Lifespan Development. Tara L. Kuther

      Figure 7.2 The Three-Mountains Task

      Children who display preoperational reasoning cannot describe the scene depicted in the three-mountains task from the point of view of the teddy bear.

      Animism

      Egocentric thinking can also take the form of animism, the belief that inanimate objects are alive and have feelings and intentions. “It’s raining because the sun is sad and it is crying,” 3-year-old Melinda explains. Children accept their own explanations for phenomena as they are unable to consider another viewpoint or alternative reason.

      Centration

      Preoperational children exhibit centration, the tendency to focus on one part of a stimulus or situation and exclude all others. For example, a boy may believe that if he wears a dress, he will become a girl. He focuses entirely on the appearance (the dress) rather than the other characteristics that make him a boy.

      Centration is illustrated by a classic task that requires the preoperational child to distinguish what something appears to be from what it really is, the appearance–reality distinction. In a classic study illustrating this effect, DeVries (1969) presented 3- to 6-year-old children with a cat named Maynard (see Figure 7.3). The children were permitted to pet Maynard. Then, while his head and shoulders were hidden behind a screen (and his back and tail were still visible), a dog mask was placed onto Maynard’s head. The children were then asked, “What kind of animal is it now?” “Does it bark or meow?” Three-year-old children, despite Maynard’s body and tail being visible during the transformation, replied that he was now a dog. Six-year-old children were able to distinguish Maynard’s appearance from reality and explained that he only looked like a dog.

      One reason that 3-year-old children fail appearance–reality tasks is because they are not yet capable of effective dual encoding, the ability to mentally represent an object in more than one way at a time (Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1986). For example, young children are not able to understand that a scale model (like a doll house) can be both an object (something to play with) and a symbol (of an actual house) (MacConnell & Daehler, 2004).

      Figure 7.3 Appearance vs. Reality: Is It a Cat or Dog?

      Young children did not understand that Maynard the cat remained a cat despite wearing a dog mask and looking like a dog.

      Source: DeVries, R. 1969. Constancy of generic identity in the years three to six. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 34(3, serial no 127), May. With permission from Blackwell Publishing

      Irreversibility

      “You ruined it!” cried Johnson after his older sister, Monique, placed a triangular block atop the tower of blocks he had just built. “No, I just put a triangle there to show it was the top and finish it,” she explains. “No!” insists Johnson. “OK, I’ll take it off,” says Monique. “See? Now it’s just how you left it.” “No. It’s ruined,” Johnson sighs. Johnson continued to be upset after his sister removed the triangular block, not realizing that by removing the block, she has restored the block structure to its original state. Young children’s thinking is characterized by irreversibility, meaning that they do not understand that reversing a process can often undo it and restore the original state.

      Preoperational children’s irreversible thinking is illustrated by their performance on tasks that measure conservation, the understanding that the physical quantity of a substance, such as number, mass, or volume, remains the same even when its appearance changes. For example, a child is shown two identical glasses. The same amount of liquid is poured into each glass. After the child agrees that the two glasses contain the same amount of water, the liquid from one glass is poured into a taller, narrower glass and the child is asked whether one glass contains more liquid than the other. Young children in the preoperational stage reply that the taller narrower glass contains more liquid. Why? It has a higher liquid level than the shorter, wider glass has. They center on the appearance of the liquid without realizing that the process can be reversed by pouring the liquid back into the shorter, wider glass. They focus on the height of the water, ignoring other aspects such as the change in width, not understanding that it is still the same water. Figure 7.4 illustrates other types of conservation problems.

      Description

      Figure 7.4 Additional Conservation Problems

      Characteristics of preoperational children’s reasoning are summarized in Table 7.2.

Table 7.2

      Evaluating Preoperational Reasoning

      Research with young children has suggested that Piaget’s tests of preoperational thinking underestimated young children. Success on Piaget’s tasks appears to depend more on the child’s language abilities than his or her actions. As we discussed earlier, to be successful at the three-mountain task, the child must not only understand how the mounds look from the other side of the table but also must be able to communicate that understanding. Appearance reality tasks require not simply an understanding of dual representation but the ability to express it. However, if the task is nonverbal, such as requiring reaching for an object rather than talking about it, even 3-year-old children can distinguish appearance from reality (Sapp, Lee, & Muir, 2000).

      Research Findings on Egocentrism and Animism

      Simple tasks demonstrate that young children are less egocentric than Piaget posited. When a 3-year-old child is shown a card that depicts a dog on one side and a cat on another, and the card is held up between the researcher who can see the cat and the child who can see the dog, the child correctly responds that the researcher can see the cat (Flavell, Everett, Croft, & Flavell, 1981). When the task is relevant to children’s everyday lives (i.e., hiding), their performance suggests that they are not as egocentric as Piaget posited (Newcombe & Huttenlocher, 1992). Other research suggests that 3- to 5-year-old children can learn perspective-taking skills through training and retain their perspective-taking abilities 6 months later (Mori & Cigala, 2016).

      Likewise, 3-year-old children do not tend to describe inanimate objects with lifelike qualities, even when the object is a robot that can move (Jipson, Gülgöz, & Gelman, 2016). Most 4-year-old children understand that animals grow, and even plants grow, but objects do not (Backschneider, Shatz, & Gelman, 1993). Sometimes, however, young children provide animistic responses. Gjersoe, Hall, and Hood (2015) suggest an emotional component to animistic beliefs. They found that 3-year-olds attribute mental states to toys to which they are emotionally attached but not to other favorite toys, even those with which they frequently engage in imaginary play. Finally, children show individual differences in their expressions of animism and reasoning about living things, and these differences are linked with aspects of cognitive development such as memory, working memory, and inhibition (Zaitchik, Iqbal, & Carey, 2014).

      Research Findings on Reversibility and the Appearance–Reality Distinction

      Although young children typically perform poorly on conservation tasks, 4-year-old children can be taught to conserve, suggesting that children’s difficulties with reversibility and conservation tasks can be overcome (Gallagher, 2008). In addition, making the task relevant improves children’s performance. For example, when children are asked to play a trick on someone