1. The Development of Children, Seventh Edition
Cynthia Lightfoot,
Michael Cole,
and Sheila R. Cole
Chapter 8:
Physical and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

2. Chapter Overview Physical and Motor Development
Preoperational Development
Information-Processing Approaches to Cognitive Development
Cognitive Development in Privileged Domains
Cognitive Development and Culture
Reconciling Alternative Approaches

3. I. Physical and Motor Development
Gains in both gross and fine motor development
Health
Common problems with getting enough sleep and meeting nutritional needs
Brain Development
Changes in myelination, neuron connections, and unevenness of growth

4. Brain Development
Variability in developing different areas of the brain
May contribute to unevenness of early childhood cognition
Scale errors

5. I. Apply – Connect – Discuss
Armed with the information in Table 8.1, and your understanding of motor drive, visit a playground where you can observe young children engaged in motor play.
What examples of motor skills and motor drive can you identify? Focusing on one or two children, can you guess their ages based on the motor skills they exhibit?

6. II. 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.

7. Centration
The tendency to focus on only one feature of an object to the exclusion of all others.
According to Piaget, the greatest limitation of young children’s thinking

8. Centration Gives rise to three common early childhood errors:
Egocentrism
Confusion of appearance and reality
Precausal reasoning

9. Egocentrism Egocentrism:
The tendency to be captive to one’s own perspective and unable to take that of another

10. Confusing Appearance and Reality
Young children may often confuse appearance and reality
Again, influence of context and familiarity
Verbal vs. nonverbal distinctions

11. Precausal Reasoning
The tendency to reason from one particular to another, rather than engaging in cause-and-effect reasoning
Challenges

12. II. Apply – Connect – Discuss
When young children are asked where they live, they often confuse the name of the city with the name of the state.
How is this confusion an example of preoperational thinking?

13. III. Information-Processing Approaches to Cognitive Development
The working of the mind as analogous to the digital computer

14. Information-Processing
Input from the environment goes to the sensory register and may be read into short-term (working) memory, where it may combine with information from long-term memory
Coordinated by control processes, including attention, rehearsal, and decision making

15. III. Apply – Connect – Discuss
Suppose that two children are presented with the same set of unrelated pictures and told to remember the pictures because they will be given a memory test shortly.
According to materials presented in this section, why is child 2 likely to out-perform child 1 on the memory test?
Picture
Child 1 says:
Child 2 says:
Cat
Cat, cat, cat
Cat, cat
Shoe
Shoe, shoe, shoe
Cat, shoe, cat, shoe
Truck
Truck, truck, truck
Cat, shoe, truck
Pen
Pen, pen, pen
Cat, shoe, truck, pen

16. IV. Cognitive Development in Privileged Domains
Cognitive domains that call on specialized kinds of information, require specifically designated forms of reasoning, and appear to be of evolutionary importance to the human species.

17. Privileged Domains Domain of Physics Naïve physics
Everyday ideas about physical world
Laws of gravity and inertia
Properties of objects

18. Privileged Domains Domain of Psychology Naïve psychology
Theory of mind: The ability to think about other people’s mental states and form theories of how they think.
False-belief tasks

19. Privileged Domains Domain of Biology
Understanding differences between living things and inanimate objects
Naïve biology
Uncertainty among developmentalists as to when and how it originates.

20. Explaining Domain-Specific Cognitive Development
Modularity theory
Theory theory
The Special Role of Language and Culture

21. Explaining Domain-Specific Cognitive Development
Modularity Theory
Distinct and separate mental modules are dedicated to the different privileged domains
For example, children with Autism
Score poorly on false-belief tasks

22. Explaining Domain-Specific Cognitive Development
Theory theory
Young children have primitive theories about how the world works, which influence how they think and act within specific domains.

23. Explaining Domain-Specific Cognitive Development
Influence of language and culture
Enormous variety across cultures in the extent and ways that mental states and actions are conceived
Are compartmentalized domains of knowledge a Western construct?

24. IV. Apply – Connect – Discuss
Of modularity theory and theory theory, which is most consistent with Piaget’s understanding of development? Why?

25. V. Cognitive Development and Culture
The importance of routine events
Scripts:
event schemas that specify who participates, what social roles they play, what objects they are to use, and the sequence of actions that make up the event.

26. Cultural Context Unevenness of development Cultural influences
Availability of specific activities
Frequency of basic activities
Relating different activities to each other
Regulation of children’s role in the activity

27. V. Apply – Connect – Discuss
In arguing against the notion that knowledge can be compartmentalized into separate domains, Bame Nsamenang asserts that, according to African beliefs, knowledge is integrated into social life and daily routines.
To what extent is this consistent with Katherine Nelson’s theory of cultural scripts?

28. VI. Reconciling Alternative Approaches
The complex and uneven picture of cognition in early childhood cannot be explained by any single approach.