Chapter 8 - professor version - Chapter 8 Physical and...

Chapter 8
Physical and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

Bio-Behavioral Foundations
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Physiological Growth and Behavior – from age 3,
children’s growth slows to about 3 inches per year.
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Fine motor skills improve
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Maturation of the Brain – brain is 50% of its adult
weight, by age 6 it’s 90%.
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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
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Piaget’s Account of Early Childhood Thinking –
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Preoperational stage – age 2-6, young children can represent
reality to themselves through the use of symbols, including
mental images, words, and gestures.
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Centration – tendency to focus on the most salient aspect of what
you are trying to think about.
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Egocentrism
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Conservation task – young children make this error because they center
on only a single dimension of the problem
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By age 7-8, children become capable of mental operations.
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Collections.
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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
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Mary: These are my new shoes.
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Sara: I’m going to draw my house.
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Mary: My dad bought them for me.
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Sara: The door has to be white.
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Mary: He bought me a sweater too.
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Sara: What color should the window be?
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Mary: The sweater’s pink. I like pink.

Piaget’s Account of Early Childhood Thinking, cont.
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Three characteristics of thinking during early childhood
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Egocentrism – consider the world entirely from one’s own point of
view
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Lack of Spatial Perspective Taking – three mountain problem
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Egocentric Speech – the egocentric quality of children’s thought is found in their
speech, collective monologues
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