Thinking During Early Childhood

You have just learned that every year of early childhood advances motor skills, brain development, and impulse control. Each of these affects cognition, as first described by Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, already mentioned in Chapter 1.

Piaget: Preoperational Thought

Early childhood is the time of preoperational intelligence, the second of Piaget’s four periods of cognitive development. He called early-childhood thinking preoperational because children do not yet use logical operations (reasoning processes) (Inhelder & Piaget, 1964).

However, preoperational children are past sensorimotor intelligence because they can think in symbols, not just via senses and motor skills. In symbolic thought, an object or word can stand for something else, including something not seen, or pretended. That is more advanced than thinking only via the senses, because using words makes it possible to think about many more things at once. However, although vocabulary and imagination can soar, logical connections between ideas are not yet active, not yet operational.

The word dog, for instance, is at first only the family dog sniffing at the child, not yet a symbol (Callaghan, 2013). By age 2, the word becomes a symbol: It can refer to a remembered dog, or a plastic dog, or an imagined dog. Symbolic thought allows for the language explosion (detailed later in this chapter), which enables children to talk about thoughts and memories. However, since thought is preoperational, it is hard for young children to understand the historical connections, similarities, and differences between dogs and wolves, or even between a cocker spaniel and a collie.

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). Preoperational thought is symbolic and magical, not logical and realistic. Animism gradually disappears as the mind becomes more mature (Kesselring & Müller, 2011).

Obstacles to Logic

Piaget described symbolic thought as characteristic of preoperational thought. He also described four limitations that make logic difficult until about age 6: centration, focus on appearance, static reasoning, and irreversibility.

Centration is the tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation to the exclusion of all others. 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, however. One 3-year-old chose to buy a model car as a birthday present for his mother: His “behavior was not selfish or greedy; he carefully wrapped the present and gave it to his mother with an expression that clearly showed that he expected her to love it” (Crain, 2005, p. 108).

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 young children have in wearing the hats or shoes of a grown-up.

Third, preoperational children use static reasoning, believing that the world is unchanging, always in the state in which they currently encounter it. Many children cannot imagine that their own parents were ever children. If they are told that Grandma is their mother’s mother, they still do not understand how people change with maturation. One preschooler wanted 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. Overwhelmed by her desire to have things “just right,” she might reject the food even after the lettuce is removed because she believes that what is done cannot be undone.

Conservation and Logic

Piaget highlighted 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.

Suppose two identical glasses contain the same amount of pink lemonade, and the liquid from one of these glasses is poured into a taller, narrower glass. If young children are asked whether one glass contains more or both glasses contain the same amount, they will insist that the narrower glass (with the higher level) has more. (See Figure 9.1 for other examples.)

FIGURE 9.1

Conservation, Please According to Piaget, until children grasp the concept of conservation at (he believed) about age 6 or 7, they cannot understand that the transformations shown here do not change the total amount of liquid, checkers, clay, and wood.

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).

Easy Question; Obvious Answer (below, left) Sadie, age 5, carefully makes sure both glasses contain the same amount. (below, right) When one glass of pink lemonade is poured into a wide jar, she triumphantly points to the tall glass as having more. Sadie is like all 5-year-olds—only a development psychologist or a 7-year-old child knows better.

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Piaget’s original tests of conservation required children to respond verbally to an adult’s questions. Later research has found that when the tests of logic are simplified or made playful, young children may succeed. In many ways, children indicate via eye movements or gestures that they know something before they can say it in words (Goldin-Meadow, 2009).

As with sensorimotor intelligence in infancy, Piaget underestimated what preoperational children could understand. Piaget was right that young children are not as logical as older children, but he did not realize how much they could learn.

Brain scans, videos measured in milliseconds, and the computer programs that developmentalists now use were not available to him. Studies from the past 20 years show intellectual activity before age 6 that was not previously known, although they also show that Piaget was perceptive about many aspects of cognition (Crone & Ridderinkhof, 2011).

Given the new data, it is easy to be critical of Piaget. However, note that many adults make the same mistakes as children. For instance, the shape of boxes and bottles in the grocery store undermine adults’ sense of conservation (package designers know that an ounce does not always appear to be an ounce). Animism is evident in many religious and cultural myths that include talking, thinking animals.

Indeed, most adults encourage children to believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and so on (Barrett, 2008). If preschoolers are foolish to imagine that animals and plants have human traits, what are adults who talk to their pets and who mourn the death of a tree? And why do some adults take it personally when it rains unexpectedly?

Vygotsky: Social Learning

For decades, the magical, illogical, and self-centered aspects of cognition dominated our concepts of early-childhood thought. Scientists were understandably awed by Piaget. His description of egocentrism and magical thinking was confirmed daily by anecdotes of young children’s behavior.

Vygotsky emphasized another side of early cognition—that each person’s thinking is shaped by other people’s wishes and goals. He emphasized the social aspects of development, a contrast to Piaget’s emphasis on the individual. That led Vygotsky to notice the power of culture, acknowledging that “the culturally specific nature of experience is an integral part of how the person thinks and acts,” as several developmentalists explain (Gauvain et al., 2011).

Mentors

Vygotsky believed that cognitive development is embedded in a social context at every age (Vygotsky, 1934/1987). He stressed 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 mentors, who might be their parents, teachers, older siblings, or just a stranger. These answers are affected by the mentors’ perceptions and assumptions—that is, their culture—which shapes their thought.

As you remember from Chapter 2, children learn through guided participation, as mentors teach them. Parents are the first guides, although children are guided by many others too. For example, the verbal proficiency of children in day-care centers is affected by the language of their playmates, who teach vocabulary without consciously doing so (Mashburn et al., 2009).

Words Fail Me Could you describe how to tie shoes? The limitations of verbal tests of cognitive understanding are apparent in the explanation of many skills.

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According to Vygotsky, children learn because their mentors do the following:

• Present challenges.
• Offer assistance (without taking over).
• Add crucial information.
• Encourage motivation.

Overall, the ability to learn from mentors indicates intelligence; 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” (1934/1987, p. 5).

Scaffolding

Vygotsky believed that all individuals learn within their zone of proximal development (ZPD), an intellectual arena in which new ideas and skills can be mastered. Proximal means “near,” so the ZPD includes the ideas children are close to understanding as well as the skills they can almost master but are not yet able to demonstrate independently. How and when children learn depends, in part, on the wisdom and willingness of mentors to provide scaffolding, or temporary sensitive support, to help them within their developmental zone.

Good mentors provide plenty of scaffolding, encouraging children to look both ways before crossing the street (while holding the child’s hand) or letting them stir the cake batter (perhaps while covering the child’s hand on the spoon handle, in guided participation).

Count by Tens A large, attractive abacus could be a scaffold. However, in this toy store the position of the balls suggests that no mentor is nearby. Children are unlikely to grasp the number system without a motivating guide.

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Sometimes scaffolding is inadvertent, as when children observe something said or done and then try to do likewise—even if it is something that adults would rather the child not do. Young children curse, kick, and do even worse because someone else showed them how.

More benignly, children imitate habits and customs that are meaningless, a trait called overimitation, evident in humans but not in other animals. This stems from the child’s eagerness to learn from mentors, allowing “rapid, high-fidelity intergenerational transmission of cultural forms” (Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010, p. 735).

Overimitation was demonstrated in an experiment with 2- to 6-year-olds, 61 of them from Bushman communities in South Africa and Botswana and, for comparison, 16 from Australia. Australian adults often scaffold for children with words and actions, but Bushman adults rarely do. The researchers expected the Australian children to follow adult demonstrations, since they were accustomed to learning in that way. They did not expect the Bushman children to do so (Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010).

One by one, all the Australian and half of the Bushman children 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 merely 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 Bushman 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 do the stick-waving opening—and they did something odd: They copied those inefficient actions, even though they already knew the easy way to open the box.

Apparently, children everywhere learn from others through observation, even if they have not been taught to do so. They even learn to do things contrary to their prior learning. Thus, scaffolding occurs through observation as well as explicit guidance. Across cultures, “similarity of performance is profound” (Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010, p. 734), with children everywhere strongly inclined to learn whatever adults from their culture do. That is exactly what Vygotsky explained.

As always, cultural differences are crucial. Consider book-reading, for instance. In many North American families, when an adult reads to a child, the adult scaffolds—explaining, pointing, listening—within the child’s zone of development. A sensitive adult reader does not tell the child to be quiet but might instead prolong the session by expanding on the child’s questions and the pictures in the book.

By contrast, book-reading in middle-class Peruvian families includes teaching the child to listen when adults talk, so that a 2-year-old who interrupts is lovingly taught to be quiet (Melzi & Caspe, 2005). Obviously, scaffolded behaviors and processes in Peru differ because the goal is a respectful child, not a talkative one.

Same or Different? Which do you see? Most people focus on differences, such as ethnicity or sex. But a developmental perspective appreciates similarities: book reading to a pre-literate child cradled on a parent’s lap.

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Words, Cultures, and Math

Vygotsky particularly stressed the role of language to advance thought. He wrote that private speech, which is talking to oneself either out loud or in one’s mind, is an important road to cognitive development. That seems to be especially true in early childhood (Al-Namlah et al., 2012). Young children talk to themselves when they are alone in their beds, to their toys, and to their parents, even when the parents are pushing their strollers and unable to hear them. All this private speech, Vygotsky believed, develops their minds.

Children’s Theories

Piaget and Vygotsky both recognized that children work to understand their world. No contemporary developmental scientist doubts that. How do children acquire their impressive knowledge? Part of the answer is that children do more than gain words and concepts—they develop theories to help them understand and remember.

Theory-Theory

Humans of all ages want explanations. Theory-theory refers to 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. All people

According to theory-theory, the best explanation for cognition is that humans seek reasons, causes, and underlying principles to make sense of their experience. That requires curiosity and thought, connecting bits of knowledge and observations, which is what young children do. Humans always want theories, even false ones.

Exactly how do children seek explanations? They ask questions, and, if they are not satisfied with the answers, they develop their own theories. This is particularly evident in children’s understanding of God and religion. One child thought his grandpa died because God was lonely; another thought thunder occurred because God was rearranging the furniture.

Theories do not appear randomly. Children wonder about the underlying purpose of whatever they observe, and they note how often a particular event occurs in order to develop a theory about what causes what and why (Gopnik & Wellman, 2012). Of course, their theories are not always correct.

For instance, when I was a young child, I noticed that my father never carried an umbrella. Since I looked up to him, I assumed he must have had a good reason. Consequently, throughout all my adult years, I never carried an umbrella. Neither did my brother, which confirmed for me that my father was right.

Over time I developed many reasons for my father’s behavior. He must have realized, I decided, that umbrellas poke people in the eye, get forgotten, blow away, and are lost. Then, when Dad was in his 80s, my brother asked him why he didn’t like umbrellas. The answer was “Chamberlain.” Neville Chamberlain was famous for carrying an umbrella when he was prime minister of England from 1937 to 1940; and he was photographed with his black umbrella after signing the Munich Agreement in 1938, when he announced that Hitler would not attack England. For Dad, umbrellas symbolized foolish trust. All my theories were imagined to justify something I did not understand. That is theory-theory.

A series of experiments that explored when and how 3-year-olds imitate others provides research support for theory-theory (Williamson et al., 2008). Children figure out why adults act as they do before deciding to copy those actions. If an adult intends to accomplish something and succeeds, a child is likely to follow the example, but if the same action and result seem inadvertent or accidental, the child is less likely to copy it.

Indeed, even when asked to repeat something ungrammatical that an adult says, children often correct the grammar. They theorize that the adult intended to speak grammatically but failed to do so (Over & Gattis, 2010). This is another example of a general principle: Children develop theories about intentions before they employ their impressive ability to imitate; they do not mindlessly copy whatever they observe. 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 was somehow important.

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 they do, or why they make foolish choices—from taking on a huge mortgage to buying an overripe cucumber. Children are puzzled about a playmate’s unexpected anger, a sibling’s generosity, or an aunt’s too-wet kiss.

To know what goes on in another’s mind, people develop a folk psychology, which includes ideas about other people’s thinking, called theory of mind. Theory of mind is an emergent ability, slow to develop but typically beginning in most children at about age 4 (Sterck & Begeer, 2010).

Realizing that thoughts do not mirror reality is beyond very young children, but that realization dawns on them sometime after age 3. It then occurs to them that people can be deliberately deceived or fooled—an idea that requires some theory of mind.

Candies in the Crayon Box Any one would expect crayons in a crayon box, but once a child sees that candy is inside, he expects that everyone else will also know that candies are inside!

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In one of several 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 a dozen nations (Wellman et al., 2001).

Indeed, 3-year-olds almost always confuse what they recently learned with what they once thought and what someone else might think. Another way of describing this is to say that they are “cursed” by their own knowledge (Birch & Bloom, 2003), too egocentric to grasp others’ perspectives. Asa did that in the vignette at the start of this chapter when he failed to understand that I was tired of throwing imaginary baskets and wanted to sit. He thought I didn’t know that a person could think while standing!

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, with increasing skill. 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 seem 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 and executive functioning (Evans et al., 2011), which indicates a more mature prefrontal cortex (see Figure 9.2).

FIGURE 9.2

Better with Age? Could an obedient and honest 3-year-old become a disobedient and lying 5-year-old? Apparently yes, as the proportion of peekers and liars in this study more than doubled over those two years. Does maturation make children more able to think for themselves or less trustworthy?

Brain and Context

Many studies have found that a child’s ability to develop theories correlates with the maturity of the prefrontal cortex and with advances in executive processing (Mar, 2011). This brain connection was further suggested by research on 8- to 16-year-olds. Their readiness to lie did not correlate with age or brain maturation (they were old enough to realize that a lie was possible, but whether they actually lied depended on their expectations and values); but if they did lie, their executive abilities correlated with the sophistication of their lies (Evans & Lee, 2011).

Additional evidence for the crucial role of the prefrontal cortex in development of theory of mind comes from the other study of 3- to 5-year-olds just cited. The experimenters tested the children’s ability to say “day” when they saw a picture of the moon and “night” when they saw a picture of the sun. The ability to do this indicates advanced executive function, which correlates with maturation of the prefrontal cortex. Even when children 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 more plausible lies (Evans et al., 2011).

FIGURE 9.3

Brains at Work Neuroscience confirms the critical role of the prefrontal cortex in development of theory of mind. Adults and 4- to 6-year-olds were questioned on 40 theory-of-mind examples. The adults answered correctly, as did some 4- to 6-year-olds (passers), though not all (failers). The leftmost images are brain-wave patterns; the other images are fMRI scans—the middle ones represent brain activity when confronted with questions about social interaction (active brains in children and adults) and the rightmost ones show mental activity when distinguishing between reality and belief (needed to pass theory-of-mind questions). Adult brain waves show quick answers, and the contrast (right) shows that they answered quickly with little effort; but the child passers needed to think longer before they answered, and the child failers didn’t give the questions much thought, because they didn’t recognize the problem. The authors concluded that “social cognition and the brain develop together” (Liu et al., 2009, pp. 318, 325).

Does the crucial role of brain maturation make context irrelevant? No (Sterck & Begeer, 2010); nurture is always important. For instance, research finds that language development fosters theory of mind, especially when mother—child conversations involve thoughts and wishes (Ontai & Thompson, 2008). Furthermore, social interactions with other children advance a child’s thinking process. As one expert quipped, “Two older siblings are worth about a year of chronological age” (Perner, 2000, p. 383).

Brothers and Sisters When every family had many children, as in this Western Australian family, even 3-year-olds had to learn when a brother was to be trusted not to move the chair.

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As brothers and sisters argue, agree, compete, and cooperate, and as older siblings fool younger ones, it dawns on 3-year-olds that not everyone thinks as they do. By age 5, children with siblings have figured out how to how to persuade their younger siblings to give them a toy, and they’ve learned how to gain parental sympathy by acting as if they are victims of their older brothers and sisters. Parents, beware: Asking “Who started it?” may be irrelevant.

Finally, the exosystem also influences development of theory of mind. A meta-analysis of 254 studies in China and North America found that Chinese children were about six months ahead of U.S. children in theory of mind and other markers of early cognition (Liu et al., 2008). Another study directly comparing executive function in young children in preschools in Canada, India, Peru, Samoa, and Thailand found that the Canadian 5-year-olds were slightly more advanced and the Samoan 5-year-olds were slightly slower, with social context the most likely explanation (Callaghan et al., 2005).