Early childhood

1
Early childhood

• 2 - 6 years preschool age
• Piagets theory based on his interview method
• More recent accounts

2
Piagets theory

• 4 main stages sensorimotor, preoperational,
  concrete operational, formal operational
• Stage II. Preoperational stage
• Children cannot think logically
• One salient feature at a time
• Appearance dominates conservation tasks
• Actions are not reversible
• Egocentrism
• Animism

3
Conservation tasks Volume

• Certain properties do not change, in spite of
  changes in appearance
• Volume

4
Conservation of number
5
Egocentrism

• Inability to take someone elses perspective
• Literally 3 mountains task
• In a more abstract sense distinguish between
  objective and subjective

6
Animism

• Attributing life to non-living objects
• They know what being alive feels like -gt they
  assimilate concepts that they dont yet
  understand to concepts that they know well
• E.g. "The sun is hot because it wants to keep us
  warm"

7
More recent views of preschool thinking

• Most important representatives Margaret
  Donaldson, Michael Siegal
• Similarly to recent studies of infant cognition
  children know more then what Piaget thought

8

• Children might not fully understand the basic
  concepts same, equal, alive
• e. g. alive is the opposite of dead
• The way questions are asked can be misleading
• e.g. repeating the same question
• children can get the question right if they are
  motivated number task with cookies
• Some tasks might test more complex abilities than
  they were designed for
• e.g. children are able to figure out what other
  people can or cannot see in certain situations
• Also children might have actually become smarter!