1. PSYC 206
Lifespan Development
Aylin C. Küntay

2. Chapter Overview Brain Development Preoperational Development
Information-Processing Approaches to Cognitive Development

3. Brain Development After infancy, brain development slows
80% of adult weight at start of early childhood (age 3)
90% of adult weight at age 5
Myelination of frontal cortex and hippocampus is incomplete
Some areas are not connected yet
Problems in problem solving
Visualizing, planning and controlling actions
Scale errors: until 30 months

4. Preoperational Development
The preoperational stage
From Piaget’s theory
Cannot perform mental operations
Mental operations:
The mental process of combining, separating, or transforming information logically. 4

5. Centration
The tendency to focus on only one feature of an object to the exclusion of all others.
vs. decentration
According to Piaget, the greatest limitation of young children’s thinking
Gives rise to 3 common errors:
Egocentrism
Confusion of appearance and reality
Precausal reasoning

6. Egocentrism
The tendency to be captive to one’s own perspective and unable to take that of another
tendency to ¨center¨:
volume conservation tasks, class inclusion tasks
lack of spatial perspective taking
egocentric speech: not listener oriented
lack of “theory of mind”

7. Egocentrism Children cannot grasp the concept of conservation.
Understanding that physical properties of objects can remain the same even when their form changes.

8. Conservation
Child focuses on the form.

9. Conservation Conservation of Substance Conservation of Number
2 identical balls of clay
One is deformed
“Do the two pieces have the same amount of clay?”
Conservation of Number
2 identical rows of coins
One row is rearranged
“Do the two rows have the same number of coins?”

10. Conservation tasks
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11. cannot consider the two levels
Class Inclusion Tasks
8 beads: 5 black, 3 white
Are there more black beads or white beads? Black...
Are there more black beads or beads?
According to Piaget, they center on only one level of categorization and
cannot consider the two levels
simultaneously.

12. Spatial Perspective Taking
Allowed to view diorama (3 mountain experiment) from all sides
Seated on one side; doll on opposite side
Asked to identify how things would look to doll
Almost always chose view corresponding to their own point of view

13. Spatial Perspective Taking
Critics:
Performance is affected by task demands.
With familiar and easily differentiated objects (e.g., farm, Grover), children are able to take spatial perspectives.

14. Children were presented with a more familiar scene than the 3 mountains-- a farm scene that has a building, a lake with a boat in it, and a horse and a cow
were asked to describe how Grover’s view of the scene looked like as he drove around the farm
3 yrs-- 80% correct
4 yrs-- 93% correct
vs. 42% correct for 3 year olds and 67% correct for the 3 mountains task
what does Grover see?
When the objects are easily differentiable, young prechool children can display non-egocentric spatial taking 14

15. Speech Egocentrism
Piaget emphasizes the egocentric nature of preschoolers’s speech (collective monologues)
where no actual communication takes place
children separated by a screen from peers were asked to describe the blocks on their side of the screen to the listener so that s/he can manipulate the blocks similarly
most 4- and 5-year-olds used many egocentric terms such as “put this one first...”

16. Confusing Appearance and Reality
Young children may often confuse appearance and reality

17. Confusing Appearance and Reality
Cat-Dog task: De Vries (1969) showed children a picture of a cat wearing a dog mask. Front half was behind the screen when the mask was put.
most of the 3-year-olds believed that the cat had become a dog.
6-year-olds were more confident that such a transformation was impossible.

18. Appearance-reality tasks
Flavell’s Sponge-Rock task: showed a sponge which looked like a rock

19. Appearance-reality tasks
Flavell’s Sponge-Rock task: showed a sponge which looked like a rock
Once children discover that the rock is really a sponge by touching it, they insist that it not only feels like a sponge but also looks like a sponge.
The ability to understand that appearance and reality might be different: causing 2 different mental representations

20. Growth of the ability to understand a masked cat remains a cat
a sponge is not a rock, though it looks like one 20
Age (years)

21. Confusing Appearance and Reality
Task demands
When measures include familiar and meaningful tasks for young children, they are more likely to show what they know 21

22. Precausal Reasoning
The tendency to reason from one particular to another, rather than engaging in cause-and-effect reasoning
“When I was a kid I thought that the wind was caused by the trees fanning their leaves...”
Why do people die? Because there are graveyards…
What makes the sun shine? Because the sky is blue…
indifference to cause-and-effect relations

23. Neo-Piagetian work
Preschool children have more advanced reasoning capabilities than Piaget’s methods give them credit for.
a range of studies showed that preschool children are not so limited in their ability to decenter
Example: Spatial perspectives, adult dressed up in a costume

24. Theory of Mind
Ability to represent others’ mental states such as thoughts, beliefs, and desires.
and to construct coherent theories about mental life and activity.
“mind reading”
There is a single reality and people may have different representations 24

25. Theory of Mind
Understanding false belief: how someone comes to have a mistaken belief about something
Understanding deception: requires representing deceived person’s false belief
Understanding appearance-reality
Age 2: child is able to distinguish between own and other’s desires.
E.g., chocolate cake (self) vs. orange cake (story character)
Age 4: child has a mature understanding of the mind 25

26. Unexpected Change Paradigm
(Think Question 2) 26

27. Unexpected Contents Task
Show Smarties box:
“What’s inside this box?”
(control question)
Following the answer, open the box, show there is a pencil in it.
Put the pencil back inside the box, close it. 27

28. Unexpected Contents Task
“X has not seen inside this box.
Now I’m going to invite her into the room and show her the box all closed up like this, in the same way I showed you. Then, I’ll ask what’s inside the box.
What will X think is in the box?” (Think Question) 28

29. 29 29 29

30. 30 30 30 30

31. Theory of Mind
“ Pencil! ”:  cannot represent mental state of other child
“ Candies! ”:  can distinguish reality, own thought and other thought
3-year-old will suggest pencils
4-year-old will correctly predict candy 31 31

32. Carlson & Moses (2001): 4-year-olds tend to outperform 3-year-olds on ToM tasks. As is clear from the table, there was a significant age difference for each of the ToM tasks (false belief: p < .001, appearance-reality: p < .05.)
Theory of Mind Tasks
3-Year-Olds
(n=62)
4-Year-Olds
(n=45)
Overall Average
(n= 107)
Age Differences
(Pearson chi- square)
False Belief
10%
49%
26%
20.8***
Appearance-Reality
47%
69%
56%
5.2*
Table. Percentage of Children Who Passed Theory-of-Mind Items as a Function of Age. 32

33. Early understanding of others’ mental states
Chandler created a treasure hunt game, where a treasure was hidden in a container by a doll who left a trail of footprints to the treasure
the child was asked to make it difficult for people to find the treasure
most 2.5 and 3 year olds erased the footprints in order to conceal the route to the treasure
deception is a process of instilling a false belief in the other
early use of deception indicates that they can reason about other people’s beliefs

34. Universality of ToM and Language
Avis and Harris (1991): 2-6-years-old Baka children, who lived in the rain forests of southeast Cameroon.
Similar to findings reported for Western children, false belief understanding of Baka children displayed a significant development between 3 and 5 years of age.
This was the first study carried out with children growing up in a preliterate society with a hunter-gatherer life-style and with no school experience. Thus, it provided a strong support for the universality claim about ToM development. 34

35. Vinden (1996): cultures (Junin Quechua) without explicit mentalistic vocabulary
Junin Quechua children had an earlier understanding of appearance-reality distinction than of false belief.
While the understanding of the appearance-reality distinction improved with age, even children over 6 years of age performed poorly in tasks of false belief.
In Western children, understanding false belief and appearance-reality distinctions tends to display parallelism in development and both abilities increase significantly from 3 to 5 years of age.
Hence, Vinden suggested that abilities requiring the ability to represent may develop differently across cultures and this may be related to linguistic properties. 35

36. Universality of ToM and Language
Development of ToM and language
English-speaking children use desire words more than cognitive words
5000 emotion words in English
5 words in a tribe of Malaysia
Language and ToM are two interconnected abilities 36

37. Language and ToM
There may be some variations in rates of ToM development and degree of conceptual elaboration across cultures due to language, but children acquire an understanding of representation independent of cultural differences.
Language that contains words about mind and mental processes
Socialization has a role:
Engaging in conversation about mental processes facilitates ToM development

38. Language and ToM
Autism : is a "spectrum disorder." The spectrum includes several distinct diagnoses, as well as a whole range of different symptoms.
Most cases of autism are diagnosed in children ages 2 to 4. It's during these early years that typical children develop critical social and language skills -- often delayed in children with autism.
Child with autism is a late talker, prefers solo play, or tends to play in the same way over and over again.
One person with autism may be very verbal, bright and engaged, while another is non-verbal, intellectually challenged and almost entirely self-absorbed.

39. Theory of Mind TED Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other's minds

40. Neo-Piagetian Theories
The problem of uneven levels of performace
Acquisition of knowledge passes through stages, but it occurs at different rates in different domains
The information processing account brings an alternative explanation…

41. Information-Processing Approaches to Cognitive Development
The working of the mind as analogous to the computer
Computer analogy Hardware (e.g., myelination of a particular brain region), Software (e.g., acquisition of a new strategy for remembering) 41 41

42. Information-Processing Theories
Limitations in knowledge, memory, attention, speed of processing information

43. Information-Processing
Young children’s cognitive difficulties caused by limitations of general cognitive factors:
Knowledge
Memory
Attention control
Processing speed
Strategies for acquiring and using information 43

44. Information-Processing Theories
Young children’s cognitive difficulties are caused by limitations on their ability to process information.
such as distractibility, incomplete examination of stimuli, inability to hold several items in mind at once
when tasks are arranged to reduce the load on children’s information-processing systems, their cognitive performance is enhanced
Unevenness in performance diminishes because the cognitive limitations lessen

45. Experience results in a rich knowledge base, which leads in turn to easier recall and more powerful ability to reason.
Children display greater competence when they have deep experience in a given domain. 45 45