In this section, we turn to the heart of this chapter: cognition. How do children develop intellectually as they travel from age 3 into elementary school? In our search for answers, we explore three perspectives on mental growth, starting with that master theorist Jean Piaget.

Recall from Chapter 1 that Piaget believed that through assimilation (fitting new information into their existing cognitive structures) and accommodation (changing those cognitive slots to fit input from the world), children undergo qualitatively different stages of cognitive growth. In Chapter 3, I discussed Piaget’s sensorimotor stage. Now, it’s time to tackle the next two stages, in Table 5.2: the preoperational and concrete operational stages.

As their names imply, we need to discuss these two stages together. Preoperational thinking is defined by what children are missing—the ability to step back from their immediate perceptions. Concrete operational thinking is defined by what children possess: the ability to reason about the world in a more logical, adult-like way.

When children leave infancy and enter the stage of preoperational thought, they have made tremendous mental strides. Still, their thinking seems on a different planet from that of adults. The problem is that preoperational children are unable to look beyond the way objects immediately appear. By about age 7 or 8, children can mentally transcend what first hits their eye. They have entered the concrete operational stage.

The Preoperational Stage: Taking the World at Face Value

You saw vivid examples of this “from another planet” preschool thinking in my chapter-opening vignette. Now, let’s enter the minds of young children and explore how they reason about physical substances and the social world.

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Strange Ideas About Substances

The fact that preoperational children are locked into immediate appearances is illustrated by Piaget’s (1965) famous conservation tasks. In Piaget’s terminology, conservation refers to knowing that the amount of a given substance remains identical despite changes in its shape or form.

In the conservation of mass task, for instance, an adult gives a child a round ball of clay and asks that boy or girl to make another ball “just as big and heavy.” Then she reshapes the ball so it looks like a pancake and asks, “Is there still the same amount now?” In the conservation of liquid task, the procedure is similar: present a child with two identical glasses with equal amounts of liquid. Make sure he tells you, “Yes, they have the same amount of water or juice.” Then, pour the liquid into a tall, thin glass while the child watches and ask, “Is there more or less juice now, or is there the same amount?”

Typically, when children under age 7 are asked this final question, they give a peculiar answer: “Now there is more clay” or “The tall glass has more juice.” “Why?” “Because now the pancake is bigger” or “The juice is taller.” Then, when the clay is remolded into a ball or the liquid poured into the original glass, they report: “Now it’s the same again.” The logical conflict in their statements doesn’t bother them at all. In Figure 5.3, I have illustrated these procedures as well as additional Piagetian conservation tasks to perform with children you know.

Why can’t young children conserve? For two reasons, Piaget believes. First, children don’t grasp a concept called reversibility. This is the idea that an operation (or procedure) can be repeated in the opposite direction. Adults accept the fact that we can change various substances, such as our hairstyle, or the color of our room, and reverse them to their original state. Young children lack this fundamental schema, or cognitive structure, for interpreting the world.

A second issue lies in a perceptual style that Piaget calls centering. Young children interpret things according to what first hits their eye, rather than taking in the entire visual array. In the conservation of liquid task, they become captivated by the height of the liquid. They don’t notice that the width of the original container makes up for the height of the current one. When children reach concrete operations, they decenter. They can step back from a substance’s immediate appearance and understand that an increase in one dimension makes up for a loss in the other one.

Centering—the tendency to fix on what is visually most striking—impairs class inclusion. This is the knowledge that a category can encompass subordinate elements. Spread 20 Skittles and a few Gummi Bears on a plate and ask a 3-year-old, “Would you rather have the Skittles or the candy?” and she is almost certain to say, “The Skittles,” even when you have determined beforehand that both types of candy have equal appeal. She gets mesmerized by the number of Skittles and does not notice that “candy” is the label for both.

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This tendency to focus on immediate appearances explains why, in the opening chapter vignette, Moriah believed that Josiah had more paper when he cut his sheet into sections. Her attention was captured by the spread-out pieces, and she believed that now there must be more paper than before.

The idea that “bigger” automatically equals “more” extends to every aspect of preoperational thought. Ask a 3-year-old if he wants a nickel or a dime, and he will choose the first option. (This is a great source of pleasure to older siblings asked to equally share their funds.) Perhaps because greater height means “older” in their own lives, children even believe that a taller person has been on earth for a longer time:

I was substitute teaching with a group of kindergarten children—at the time I was about 22—and when I met a student’s mother, she was shocked. “When I asked Ben about you,” she said, “he told me you were much older than his regular teacher.” This teacher was in her mid- to late fifties and looked it. However, then we figured out the difference. This woman was barely 5 feet tall, and I am 6 feet two!

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Peculiar Perceptions About People

Young children’s tendency to believe that “what hits my eye right now is real” explains why a 3-year-old thinks her mommy is transformed into a princess when she dresses up for Halloween, or cries bitterly after her first visit to the beauty salon, believing that her short haircut has transformed her into a boy. It makes sense of why a favorite strategy of older sisters and brothers (to torture younger siblings) is to put on a mask and see the child run in horror from the room. As these examples show, young children lack identity constancy. They don’t realize that people are still their essential selves despite changes in the way they visually appear.

I got insights into this identity constancy deficit at my son’s fifth birthday party, when I hired a “gorilla” to entertain the guests (some developmental psychologist!). As the hairy 6-foot figure rang the doorbell, mass hysteria ensued—requiring the gorilla to take off his head. After the children calmed down, and the gorilla put on his head again to enact his skit, guess what? Pure hysteria again! Why did that huge animal cause pandemonium? The reason is that the children believed that the gorilla, even though a costumed figure, was really alive.

Animism refers to the difficulty young children have in sorting out what is really alive. Specifically, preschoolers see inanimate objects—such as dolls or costumed figures—as having consciousness, too. Look back at the beginning chapter vignette and you will notice several examples of animistic thinking—for example, the Barbies that were hungry or the wind that ran away. Now think back to when you were age 5 or 6. Do you remember being afraid the escalator might suck you in? Or perhaps you recall believing, as in the Stephen King Experiencing the Lifespan box on page 146, that your dolls came alive at night.

Listen to young children talking about nature, and you will hear delightful examples of animism: “The sun gets sleepy when I sleep.” “The moon likes to follow me in the car.” The practice of assigning human motivations to natural phenomena is not something we grow out of as adults. Think of the Greek thunder god Zeus, or the ancient Druids who worshiped the spirits that lived within trees. Throughout history, humans have regularly used animism to make sense of a frightening world.

A related concept is called artificialism. Young children believe that human beings have made everything in nature. Here is an example of this “daddy power” from Piaget’s 3-year-old daughter, Laurent:

L was in bed in the evening and it was still light: “Put the light out please” . . . (I switched the electric light off.) “It isn’t dark”—”But I can’t put the light out outside” . . . “Yes you can, you can make it dark.” . . . “How?” . . . “You must turn it out very hard. It’ll be dark and there will be little lights everywhere (stars).”

(Piaget, 1951/1962, p. 248)

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Animism and artificialism perfectly illustrate Piaget’s concept of assimilation. The child knows that she is alive and so applies her “alive” schema to every object. Having seen adults perform heroic physical feats, such as turning off lights and building houses, a 3-year-old generalizes the same “big people control things” schema to the universe. Imagine that you are a young child taking a family vacation. After you visited that gleaming construction called Las Vegas, wouldn’t it make sense that people carved out the Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains, too?

The sun and moon examples illustrate another aspect of preoperational thought. According to Piaget, young children believe that they are the literal center of the universe, the pivot around which everything else revolves. Their worldview is characterized by egocentrism—the inability to understand that other people have different points of view.

By egocentrism, Piaget does not mean that young children are vain or uncaring, although they will tell you they are the smartest people on earth and the activities of the heavenly bodies are at their beck and call. Many of their most loving acts show egocentrism. There is nothing more touching than a 3-year-old’s offer of a favorite “blankee” if he sees you upset. The child is egocentric, however, because he assumes that what comforts him will automatically comfort you.

You can see delightful examples of egocentrism when having a conversation with a young child. Have you ever had a 3-year-old discuss an event at school without providing any background information, as if you automatically knew her teacher and the rest of the class?

Piaget views egocentrism as a perfect example of centering in the human world. Young children are unable to decenter from their own mental processes. They don’t realize that what is in their mind is not in everyone else’s awareness, too.

The Concrete Operational Stage: Getting on the Adult Wavelength

Piaget discovered that the transition from preoperations to concrete operations happens gradually. First, children are preoperational in every area. Then, between ages 5 and 7, their thinking gets less static, or “thaws out” (Flavell, 1963). A 6-year-old, when given the conservation of liquid task, might first say the taller glass had more liquid, but then, after it is poured back into a wide glass, becomes unsure: “Is it bigger or not?” She has reached the tipping point where she is poised to reason on a higher cognitive plane.

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By age 8, the child has reached this higher-level, concrete operational state: “Even though the second glass is taller, the first is wider” (showing decentering); “You can pour the liquid right back into the short glass and it would look the same” (illustrating reversibility). Now, she doesn’t realize that she ever thought differently: “Are you silly? Of course it’s the same!”

Piaget also found that specific conservations come in at different ages. First, children master conservation of number and then mass and liquid. They may not figure out the most difficult conservations until age 11 or 12. Imagine the challenge of understanding the last task in Figure 5.3 (see p. 144)—realizing that when sugar is dissolved in water, it exists, but in a molecular form.

Still, according to Piaget, age 8 is a landmark for looking beyond immediate appearances, for understanding seriation and categories, for decentering in the physical and social worlds, for abandoning the tooth fairy and the idea that our stuffed animals are alive, and for entering the planet of adults.

Table 5.3 shows examples of different kinds of preoperational ideas. Now, test yourself by seeing if you can classify each statement in Piagetian terms.

Evaluating Piaget

Piaget has clearly transformed the way we think about young children. Still, as you saw with infancy, in important areas, Piaget was incorrect.

I described a major problem with Piaget’s ideas in Chapter 3: just as he minimized what babies know, Piaget underestimated preoperational children’s capacities. In particular, Piaget overstated young children’s egocentrism. If babies can decode intentions, the first awareness that we live in “different heads” must dawn on children at a far younger age than 8! (At the end of this chapter, you’ll learn when this mindreading ability fully comes on.)

We might also take issue with Piaget’s idea that we grow out of animism by age 8 or 9. Maybe he was giving us too much credit here. Do you have a good luck charm that keeps the plane from crashing, or a place you go for comfort where you can hear the trees whispering to you?

Children around the world do learn to conserve (Dasen, 1977, 1984). But because nature interacts with nurture, the ages at which they master specific conservation tasks vary from place to place. An example comes from a village in Mexico, where weaving is the main occupation. Young children in this collectivist culture grasp conservation tasks involving spatial concepts when they are younger than age 7 or 8 because they have so much hands-on training in this kind of skill (Maynard & Greenfield, 2003). This brings up a crucial dimension that Piaget’s theory leaves out: the impact of teaching in promoting cognitive growth.

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Piaget implies that children naturally construct an adult view of the world. We can’t convince preschoolers that their dolls are not alive or that the width of the glass makes up for the height. They must grow out of those ideas on their own. The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1962, 1978) had a different perspective: people propel mental growth.

Vygotsky was born in the same year as Piaget. He showed as much brilliance at a young age, but—unlike Piaget, who lived to a ripe old age—he died of tuberculosis in his late thirties. Still, Vygotsky’s writings have given him towering status in developmental science today. One reason is that Vygotsky was, at heart, an educator. He believed that what we do helps children mentally advance.

Vygotsky theorized that learning takes place within the zone of proximal development, which he defined as the difference between what the child can do by himself and his level of “potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86; also, see the diagram in Figure 5.4). Teachers must tailor their instruction to a child’s proximal zone. Then, as that child becomes more competent, they should slowly back off and allow the student more responsibility for directing that learning activity on his own. This sensitive pacing has a special name: scaffolding (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976).

You saw scaffolding in operation in Chapter 3 in my discussion of infant-directed speech, the simplified language that adults use when talking to babies. Recall that baby talk has an adult function. It permits caregivers to penetrate a young child’s proximal zone for language and so helps scaffold emerging speech. Now, let’s explore scaffolding as we read about a mother teaching her 5-year-old daughter how to play her first board game, Chutes and Ladders:

Tiffany threw the dice, then looked up at her mother. Her mother said, “How many is that?” Tiffany shrugged her shoulders. Her mother said, “Count them,” but Tiffany just sat and stared. Her mother counted the dots aloud, and then said to her daughter, “Now you count them,” which Tiffany did. This was repeated for the next five turns. Tiffany waited for her mother to count the dots. On her sixth move, however, Tiffany counted the dots on the dice on her own after her mother’s request. . . . Eventually, Tiffany threw the dice and counted the dots herself and continued to do so, practicing counting and moving the pieces on both her own and her mother’s turns.

(Bjorklund & Rosenblum, 2001)

Notice that this mother was a superb scaffolder. By pacing her interventions to Tiffany’s capacities, she paved the way for her child to master the game. But this process did not just flow from parent to child. Tiffany was also teaching her mother how to respond. Just as your professor is getting new insights into lifespan development while teaching every class—or at this minute, as I struggle to write this page, I’m learning to better connect with Vygotsky’s ideas—education is a bidirectional, mind-expanding duet (Scrimsher & Tudge, 2003).

In our culture, we have definite ideas about what makes a good scaffolder. Enter a child’s proximal zone. Actively instruct, but be sensitive to a child’s responses. However, in collectivist societies, such as among the Mayans living in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, children learn by observation. They listen. They watch. They are not explicitly taught the skills they need for adult life (Rogoff and others, 2003). So the qualities our culture sees as vital to socializing children are not necessarily part of the ideology of good parenting around the globe.

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Vygotsky filled in the missing social pieces of Piaget’s theory and gave us a framework for stimulating mental growth. But he did not address the gaps in the theory itself. Why are children able to decenter? What specific skills allow children to understand that the width of the glass makes up for the height?

Piaget never mentions how crucial abilities such as memory, concentration, and planning develop. Was Ms. Angela, the teacher in the opening chapter vignette, asking too much of her 3-year-olds to remember those free-play rules? How can teachers best teach spelling to a third-grade class? Parents might want guidelines as to what to expect from a child at a particular age: “Can my 6-year-old daughter take responsibility for caring for a puppy?” “When will my son be able to get ready for school on his own?” Clinical psychologists and caregivers would want to understand why a particular child has so much trouble focusing and obeying at school and at home. To get this information, everyone would gravitate toward the information-processing approach.

Information-processing theorists, as you learned in Chapter 3, break cognitive processes into components and divide thinking into steps. Let’s illustrate this approach by examining memory, the basis of all thought.

Making Sense of Memory

Information-processing theorists believe that on the way to becoming “a memory,” information passes through different stores, or stages. First, we hold stimuli arriving from the outside world briefly in a sensory store. Then, features that we notice enter the most important store, called working memory.

Working memory is where the “cognitive action” takes place. Here, we keep information in awareness and act to either process it or discard it. Working memory is made up of limited-capacity holding bins. It also consists of an “executive processor,” which allows us to focus on what we need to remember as well as to manipulate the material in working memory to prepare it for permanent storage (Baddeley, 1992; Best & Miller, 2010). Once we have moved information through working memory, it enters a more long-lasting store, and we can recall it at a later time.

You can get a real-life example of the fleeting quality of working memory when you get a phone number from information and call from a landline phone. You know that you can dial the number without having to write it down, and your memory will not fail if you get to finish. If you are interrupted by a beep from another caller and lose focus, the number evaporates. In fact, for adults, the typical bin size of working memory is about the size of a local phone number: seven chunks (in this case, digits) of information.

Just as they vary in motor talents, young children differ in working memory abilities, and these differences predict school readiness skills (Fizpatrick & Pagani, 2012; Preßler, Krajewski, & Hasselhorn, 2013). Moreover, while the basic structure of working memory, described above, swings into operation by about age 6 (Michalczyk and others, 2013), this capacity enlarges dramatically during elementary school (Alloway & Alloway, 2013; Thaler and others, 2013). Actually, the fact that memory-bin capacity expands from about two to five bits of information by age 7 (Dempster, 1981) explains why we reach concrete operations at roughly that age (Case, 1999). Now, children have the memory capacities to step back from their first impressions and remember that what they saw previously (for instance, a wider glass) compensates for what they are seeing right now.

Exploring Executive Functions

Executive functions refer to any skill related to managing our memory, controlling our cognitions, planning our behavior, and inhibiting our responses. Executive functions depend on the brain’s master planner—the frontal lobes. Now, let’s look at three examples of executive functions that make children in concrete operations very different thinkers than at age 4 or even 5.

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Older Children Rehearse Information

A major way we learn information is through rehearsal. We repeat material to embed it in memory. In a classic study, developmentalists had kindergarteners, second graders, and fifth graders memorize objects (such as a cat or a desk) pictured on cards (Flavell, Beach, & Chinsky, 1966). Prior to the testing, the research team watched the children’s lips to see if they were repeating the names of the objects to themselves. Eighty-five percent of the fifth graders used rehearsal; only 10 percent of the kindergarteners did. So one reason why older children are superior learners is that they understand that they need to rehearse.

Older Children Understand How to Selectively Attend

The ability to manage our awareness so we focus on what we need to know and filter out extraneous information is called selective attention. In a classic study illustrating young children’s problems in this area, researchers presented boys and girls of different ages with cards. On one half of each card was an animal photo; on the other half was a picture of some household item (see Figure 5.5). The children were instructed to remember only the animals.

As you might expect, older children were better at recalling the animal names. But now comes the interesting part: when the children were asked how many irrelevant items they could recall, the performance differences evaporated—suggesting that the young children wasted effort looking at the objects they did not need to know (Bjorklund, 2005). This suggests that, in addition to having smaller memory bins, young children clog their bin space with irrelevant information. They can’t focus their attention on what is relevant and filter out extraneous stimuli as well.

Older Children Are Superior at Inhibition

Turn back to the vignette at the beginning of this chapter to see the problems young children have inhibiting their impulses. Notice how the 3-year-olds ran into the different activity centers without thinking, “That’s not what I’m supposed to do.” The most fascinating example occurred during the weather report. Because the temptation to say yes was so strong, the children could not restrain themselves from agreeing when the teacher asked any question about the weather that day.

To measure differences in inhibition directly, researchers may ask children to perform some action that contradicts their immediate tendencies, such as instructing them to say the word black when they see the word white (Diamond, Kirkham, & Amso, 2002). Or the child may be instructed, “Press a button as fast as you can each time you see an animal on the screen, but don’t respond when you see a dog” (Pnevmatikos & Trikkaliotis, 2013). This “go, don’t go” challenge is exemplified by the classic childhood game Simon Says.

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Performance on these tasks improves markedly during preschool, and gradually gets better with age (Best & Miller, 2010). Actually, fostering inhibition—not doing what you feel like doing—is a primary socialization goal. From following the preschool rules to resisting checking Facebook while you are reading this page, inhibiting our responses is essential to succeeding at school and life.

Moreover, if you think these self-control feats are difficult, imagine being a young child. And never, ever tell a 4- or 5-year-old to keep a “big secret.” Her automatic response will be to immediately blurt it out!

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Now that I have reached the end of our survey of cognition, it should be clear why our species needs a decade (or two) beyond infancy to master the intellectual challenges of the adult world. Now, imagine the insights we would be missing if we left out any theory. What if you wanted to make sense of the strange ideas preschoolers have, or needed a general strategy for stimulating intellectual growth, or were looking for guidance about what to expect from children in terms of listening, following directions, and sitting still? You would have to turn to Piaget, Vygotsky, and the information-processing perspective. Has a particular theory been especially valuable in helping you understand the children you know?

Question 5.9

1. Mark tells you that the big tree in the garden is watching him.

2. When you stub your toe, Mark gives you his favorite stuffed animal.

3. Mark tells you that his daddy made the sun.

4. Mark says, “There’s more now,” when you pour juice from a wide carton into a skinny glass.

5. Mark tells you that his sister turned into a princess yesterday when she put on a costume.

(a) animism; (b) egocentrism; (c) artificialism; (d) can’t conserve; (e) (no) identity constancy

Question 5.10

Children in concrete operations can step back from their current perceptions and think conceptually, while preoperational children can’t go beyond how things immediately appear.

Question 5.11

Buy Chris easy-to-read books that are just above his skill level.

Question 5.12

(1) Following the play center rules to clean up, not take toys outside, and keep oneself from entering if there are four children; (2) having the class sit still and raise their hands to speak; (3) the dance slower and faster activity.

Question 5.13

Don’t put your son in demanding situations involving time management. When he studies, provide “white” background noise. Use small immediate reinforcers, such as prizes for good behavior that day. Get your son involved in sports or playing exciting games. Avoid power assertion (yelling and screaming), and go out of your way to provide lots of love.