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.