Social and Cognitive Development in Childhood and Adolescence I Flashcards
Ability of preopetational child
The preoperational child builds upon the attainments of the sensori-motor period and has achieved the ability to engage in symbolic or representational thought. Preoperational children engage in pretend play, deferred imitation and drawing. However, Piaget proposed there are important limitations of preoperational thought that prevent logical reasoning.
lack of mental operations
One is a lack of mental operations. An operation is an internal mental scheme that allows one to modify or reorganise images and symbol’s in one’s head. e.g. reversible operations - reversibility allows one to go through a series of steps in a problem and then reverse direction, returning to the starting point.
Preoperational children are unable to mentally reverse a series of events.
Another is centration. Preoperational children focus on only one salient feature of a situation or a task, and are unable to take account of other relevant and important features. In contrast, older children’s and adults’ thinking is said to be decentred - several features can be considered simultaneously.
A third is a focus on states not transformations. One of the limitations related to the inability to decentre is that preoperational children focus on the state of a problem and ignore the transformations which produced that state.
the conservation problem
Examples of each of these limitations can be seen in one of the most famous of Piagetian tasks - the conservation problem. Conservation refers to the fact that even though objects are transformed in one particular way (a way that changes certain perceptual features) they still conserve their properties. If a child is shown two rows of counters, one placed directly beneath the other, they can correctly say that each row has the same number of counters. But if the second row is ‘lengthened’ by spacing the counters apart, the preoperational child will say that it has more counters. They centrate on the perceptual length of the counters and ignore the compensating dimension of gaps between counters. The failure of preoperational children on these tasks is presumed by Piaget to result from 1) centrating on one aspect of the array 2) inability to mentally reverse the sequence of events 3) inability to consider the transformation that took place and the tendency to focus on the states of the objects as they now are.
Criticism on the pre-operational period
As with the sensori-motor period, objections have been raised in which it is claimed that Piaget underestimated cognitive ability in young children. Part of the criticism stems from the sorts of methods used to evaluate the competencies of young children - these methods were often verbal and relied heavily on children’s explanations not just their judgements. Numerous attempts have been made to modify the conservation task, in order to remove potential confounds which might produce lack of conservation responses but for reasons other than lack of conservation.
One criticism is the pragmatics of the conservation task.
One criticism is the pragmatics of the conservation task. The child is being asked a question about two quantities, an adult carries out a transformation that is apparently salient, and then asks them the same question again.
Linguistically, a question is usually repeated when the first answer given needs changing. Thus McGarrigle & Donaldson (1974) argued that Piaget’s experimental set-up could be leading children to answer the question that they thought the tester planned to ask, rather than attending to the wording of the precise question that was in fact asked.
In their “naughty teddy” studies, 4- and 5-year-old children were shown a cardboard box containing a teddy bear, and were told that the teddy was very naughty and would occasionally escape from his box and try to ‘spoil the game’. The conservation materials were then brought out (e.g., two rows of counters in one-to-one correspondence). The child was asked “Are there more here or more here or are they both the same number?”. Suddenly the naughty teddy appeared and altered the length of one of the rows by shoving the counters together. The teddy received the appropriate scolding, and the children were then asked again “Are there more here or more here or are they both the same number?”. In this pragmatic situation of a perceptual change in the arrays by a naughty teddy, the majority of 4- and 5-year-old children in the experiment gave conserving responses.
However, as with many experiments which are designed to test Piaget’s theory, it could be argued that these experiments are not a test of Piaget’s claim that preoperational children fail conservation because they are unable to decentre from the perceptual appearance of the transformed array in order to take account of the compensating dimension. In accidental or incidental versions of the test, children may be distracted from looking at the transformed array.
egocentricity
Piaget proposed that limitations of preoperational thought can also be detected by its “egocentricity”. What Piaget meant by this is the tendency of children’s thought to be centered in a first-person perspective because preoperational thought is unable to co-ordinate multiple perspectives. This can be seen in communicative egocentrism - children at this age make little effort to tailor speech to the needs of the listener and perceptual egocentrism. If asked to judge how a perceptual array looks from another person’s perspective, preoperational children tend to respond on the basis of their own view. Piaget and Inhelder developed the “three mountains task” to demonstrate perceptual egocentrism in preoperational thought, where children sat on one side of a model of three mountains with a toy placed on another side. Children were asked to identify what the toy could see, and often reported their own perceptual view instead.
Some have argued that classic tests of perceptual egocentricity are too complex.
Some have argued that classic tests of perceptual egocentricity are too complex. For example, Helen Borke (1975) provided a ‘simpler’ test by allowing children to rotate a model of a scene until it matched the perspective of a doll. She concluded that Piaget had underestimated preoperational children’s ability to compute another’s viewpoint and that thought was less egocentric than he had claimed. Does this assess Piaget’s view of egocentricity?
Piaget argued that preoperational children were centred in their own perspective because preoperational thought is unable to decentre from the egocentric perspective in order to take another’s. However, if the external conditions artificially support decentering, then children can “pass” the task. It appears that changing certain aspects of the classic Piaget tasks can result in children much younger than Piaget predicted being able to show conservation and perspective taking and it may be that Piaget underestimated the cognitive abilities of children of this age. However, advocates of Piagetian theory argue that not all experiments test the same logical competence Piaget was interested in.
the hallmark of the concrete operational period
Piaget claimed that the hallmark of the concrete operational period is that thought is able to apply mental operations to representations, leading to logical solutions. Thought is now more organised, flexible and logical than preoperational thought. For example, concrete operations allow transitive inferences. Transitive relations hold between any entities that can be organised into an ordinal series - if shown A>B and then shown B>C, a transitive inference can be made that A>C. However, a simple three-term series can allow other, simpler mental processes to solve the task, such as using the verbal phrases just presented (e.g. Jane is taller than Mary and Sarah is shorter than Mary. Who is taller, Jane or Sarah? From memory, the child can repeat “Jane is taller”). This kind of confound can be avoided by using a five-term series and requires the child to make the inference between the terms in the middle of the series: A>B, B>C, C>D, D>E – which is bigger, B or D? However, this introduces another possible confound – children in the preoperational period may struggle with a memory load of five terms. If the memory load was reduced, would preoperational children show concrete operational thought?
Pears and Bryant (1990)
Pears and Bryant (1990) eliminated the memory load in the transitive task by using visible premises. Children were shown pairs of coloured bricks presented in little ‘towers’ one on top of the other. The child’s task was to build a complete tower of bricks from single bricks of the appropriate colours, using premise pairs of bricks as a guide. Prior to being allowed to build the target towers, the children were asked a series of inferential questions such as “Which will be the higher in the tower that you are going to build, the yellow brick or the blue one?”. Pears and Bryant found that the children were significantly above chance in their performance on two-thirds of the critical inferential questions. From this finding, they argued that 4-year-olds do possess the ability to make transitive inferences, at least about the continuum of space.
Concrete operational thought can also understand hierarchical classifications
Concrete operational thought can also understand hierarchical classifications - e.g. class inclusion. the logical concept of class inclusion involves understanding that a set of items can be simultaneously part of a combined set and part of an embedded set. Imagine a bunch of flowers, 5 of which are red, and 4 of which are white. The combined set is the 9 flowers, and the embedded sets are the white flowers and the red flowers. To see whether young children understood the logical concept of class inclusion, Piaget devised the class inclusion task. The child was shown a combined set, such as the flowers, and was then asked “Are there more red flowers or more flowers here?”. Children younger than approximately 6 years of age usually responded that there were more red flowers. Piaget argued that children could only deal with the parts or with the whole separately. They could not think about the flowers in two ways simultaneously, as they lacked the cognitive operation of reversibility, in the same way they could not simultaneously think about total row length and 1:1 correspondence when trying to judge the quantity in two rows of pennies, or combine individual transitive relations into an ordinal series.
Markman and Seibert (1976)
Markman and Seibert (1976) argued that the children could be failing to make part-whole comparisons in the class inclusion task because Piaget’s class inclusion question was pragmatically strange. In natural speech, we do not usually contrast a whole and a part by asking “Are there more red flowers or more flowers here?”. For a part-part comparison we would ask “Are there more red flowers or more white flowers?”, and for a part-whole comparison we might say “Are there more red flowers, or are there more flowers in the bunch?”. The use of the term ‘bunch’ is a natural linguistic device for referring to a collection of objects. Collections have some degree of internal organisation and form natural units marked in the spoken language. When children’s class inclusion performance with class terms and with collection terms is compared, very different outcomes are found.
However, it can again be argued that studies such as these have not tested the logical requirements which Piaget claimed were necessary
However, it can again be argued that studies such as these have not tested the logical requirements which Piaget claimed were necessary, because they have not tested the range of relationships involved in the problem. According to Piaget, understanding A + A’ = B operationally also entails understanding that A = B - A’ and A’ = B – A and advocates of Piagetian theory have argued that simplified language studies do not test simultaneous reversibility. This requires cognitive flexibility, an operation that is not assessed in modified tasks. But the problem of course is that it is very difficult to design a test that could adequately test Piaget’s theories without other confounding variables. Without providing the opportunity to disprove a theory, then its explanatory power is substantially reduced.
The concrete operational child, according to Piaget, is still limited to dealing with the concrete - with what is directly in front of them, the tangible and real.
The concrete operational child, according to Piaget, is still limited to dealing with the concrete - with what is directly in front of them, the tangible and real. What the child at this stage cannot yet do is deal with the hypothetical - with the world of possibility rather than immediate reality. Piaget referred to the capacity for logical reasoning about the hypothetical and about highly abstract notions as “formal operational thought” which he presumed to emerge from adolescence onwards. Piaget’s way of characterising the difference between concrete and formal operations was to talk about a reversal in the relation between reality and possibility. For the concrete operational child the starting point is always immediate reality. From this point, the child can make very limited extensions into the hypothetical. In a conservation of number task, for example the child who imagines pushing the discs back together is going beyond what is immediately given but in a very limited way. For the formal operational thinker, the starting point is what might possibly be true, i.e. a hypothesis and then working back to what happens to be true in reality. According to Piaget, formal operational thought continues to develop through adulthood as formal operations are applied to more and more content areas and situations. The changes that take place are not changes in structure of thought, only in its content.
pendulum task
The classic task used to assess formal operational thought is the pendulum task where children are asked “what makes the pendulum swing fastest”? This requires identification of the critical variables and then systematic testing, holding all variables constant except the one being assessed. Children less than around 12 years are unable to demonstrate systematic thinking on the task. However, we now know from substantial research on reasoning that human minds rarely demonstrate the formal operations Piaget referred to.
Ultimately, Piaget’s theory has been abandoned, primarily because of the limitations on the means of testing it empirically. The resulting scenario is not entirely satisfactory – instead of Piaget’s elegant domain-general theory, which characterises changes in both the content of thought and the structures which constrain thought (stage theory), we now have a plethora of theoretical perspectives, none of which are able to account for the full set of developmental phenomena seen in humans. Perhaps we need to adopt a multitude of perspectives rather than a single monolithic theory (see Gopnik, 1996)
