Chapter 8Physical and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood
Bio-Behavioral Foundations•Physiological Growth and Behavior – from age 3, children’s growth slows to about 3 inches per year. –Fine motor skills improve•Maturation of the Brain – brain is 50% of its adult weight, by age 6 it’s 90%.–Myelination in association areas – planning and executive functions, hippocampus (short term memory and working memory difficulties), frontal cortex
Focusing on General Processes of Cognitive Change•Piaget’s Account of Early Childhood Thinking – –Preoperational stage – age 2-6, young children can represent reality to themselves through the use of symbols, including mental images, words, and gestures. •Centration– tendency to focus on the most salient aspect of what you are trying to think about. –Egocentrism –Conservation task – young children make this error because they center on only a single dimension of the problem –By age 7-8, children become capable of mental operations.•Collections.–Piaget believed children before 7 were unable to decenter their thinking or to think through the consequences of an action.
Limits on Conservation
Three Mountain Task
Collective Monologues•Mary: These are my new shoes.•Sara: I’m going to draw my house.•Mary: My dad bought them for me.•Sara: The door has to be white.•Mary: He bought me a sweater too.•Sara: What color should the window be?•Mary: The sweater’s pink. I like pink.
Piaget’s Account of Early Childhood Thinking, cont.•Three characteristics of thinking during early childhood–Egocentrism– consider the world entirely from one’s own point of view•Lack of Spatial Perspective Taking– three mountain problem •Egocentric Speech – the egocentric quality of children’s thought is found in their speech, collective monologues–
