Last week we named the stages of cognitive development as Jean Piaget divided them: , preoperational, concrete operations and formal operations. We also define the sensorimotor stage. This week we are going to define the preoperational stage:
Preoperational stage
Included from 2 to 6 years old. The name of this stage is due to the fact that Piaget believed that in this stage children were not capable of doing mental operations, but were influenced by how things were seen. The biggest difference between this stage and the previous one is the continuous development and use of internal images (schemas), language and symbols, which will help the development of self-awareness (Myers, 2006; Gross, 2005).
Piaget subdivided the stage into: (a) Preconceptual (2-4 years): the child is not able to understand relative terms such as bigger or stronger. (b) Intuitive (4-7 years): the child can now use relative terms but his logical ability is still limited (Gross, 2005).
Regarding the characteristics of the child’s thinking at this stage, Piaget found difficulties in serialization (arranging objects in relation to a particular dimension, such as height), artificialism (belief that things in nature have been created by man), centralization (focusing only on one perceptual quality at a time; relates to the lack of the concept of conservation), transductive reasoning (the child sees that two things happen at the same time and assumes that one causes the other), this reasoning is also called intuitive (Gross, 2005, Bee, 1985).
Furthermore, Piaget noted that at this stage children lack the conservation concept (that is, the principle according to which we know that the quantity is maintained even if the shape changes) and this is why if you are shown a long glass with juice inside, it seems to you that it contains a lot of juice; On the other hand, if you change the glass for a short and wide one, it seems like an acceptable amount of juice (Myers, 2006).
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While for Piaget the transitions from one stage to another were not abrupt, you would be surprised by the results of a study that found that the symbolic thinking It appears at an earlier age than he thought. In an experiment, she showed small children a model of a room that had a sofa, behind which she hid a toy dog; The 2½-year-olds could easily remember where the puppy was hiding, but they couldn’t find it when they entered a full-size room. The 3-year-old children went directly to the place where the dog was hidden, which showed that they used the model as a symbolic representation of the life-size room (Myers, 2006).
Another characteristic of this stage of development according to Piaget is the . Some later research found that 2- or 3-year-old children are able to understand to some extent that other people see or experience things differently. , cited in Bee, 1985) carried out an experiment to demonstrate this which consisted of showing a child a card that had a drawing of a dog on one side and a drawing of a cat on the other, then holding the card vertically so that he He saw one side and the child the other and asked the child what he (Flavell) was looking at. The 3-year-olds had no problem understanding that Favell saw something different than what they were seeing. , cited in Bee 1985) also noted that children of the same age use simpler sentences when speaking to a 2-year-old (different from those used when speaking to an adult). However, those same children have difficulty realizing that you see things from another point of view if they are looking at the same object but from different angles. The truth is that these investigations noted that the preoperational child seems to be less egocentric than Piaget thought (Bee, 1985).
Bibliographic references:
- Bee, H. (1985), The developing child 4th edition. Harper & Row publishers: New York
- Gross, R. (2005), Psychology, the science of mind and behavior 5th edition. Hodder Arnold Publication
- Myers, D. (2006), Psychology 7th edition. Panamericana Medical Editorial:Madrid