test results causation animism, realism, artificialism concepts of quantity number concepts...

Test Results Causation Animism, realism, artificialism Concepts of quantity Number concepts Measurement Classification Seriation Transitive inference Attention Memory Metamemory Social Cognition Egocentrism Theory of Mind Competence/performance

Test score = (Number of multiple choice correct X 2) + score on written questions + extra credit + 5 points (curve)

A – 18 B – 33 C – 32 D – 26 F - 12Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or

display.

Themes of Preschool Cognitive Development

Preschool children are active participants in their own development.

Continual interplay between children’s developing capacities & environment.

Cognitive limitations: Centration Appearance-reality problem Difficulty managing attention & memory

processes

Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Permission required for reproduction or display.

Reasoning about Causation• Reality is defined superficial appearance.

• Preschoolers use observations to construct their own understanding of cause-and-effect relationships.

• Piaget did not find mature causal reasoning until well into middle childhood.

• Other researchers found preschoolers can give good causal explanations for simple, familiar processes, but do not yet have an abstract understanding of plausible cause. • Preschoolers do not yet understand what a

good explanation is.


Reasoning About Livingand Nonliving Things

Animism:Tendency to attribute life to nonliving things.

Animism:Tendency to attribute life to nonliving things.

• Piaget noted that young children thought that anything that moved was alive.

• Others have found that their thinking is not as animistic as previously thought but that children do have a problem distinguishing between the categories of living and nonliving.

• There is progression in this understand throughout this age period.

Why Clouds Move They move because we move. Why do clouds move? Why does the wind blow?

Because the trees move? What is the adult explanation?

Where do dreams come from? Lie down on the bed with me and

watch my dreams



Reasoning About Quantity• Concepts of Conservation

• liquid volume• number• mass• length

• Once children understand conservation (around age 7), they explain it several ways:• compensation• reversibility• identity• the nodded added or subtracted criterion


Reasoning About Quantity• Concepts of Number

• addition & subtraction• primitive rule• qualitative rule• quantitative rule

• learning to count• one-to-one principle• stable-order principle• cardinal principle• abstraction principle• order-irrelevant principle


Reasoning About Quantity• Concepts of Measurement

• Piaget believed knowledge of conservation was needed to understand measurement.

• Preschoolers make measurement errors when the appearance of two equal quantities makes them look unequal.

• If there is no misleading perceptual information, they often perform reasonable measurement activities.

Conservation of area XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX

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Class on 11/4 Classification Seriation Transitive inference Attention Memory Metamemory Social Cognition Egocentrism Theory of Mind Competence/performance Video on Play



Reasoning About Classesand Logical Relations

Classification Ability to group things by shared characteristics, such as size or shape.

Seriation Ability to arrange things in a logical progression, such as from oldest to newest.

Transitive inference

Ability to infer relationship between two objects by knowing their respective relationships to a third.

Class Any set of objects or events that are treated as the same in certain ways because they have common features.


Classification

• Children show a primitive form of classification from infancy.

• They are not able to classify objects consistently until the preschool years.

• Centration limits preschoolers' classification skills.

Multiple (or cross) Classification

1: X Y G Z

2: x y g


Paradigmatic syntagmatic shift Twenty Questions



Seriation

• Preschoolers can find the largest or smallest stick in a fairly large group.

• Difficulty placing the whole set of sticks in order from largest to smallest.

• Problems related to the appearance-reality problem and to centration.


Transitive Inference

• Piaget found children could not solve transitive inference problems until middle childhood.

• More recent studies indicated 4-year-olds can solve them with the right training.

• Preschoolers have more trouble learning the relationships involved than older children do.

Preschoolers’Attention and

MemoryAbilities


Sensory register

The part of memory where incoming information from one of the five senses is stored very briefly.

Short-term (working) memory

The part of memory where consciously noted information is stored for 10-20 seconds.

Long-term memory

The part of memory where information is stored for a long time.

Attention skills

Processes that control the transfer of information from a sensory register to working memory.

Memory skills

Processes that retain information in working memory and/or transfer it to long-term memory.


Deploying Attention• Although preschoolers can pay

attention to interesting events, their attentional system is not yet fully developed.

• Not until middle childhood do children think of attention as a limited resource that must be deployed selectively.


Preschoolers’ Memory• Young children are often oblivious

to the memory demands of a situation.

• Abilities and Limitations• Preschoolers demonstrate both

recognition and free recall in their daily activities.

• Usually do more poorly on recall tasks than older children and adults. They have a digit span of 3 to 4 items.


Preschoolers’ Memory• Speed of information processing is

slower in younger children. • Tasks require more memory space

for younger children.• They lack skill at using memory

strategies. Will use obvious strategies at times.

SocialCognition


Understanding of the social world.

Social cognition:

• Deals with the impact of children's cognitive skills on their social relationships and the role of social interaction in supporting cognitive development.

• Children start to learn how other people think and feel, what their motives and intentions are, and what they are likely to do.


Egocentrism in Preschoolers

Egocentrism

Inability to understand others’ perspectives.

Perceptual egocentrism

Not differentiating one’s own perceptual experience from someone else’s.

Cognitive egocentrism

Failing to take into account someone else’s cognitive perspective.


Egocentrism in Preschoolers

Overcoming egocentrism Knowledge of existence: Realizing

other people have thoughts, viewpoints, & desires that differ from the child’s.

Awareness of need: Realizing it can be useful to consider another’s perspective.

Social inference: Reading another person’s actions and imagining that person’s point of view.


The Child’s Theory of Mind

In developing a theory of mind, children come to understand 5 principles:

1. Minds exist.2. Minds have connections to the physical

world.3. Minds are separate and different from the

physical world.4. Minds can represent objects & events

accurately or inaccurately.5. Minds actively interpret reality &

emotional experiences.

Theory of mind:An understanding of the mind & mental operations.Theory of mind:An understanding of the mind & mental operations.


Communication and the Declineof Egocentrism

Egocentric speech is seen both when children talk to themselves while playing and in collective monologues.

Preschoolers often have difficulty communicating information to a listener in a nonegocentric way, especially abstract thoughts.

Preschoolers do show some evidence of adjusting their speech to the needs of their listeners under certain circumstances.


Competence-performance distinction:

There is often a difference between what children are capable or doing under optimal circumstances (competence) and how they actually do a particular task (performance).

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Limited Cognitive Resources& Communication

Script:An abstract representation of the

sequence of actions needed to accomplish some goal.

Script:An abstract representation of the

sequence of actions needed to accomplish some goal.

• A script only occasionally involves specific words or actions.• More often, it concerns a general idea about appropriate things to say and do.


An Overview of PreschoolCognitive Development

Cognitive advances during preschool years include: emerging understanding of causation ability to distinguish living & nonliving things qualitative understanding of many concepts

related to quantity gradual development of ability to distinguish

appearance and reality expanding attention & memory skills increasing understanding of others’ perspectives &

thoughts

test results causation animism, realism, artificialism concepts of quantity number concepts...

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