Chapter 8: Cognitive Development in Early Childhood
Chapter 8: Cognitive Development in Early Childhood
Objectives
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
- Compare and contrast Piaget and Vygotsky’s beliefs about cognitive development.
- Explain the role of information processing in cognitive development.
- Discuss how preschool-aged children understand their worlds.
- Put cognitive and language milestones into the order in which they appear in typically developing children.
- Discuss how early child education supports development and how our understanding of development influence education.
- Describe autism spectrum disorder, including characteristics and possible interventions.
Introduction
Early childhood is a time of pretending, blending fact and fiction, and learning to think of the world using language. As young children move away from needing to touch, feel, and hear about the world toward learning some basic principles about how the world works, they hold some pretty interesting initial ideas. For example, while adults have no concerns with taking a bath, a child of three might genuinely worry about being sucked down the drain.1
Figure 8.1 – A child in a bathtub.2
A child might protest if told that something will happen “tomorrow” but be willing to accept an explanation that an event will occur “today after we sleep.” Or the young child may ask, “How long are we staying? From here to here?” while pointing to two points on a table. Concepts such as tomorrow, time, size and distance are not easy to grasp at this young age. Understanding size, time, distance, fact and fiction are all tasks that are part of cognitive development in the preschool years.3
Piaget’s Preoperational Intelligence
Piaget’s stage that coincides with early childhood is the preoperational stage. The word operational means logical, so these children were thought to be illogical. However, they were learning to use language or to think of the world symbolically. Let’s examine some of Piaget’s assertions about children’s cognitive abilities at this age.
Pretend Play
Pretending is a favorite activity at this time. A toy has qualities beyond the way it was designed to function and can now be used to stand for a character or object unlike anything originally intended. A teddy bear, for example, can be a baby or the queen of a faraway land!
Figure 8.2 – A child pretending to buy items at a toy grocery store.4
According to Piaget, children’s pretend play helps them solidify new schemes they were developing cognitively. This play, then, reflects changes in their conceptions or thoughts. However, children also learn as they pretend and experiment. Their play does not simply represent what they have learned (Berk, 2007).
Limitations on Thinking
Due to cognitive immaturity, children’s thinking is often dictated more by their own subjective views than by reality. Piaget argued that a preoperational child lacks the ability to hold two categories constant and to use full information to arrive at a solution to the problem. T