Lesson 2 - Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

Presentation of Theoretical Construct

 

Lecture Information: Preoperational Stage

Characteristics of this stage
The first concept that needs to be addressed at this stage is one of vocabulary.  Piaget uses the term "Operation" to refer to the cognitive activities going on in the brain at any given time.  He interprets this as mental representations that are reversible or in more informal terms it is an internalized thought.  For Piaget this cognitive activity is dependent on the person's language ability.  So the acquisition of language during this stage is of paramount importance.

The first step in the development of language is the child's use of "Semiotic Functions."  This is achieved when the child understands that there is a correlation between symbols and reality like when toddlers begin to use symbolic play.  This is evident in the "little tea parties" and the sounds that a gun makes when they point their index finger at you.  Symbolic play is generally all those great memories of just being a kid.  The most important of those symbol/reality correlations being the sound/meaning correlation that makes up a "word."  Language at this stage simply takes off.  Children's vocabulary grows from a few words at age 2 to as many as 20,000 by age 11.  Some believe that no other time in life is as productive as Preoperations for the sheer amount of learning that takes place.

Cognitive challenges of this stage
At this stage of development there are very famous challenges with which children have to deal.  The first is the concept of reversible thinking.  Children at this stage have a difficult time reversing a sequence mentally.  For example, a researcher will relate a story of a man walking down a road; the first thing the man sees is a cat, then he keeps walking and passes a tree, then as he is walking he sees a parked car, then he finds his house and goes inside.  The researcher then asks a child at this stage to imagine themselves walking back down that same road, and asks the child to relate which object they would see first, then second, and so on.  They have found that children have an extremely difficult time with this task.  This may go a long way to explaining why it is so common to hear over the public address speaker at the ballgame, "Excuse me but I have a little girl here looking for her mama..."  Toddlers find retracing their steps very difficult.  This is one directional thinking.

Perhaps the most famous of Piaget's experiments were with conservation tasks.  The term conservation is a reference to the second law of thermodynamics concerning the conservation of matter.  Toddlers are just trying to understand, inventory,  and think about the world.  Piaget sees this interaction as getting to know the outside world, getting to know what the world is made up of.  We have all heard of the two glasses of water demonstration where there are equal amounts of water in both glasses; one of the glasses of water is poured into a taller, thinner glass; then ask the child which has more water.  They usually say that the taller glass has more water.  This task has to do with the "volume" property of matter there are others as well like length, number, and so on.  The profound part of the experiment is that the child is demonstrating ability to keep track of only one of the dimensions at a time.  This over attention to one variable is called "centering" or a lack of an ability to decenter.  So not only do toddlers have one directional logic, they also have one dimensional thought as well.

The last concept of Piaget's for the preoperational stage is that of "toddler ego-centrism."  Piaget and subsequent researchers observed children in a social setting like a pre-school area and noticed that many of the supposed conversations were not really conversations at all, but "collective monologues."  One child would be saying, "Purple is my favorite color." The next child, sitting right next him, would be saying, "I'm keeping my crayons in my pocket."  While another child is saying, "Where did my mommy go?"  None of the statements have anything to do with the other statements and if you aren't looking very closely, appear to be a conversation.  Piaget saw this as evidence of ego-centrism.  To test it they set up an experiment where by a child's mother would sit in a chair facing one direction and the child facing in the opposite direction.  Then they asked the child what "mommy" was seeing.  They found that the child would relate what they were seeing not what the mother was seeing.  Piaget believed that children have a difficult time taking on another's perspective.

 

Back to lesson 2 index