Susan Carey accurately summarizes Piagetian proposals to differentiate between preoperational and operational children. Preoperational children: (1) only attend to one dimension of the task at a time, (2) cannot construct ordered series or make transitive inferences about them, (3) cannot represent classes or the inclusion relation of classes, ( 4) they are egocentric: they cannot consider other points of view, (5) they do not have the notion of physical causality and (6) they cannot distinguish appearance from reality. For their part, children who have constructed concrete operations: (1) can coordinate two dimensions, (2) can represent ordered series and make transitive inferences, (3) can represent classes and the inclusion relationship of classes, (4) they can adopt other points of view, (5) they grasp physical causality, and (6) they grasp the distinction between appearance and reality.
Piagetian theory considers that the use of logical rules to solve problems is the cornerstone on which children’s intelligence is built. However, psychologists who give priority to cultural aspects, Vygotsky and Luria for example, consider that it is the development of language as a regulator of one’s own behavior, as an activator and inhibitor, that drives intellectual development during childhood. middle childhood.
Definition of mental operation
A mental operation, according to Piaget, is an internalized action of a reversible nature that is combined with others forming overall structures. We call these structures groupings. Groupings have two fundamental operations: identity and reversibility. Identity implies that if nothing is added or removed from a “whole” it remains the same. Reversibility means that if a transformation is carried out in one direction and then in the opposite direction, the “everything” remains the same.
Piaget considered that the notion of conservation is a necessary condition for groupings. The new groupings are: transitivitythe classifications and the serietions. Groupings are weak structures, halfway between mathematical logic and psychology. Piaget used the properties of these structures to explain conservation, the inclusion of classes and order relations, as well as the understanding of the notion of number.
Other approaches to mental operation
With mental attention (M) of e + 1 the subject can only represent one mental state. To have two different representations requires a mental attention of e + 2. If this is not achieved, all I can understand is my own mental state, extended or prolonged.
The origin of research on theory of mind dates back to the works of Premack and Woodruff. These authors considered, given the ability of chimpanzees to solve certain tasks, whether it could be inferred that these animals have a theory of mind, which would imply that they understand what was happening to the protagonist of the story observed in the video. The fundamental problem is that the test designed by these authors could not ensure whether the chimpanzee was taking into account the mental state of the character in the video.
One of the best-known tasks is the one designed by Wimmer and Perner to study children’s competence in attributing mental states. This task was called false belief.
Leslie places the origin of the theory of mind already in the second year of a child’s life, when pretend play begins and when the first declarative uses of language appear. The capacity for decoupling is a cognitive mechanism of innate origin that is required for the construction of metarepresentations. To explain these innate mechanisms, Leslie turns to the notion of modularity. According to this notion, it is the existence of a metarepresentational module that makes it possible for all children to develop in a uniform and powerful way, even if they are exposed to such different social environments, the abilities to understand simulations, desires and beliefs.
According to Wellman, it is at three years old that children have already developed a theory of desires – beliefs of the mind.
Perner maintains that at the age of four there is a fundamental change in the child’s metacognitive abilities. Thanks to this change, children come to understand that between the mind and the world there are internal representations that act as mediators.
Perner describes three representational levels: primary representations (first year), secondary representations (second year), meta-representation (from the age of four). Primary representations allow the child to have simple models of the world linked to immediate reality. Secondary representations allow him to be a “situation theorist.”
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