5.3 Thinking During Early Childhood

You have just learned that every year of early childhood brings more advanced motor skills, further brain development, and better control of impulses. All these affect 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. 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 senses and motor skills. In symbolic thought, an object or word can stand for something else, including something pretended, or something not seen. For instance, toddlers often hold a block or hairbrush to their ear and pretend they are talking with someone. Symbolic thought allows for the language explosion (detailed later in this chapter), when children can talk about thoughts and memories.

Symbolic thought explains animism, the belief of many young children that natural objects (such as a tree or a cloud) are alive, and that non-human animals have the same characteristics as the child. For example, when my niece Kaitlyn was 2 years old, we went to an aquarium store to look at the fish. She pointed at one and asked me, “Why is this fish sad? Is it because he’s not with his mommy?” The fish she pointed to had a mouth that sloped downwards as if it were frowning.

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

Obstacles to LogicPiaget described symbolic thought as characteristic of preoperational thought, and 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, sort blocks by colour (grouping blue blocks together and red ones in another pile). However, if you ask them to sort by colour and shape, putting the blue square blocks together in one pile and the blue triangle blocks in another, and the same for green, they would not be able to do it.

The block example illustrates a particular type of centration that Piaget called egocentrism—literally, “self-centredness.” Egocentric children contemplate the world primarily from their personal perspective. Egocentrism is not selfishness. Consider, for example, a 3-year-old who chose to buy a model car as a birthday present for his mother: His “behaviour 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).

A second characteristic of preoperational thought is a focus on appearance to the exclusion of other attributes. Preschoolers are easily tricked by the outward appearance of things. In preoperational thought, a girl given a short haircut might worry that she has turned into a boy, and young children wearing the hats or shoes of a grown-up believe they themselves are grown up.

Third, preoperational children use static reasoning, believing that the world is unchanging, always in the state in which they currently encounter it. For instance, many children cannot imagine that their own parents were ever children. If they are told that their grandmother is their mother’s mother, they still do not understand that people change with maturation. One preschooler 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 child 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 LogicPiaget highlighted the many ways in which preoperational intelligence overlooks 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 milk. If you ask a child to confirm that both glasses have the same amount, he or she will acknowledge that they do. But if you then take one of the glasses of milk and pour the milk into another glass that is taller and thinner, the child will insist that the narrower glass (with the higher level) has more milk. (See Figure 5.5 for other examples.)

FIGURE 5.5 Types of Conservation 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.

Demonstration of Conservation Sarah, here at age 5¾, demonstrates Piaget’s conservation-of-liquids experiment. First, she examines both short glasses to be sure they contain the same amount of milk. Then, after the contents of one are poured into the tall glass and she is asked which has more, she points to the tall glass, just as Piaget would have expected. Later she added, “It looks like it has more because it’s taller.”

COURTESY OF KATHLEEN BERGER

All four characteristics of preoperational thought are evident in this mistake. Young children fail to understand conservation of liquids because they focus (centre) 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 an adult’s questions. Later research has found that when the tests of logic are simplified or made playful, young children may succeed. In addition, researchers must consider children’s eye movements or gestures, which may reveal children’s thoughts before they can articulate them in words (Goldin-Meadow, 2009).

As with sensorimotor intelligence in infancy, Piaget underestimated what children could understand. Nonetheless, he was a pioneer in recognizing several crucial ways in which children’s thought patterns are unlike those of adults.

Vygotsky: Social Learning

Learning to Tie Shoes Could you describe how to tie shoes? The limitations of verbal tests of cognitive understanding are apparent in many skills.

CORBIS RF/AGE FOTOSTOCK

For decades, the magical, illogical, and self-centred aspects of early childhood cognition dominated research; scientists were understandably influenced by Piaget. His description of egocentrism was confirmed daily by anecdotes of young children’s behaviour. Vygotsky emphasized the influence 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).

Children and MentorsVygotsky believed that every aspect of children’s cognitive development is embedded in a social context (Vygotsky, 1934/1987). 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. These answers are affected by the mentors’ perceptions and assumptions—that is, their culture.

As you remember from Chapter 1, children learn through guided participation, as older and more skilled mentors teach them. Parents are the first guides, although many teachers, other family members, and peers are mentors as well. For example, the verbal proficiency of children in daycare centres is affected by the language of their playmates, who teach vocabulary without consciously doing so (Mashburn et al., 2009).

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).

Scaffolding and OverimitationVygotsky believed that each individual learns within their zone of proximal development (ZPD), an intellectual arena where new ideas and skills can be mastered. Proximal means “near,” so the ZPD includes the ideas children are close to understanding and the skills they are close to attaining but not yet able to master independently. For example, a parent might hold her child’s hands to help the child walk or hold the back of a bicycle seat as the child learns to ride the bike.

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 the adult’s hand covers the child’s hand on the spoon handle, in guided participation).

Young children also 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). Children’s reasons for imitating one person versus another can vary from seeking approval to trying to fit in with the group.

Overimitation was demonstrated in an experiment with 2- to 6-year-olds, 16 from Bushman communities in South Africa and Botswana and 16 from Australia. Australian adults often scaffold with words and actions, but Bushman adults rarely do so. The researchers expected the Australian children to follow adult demonstrations, as they had been taught. They did not expect the Bushman children to do so.

One by one some of the 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 opened by pulling a knob. 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.

Other children did not see the demonstration. When they were given the stick and the box, they simply pulled the knob. Then they observed an adult do the stick-waving opening and they copied those inefficient actions—even though they already knew the easy way to open the box. Apparently, children are universally predisposed to learn from others via observation if not deliberately taught.

Children’s Theories

Piaget and Vygotsky recognized that children work to understand their world. No contemporary developmental scientist doubts that. The question now is: When and how do children acquire their impressive knowledge? Part of the answer is that children do not simply gain words, skills, and concepts—they develop theories to help them understand and remember.

Theory-TheoryHumans 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, as do all humans:

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

Exactly how do children seek explanations? They ask questions, and, if not content 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 rearranged the furniture.

In one study, Mexican-American mothers kept detailed diaries of every question their 3- to 5-year-olds asked and also what they themselves responded (Kelemen et al., 2005). Most of the questions were about human behaviour and characteristics (see Figure 5.6); for example, “Why do you give my mother a kiss?” “Why is my brother bad?” “Why do women have breasts?” Fewer questions were about nonliving things (“Why does it rain?”) or objects (“Why is my daddy’s car white?”).

FIGURE 5.6 Questions, Questions Parents found that most of their children’s questions were about human behaviour—especially the parents’ behaviour toward the child. Children seek to develop a theory to explain things, so the question “Why can’t I have some candy?” is not satisfactorily answered by “It’s almost dinnertime.”

Children seem to wonder about the underlying purpose of whatever they observe, although parents usually respond as if children were seeking scientific explanations. An adult might interpret a child’s “Why?” to mean “What causes X to happen?” when the child intended “Why?” to mean “Tell me more about X” (Leach, 1997).

For example, if a child asks why women have breasts, adults might talk about hormones and maturation, but a child-centred response would be that breasts are for feeding babies. From a child’s egocentric perspective, any query includes “How does this relate to me?” Accordingly, an adult might add that the child got his or her first nourishment from the mother’s breast.

A series of experiments further explored when and how 3-year-olds understand other people’s intent, which provided some support for theory-theory (Williamson et al., 2008). Children seem to figure out why adults act as they do before deciding to copy those actions. If an adult intended to accomplish something and succeeded, a child is likely to follow the example, but if the same action and result seemed inadvertent or accidental, the child is less likely to copy it. So, these children made a distinction between purposeful and perchance actions.

Indeed, even when asked to repeat something ungrammatical that an adult says, children are likely to correct the grammar based on their theory 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.

Theory of MindHuman mental processes—thoughts, emotions, beliefs, motives, and intentions—are among the most complicated and puzzling phenomena that we encounter every day. Adults wonder why people fall in love with a particular persons, or why they vote for a candidate, 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 a set of 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 reflect reality is beyond very young children, but it occurs to them sometime after age 3. They then realize that people can be deliberately deceived or fooled—an idea that requires some theory of mind.

In one of several false-belief tests that researchers have developed, a child watches a doll named Max put a puppy into a red box. Then Max leaves and the child sees the puppy 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 puppy?” Most 3-year-olds confidently say, “In the blue box,” believing Max would know and act in accordance with their newly acquired knowledge; most 6-year-olds correctly say, “In the red box,” This pattern is 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.

FIGURE 5.7 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?

The development of theory of mind can be seen when young children try to escape punishment by lying. Their facial expression often betrays them. 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 and 5, were left alone at a table that had an upside down cup that covered dozens of candies (Evans et al., 2011). The children were told not to peek, but more than half of them did (specifically, 49 percent of the 3-year-olds and 70 percent of the 5-year-olds), spilling the candies onto the table. They could not put them back to hide that the fact that they had peeked. 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 5.7).

Brain and Context

Many scientists have found that theory of mind correlates with maturity of the prefrontal cortex and advances in executive processing (Liu et al., 2011; Mar, 2011). The brain connection was further supported 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). If they did lie, their executive abilities correlated with the sophistication of their lies (Evans & Lee, 2011).

Context and experience are relevant as well (Sterck & Begeer, 2010). Language proficiency helps, especially if mother–child conversations involve thoughts and wishes (Ontai & Thompson, 2008). Siblings help, too. 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. Egocentrism is somewhat modified. By age 5, children with older siblings know what words and actions will gain parental sympathy to protect themselves against their older siblings, as well as how to persuade their younger brothers and sisters to give them a toy. As one expert stated, “Two older siblings are worth about a year of chronological age” (Perner, 2000).

Finally, culture and context matter for theory of mind. A meta-analysis of 254 studies done in China and North America reported that Chinese children were about six months ahead of Canadian and U.S. children in development of theory of mind (Liu et al., 2008). A Canadian study found that children were slower by a few months if they often watched television (Mar et al., 2010). Everywhere, however, sometime between ages 2 and 6, children realize that not everyone knows what they know.