view the world from their perspective.
What is Piaget’s Three Mountains Task?
A child walks around a table containing a model of three mountains of different sizes, each with different landmarks positioned on each mountain. The child then sits down across the table from a doll seated in a chair. The child’s task is to identify which of several photographs depicts the doll’s point of view.
What did Piaget conclude from the Three Mountains Task?
Although children were able to remember all the landmarks on the mountains, most children failed Piaget’s task. They stated that the doll opposite them saw the same thing that they did. Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder concluded that children are unable to differentiate among alternative perspectives until around 7–10 years of age because of difficulties in manipulating multiple representations in their minds.
What is Animistic thinking
This refers to the attribution of human qualities to inanimate entities.
What was the Gelman and Markman study?
Preschoolers were shown three pictures labeled as a “leaf,” “bug,” and “bug,” respectively. Although the leaf insect looked more like a leaf than it did a bug, when children were asked to make inferences about the odd-looking, novel bug, they based their inferences on the object’s category label rather than its physical features. For example, when the leaf insect was labeled a bug, they concluded that it could move around by itself.
What is essentialism?
Developmental researchers refer to children’s belief that entities have an underlying essence as essentialism
What is Conservation?
This asks if children understand that the number, mass, or volume of something remains the same even if it looks different?
Why do children fail conservation tasks?
– Centration: Tendency to focus on one perceptually salient feature of
something
– Reversibility: Unable to mentally “undo” an action
What is Appearance-Reality Distinction?
Children’s ability to differentiate
between appearance and reality
