You have just learned that every year of early childhood advances motor skills, brain development, and impulse control. That allows impressive, multi-contextual learning, as described by Piaget, Vygotsky, and many others.

Preoperational intelligence is the second of Piaget’s four periods of cognitive development (described in Table 1.6). He used the prefix pre- because children do not yet use logical operations (reasoning processes) (Inhelder & Piaget, 1964/2013a).

Because they are no longer simply sensorimotor, however, young children have language. Knowing words enables symbolic thought, when an object or word can stand for something else, including something out of sight or imagined. Words are used to symbolize an object or action; a child can talk about a dog without seeing the actual dog.

Symbolic thought helps explain animism, the belief of many young children that natural objects (such as a tree or a cloud) are alive and that nonhuman animals have the same characteristics as the child. Many children’s stories include animals or objects that talk and listen (Aesop’s fables, Winnie-the-Pooh, Goodnight Moon, The Day the Crayons Quit). Childish animism gradually disappears with maturation (Kesselring & Müller, 2011).

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OBSTACLES TO LOGIC Piaget noted four limitations that make logic difficult and thus make children preoperational until about age 6. These four are centration, appearance, static reasoning, and irreversibility.

Centration is the tendency to focus (to center) on only one aspect of a situation. Young children may, for example, insist that Daddy is a father, not a brother, because they center on the role that he fills for them. The daddy example illustrates a particular type of centration that Piaget called egocentrism—literally, “self-centeredness.” Egocentric children contemplate the world exclusively from their personal perspective.

Egocentrism is not selfishness. I encountered this with my daughter Sarah, when she was 3. We were holding hands and crossing a street.

Sarah: If a car killed one of us, who would you want it to be?

Me: Me.

Sarah: I would want it to be me.

Before I could appreciate what seemed to be her unselfishness, she matter-of-factly gave an egocentric reason.

Sarah: Because if you were dead, I wouldn’t know how to get home.

A second characteristic of preoperational thought is a focus on appearance to the exclusion of other attributes. For instance, a girl given a short haircut might worry that she has turned into a boy. In preoperational thought, a thing is whatever it appears to be—evident in the joy children have in wearing the shoes of a grown-up, clomping noisily and unsteadily.

Third, preoperational children use static reasoning. ?They believe that the world is stable, unchanging, always in the state in which they currently encounter it. Many children cannot imagine that their own parents were ever children.

If they grasp that their grandmother is their mother’s mother because they are repeatedly told, they still cannot imagine how the parent–child relationship changes with age. One young boy told his grandmother to tell his mother to never spank him because “she has to do what her mother says.”

The fourth characteristic of preoperational thought is irreversibility. Preoperational thinkers fail to recognize that reversing a process sometimes restores whatever existed before. A young girl might cry because her mother put lettuce on her sandwich, rejecting it after the lettuce is removed because she believes that what is done cannot be undone.

CONSERVATION AND LOGIC Piaget demonstrated several ways in which preoperational intelligence disregards logic. A famous set of experiments involved conservation, the notion that the amount of something remains the same (is conserved) despite changes in its appearance.

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The classic test of conservation begins with two identical glasses containing the same amount of liquid. Then the liquid from one glass is poured into a taller, narrower glass. Ask a child whether one glass contains more or both glasses contain the same. Preoperational children insist that the narrow glass (with the higher level) has more. (Figure 5.4 shows other examples.)

All four characteristics of preoperational thought are evident in this mistake. Young children fail to understand conservation because they focus (center) on what they see (appearance), noticing only the immediate (static) condition. It does not occur to them that they could reverse the process and re-create the level of a moment earlier (irreversibility).

Piaget’s original tests of conservation required children to respond verbally to adult questions. Later research has found that when the tests are simplified or made playful, young children may succeed, perhaps indicating via eye movements or gestures what they know before they put it in words (Goldin-Meadow & Alibali, 2013).

As with sensorimotor intelligence, Piaget underestimated preoperational children. Brain scans, video responses measured in milliseconds, and modern computer analysis were not available to Piaget. Although he was perceptive about children’s thinking, recent studies show much more early intellectual activity than Piaget described (Crone & Ridderinkhof, 2011).

Conservation and many more logical ideas are understood bit by bit, with active curiosity. Glimmers of understanding are apparent even at age 4 (Sophian, 2013). But preschoolers’ social network is limited. They rely heavily on their own experience, on their parents, and on simple rules governing behavior (Lane & Harris, 2014). Because of their cognitive limits, smart 3-year-olds sometimes are foolish, as Caleb is.

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For decades, scientists were understandably awed by Piaget. His description of egocentrism and magical thinking was confirmed daily by anecdotes of young children’s behavior. For Western developmentalists, Vygotsky, who wrote in Russian, was unknown until about 1970 when translations began to appear.

Vygotsky emphasized another side of early cognition, the social aspects. He stressed the power of culture, acknowledging that “the culturally specific nature of experience is an integral part of how the person thinks and acts” (Gauvain et al., 2011, pp. 122–123). Learning is not done in isolation; according to many contemporary educators, it depends on joint engagement.

MENTORS AND SCAFFOLDING Vygotsky agreed with Piaget that children are curious and observant. They ask questions—about how machines work, why weather changes, where the sky ends—and seek answers from more knowledgeable sources, called mentors. A mentor is anyone who provides guidance—teachers, older siblings, strangers, and, especially, parents. All of them are affected by their culture, and thus culture shapes a child’s cognition.

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According to Vygotsky, “What children can do with the assistance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone” (1980, p. 85). Indeed, mentors:

A skilled mentor finds the learner’s zone of proximal development (ZPD), an intellectual arena in which new ideas and skills can be mastered. Proximal means “near,” so the ZPD includes whatever ideas children are close to understanding and skills they can almost master. Mentors provide scaffolding, or temporary support, to help learners within their zone.

For instance, scaffolding may include telling children to look both ways before crossing the street (while holding the child’s hand) or letting them stir the cake batter (while covering the child’s hand on the spoon handle, in guided participation). Crucial is joint engagement, with novice and mentor together in the learning zone (Adamson et al., 2014).

As always, culture is crucial. Consider book-reading, for instance, an activity parents worldwide do with their young children, in part because it fosters language, reading, and moral development. Mentors do not merely read the words, they scaffold—explaining, pointing, listening, describing—within the child’s zone of development.

Comparative research finds that parents choose books carefully and then teach whatever is important to them. For example, one study found that, compared to European Americans, Chinese American parents were more likely to note how the book’s characters created problems by misbehaving and Mexican Americans were more likely to highlight the characters’ emotions (Luo et al., 2014).

As good mentors, parents adjust their reading to meet the developmental age of the child, first expanding vocabulary, then focusing on letters, and always listening to the child (Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2014).

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OVERIMITATION Sometimes scaffolding is inadvertent, as when children observe something said or done that adults wish they had not noticed. Young children may curse and kick because someone else showed them. More benignly, children imitate meaningless habits and customs, a trait called overimitation. This stems from the child’s eagerness to learn, allowing “rapid, high-fidelity intergenerational transmission of … cultural forms” (Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010, p. 735).

Overimitation was demonstrated in a series of experiments with 3- to 6-year-olds. To understand the role of culture, the researchers studied children from three groups: 64 from San communities (pejoratively called Bushmen) in South Africa and Botswana, 64 from cities in Australia, and 19 from aboriginal communities within Australia (Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010; Nielsen et al., 2014).

Australian adults often scaffold for children with words and actions, but San adults rarely do. The researchers expected the Australian children to follow adult demonstrations. They were surprised when San children did so also.

In part of the study, one by one some children in each group observed an adult perform irrelevant actions, such as waving a red stick above a box three times and then using that stick to push down a knob to open the box, which could be easily and more efficiently opened by pulling down the same knob by hand. Then children were given the stick and the box. No matter what their cultural background, the children followed the adult example, waving the stick three times and not using their hands directly on the knob.

Other children did not see the demonstration. When they were given the stick and asked to open the box, they simply pulled the knob. Then they observed an adult open the box with stick-waving and they did something odd: They copied those inefficient actions. Apparently, children everywhere learn from others through observation, sometimes contrary to what they know. Across cultures, overimitation is striking.

In this study, the researchers found that the urban and aboriginal Australian children followed the procedures they had just seen when given a new, similar task. The San children did not immediately apply what they had just learned, perhaps because the circumstances of their daily life (which the researchers called “dire and depressing”) taught them not to do anything on their own (Nielsen et al., 2014). Or perhaps the power of their culture was so strong that they did not choose to follow the odd new procedures.

Either way, Vygotsky’s stress on social context is confirmed.

Piaget and Vygotsky both recognized that from birth on people strive to understand their world. No contemporary developmental scientist doubts that. How exactly do children acquire their impressive knowledge? Part of the answer is that children do more than master words and ideas; they develop theories to help them understand and remember (Baron-Cohen et al., 2013).

THEORY-THEORY Humans of all ages want explanations. That is one reason traffic slows down when there is an accident on the other side of a divided highway: People want to know what happened and why. Theory-theory is the idea that children naturally construct theories to explain whatever they see and hear. In other words, the theory about how children think is that they construct a theory.

We are perpetually driven to look for deeper explanations of our experience, and broader and more reliable predictions about it…. Children seem, quite literally, to be born with … the desire to understand the world and the desire to discover how to behave in it.

[Gopnik, 2001, p. 66]

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New bits of knowledge and observations are used to make sense of experiences. Children revise their theories as new evidence accumulates (Meltzoff & Gopnik, 2013).

In order to develop a theory about what causes what and why, children notice how often a particular event occurs. They follow the same processes that scientists do: asking questions, developing hypotheses, gathering data, and drawing conclusions.

Of course, their methods lack the rigor of scientific experiments, but they explore physics, biology, and the social sciences: “infants and young children not only detect statistical patterns, they use those patterns to test hypotheses about people and things” (Gopnik, 2012, p. 1625).

Some children seem always to ask why, why, why. From the answers they develop theories. This is particularly evident in children’s understanding of God. One child thought his grandpa died because God was lonely; another thought thunder occurred because God was rearranging the furniture in heaven.

As you see, a child’s conclusions are not always correct. Egocentric young children theorize that everyone operates as they themselves do. Since they see themselves as always the same (static), yet they realize that their behavior changes depending on circumstances, they overestimate the role of context, and underestimate the role of personality, for other people as well.

That explains the results of a series of experiments in which children observe that one puppet refuses to play on a trampoline or ride a bicycle and another puppet does both. Four-year-olds theorize that the playing puppet must know that the trampoline is safe, not that one puppet is brave and the other fearful. By age 6, children are more able to explain behavior based on temperament, not situation (Seiver et al., 2013).

One common theory-theory is that everyone intends to do things correctly. For that reason, when asked to repeat something ungrammatical that an adult says, children often correct the grammar. They theorize that the adult intended to speak grammatically (Over & Gattis, 2010).

This illustrates a general principle: Children theorize about intentions before they imitate what they see. As you have read, when children saw an adult wave a stick before opening a box, the children theorized that, since the adult did it deliberately, stick-waving must somehow be important. If the adult seemed to do it by mistake or thoughtlessly, imitation would not occur.

THEORY OF MIND Mental processes—thoughts, emotions, beliefs, motives, and intentions—are among the most complicated and puzzling phenomena that humans encounter every day.

Adults wonder why people fall in love with the particular persons they do, why they vote for the candidates whose policies would hurt them, or why they make foolish choices—from signing for a huge mortgage to buying an overripe cucumber. Children are likewise puzzled about a playmate’s unexpected anger, a sibling’s generosity, or an aunt’s too-wet kiss.

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To understand what another person thinks, people develop a theory of mind, a hypothesis about what other people think and feel. Theory of mind is “essential in communities that rely heavily on the exchange of information, ideas, and points of view” (Lillard & Kavanaugh, 2014, p. 1535). That makes theory of mind crucial for human society in most places.

Theory of mind develops slowly in young children, typically emerging at about age 4 (Carlson et al., 2013). Some aspects of theory of mind develop sooner, and some later. Generally, the preschool years begin with 2-year-olds not realizing that other people think differently than they do and end with 6-year-olds aware that other minds might not know what they know (Wellman et al., 2011).

In one of dozens of false-belief tests that researchers have developed, a child watches a puppet named Max put a toy dog into a red box. Then Max leaves and the child sees the dog taken out of the red box and put in a blue box.

When Max returns, the child is asked, “Where will Max look for the dog?” Most 3-year-olds confidently say, “In the blue box”; most 6-year-olds correctly say, “In the red box,” a pattern found in more than a dozen nations. Interestingly, although some cultural differences appear, the most notable differences are neurological, not cultural: Children with autism spectrum disorder are slow to develop theory of mind (Carlson et al., 2013).

The development of theory of mind can be seen when young children try to escape punishment by lying. Their face often betrays them: worried or shifting eyes, pursed lips, and so on. Parents sometimes say, “I know when you are lying,” and, to the consternation of most 3-year-olds, parents are usually right.

In one experiment, 247 children, aged 3 to 5, were left alone at a table that had an upside-down cup covering dozens of candies (Evans et al., 2011). The children were told not to peek, and the experimenter left the room.

For 142 children (57 percent), curiosity overcame obedience. They peeked, spilling so many candies onto the table that they could not put them back under the cup. The examiner returned, asking how the candies got on the table. Only one-fourth of the participants (more often the younger ones) told the truth.

The rest lied, and their skill increased with their age. The 3-year-olds typically told hopeless lies (e.g., “The candies got out by themselves”); the 4-year-olds told unlikely lies (e.g., “Other children came in and knocked over the cup”). Some of the 5-year-olds, however, told plausible lies (e.g., “My elbow knocked over the cup accidentally”).

This particular study was done in Beijing, China, but the results are universal: Older children are better liars. Beyond the age differences, the experimenters found that the more logical liars were also more advanced in theory of mind (Evans et al., 2011).

Many studies have found that a child’s ability to develop theories correlates with activity in several areas of the brain (Koster-Hale & Saxe, 2014). A meta-analysis found that executive function in preschoolers led to a better understanding of false belief (as in Max and the boxes) but not vice versa (Devine & Hughes, 2014).

More evidence comes from the same 3- to 5-year-olds whose lying was studied. Researchers asked them to say “day” when they saw a picture of the moon and “night” when they saw a picture of the sun. The children needed to inhibit their automatic reaction.

This is a common measure of executive function. When compared to other children who were the same age, those who failed the day–night tests typically told impossible lies, whereas their age-mates who were high in executive function told plausible lies (Evans et al., 2011).

Of course, many egocentric children convince themselves that something is true when it is not—as do some adults. This does not mean that they are unable to recount what they see and hear, but it does mean that what any witness says may or may not be true.

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