hi this is Bart pulson and this is a video for behav uh excuse me for psychology 1100 lifespan development this is chapter four of our uh text it's early childhood we're looking at the second section which is about cognitive development in early childhood uh the first thing we want to talk about is a little bit about uh the work by Jean P one of the uh most significant people in the cognitive development of children um he talks about things like for instance symbolic play which is what we see right here now P's pre preoperational stages now and the operations have to do with the ability to deal with abstract Concepts the pre-operational stage lasts from about two to seven and this is when young children's logic is under construction and pre-operational thought is characterized by the use of symbols to represent objects that's what we have here sort of in our pretend play that symbolic play and the relationships among them with the most important symbolic activity being language and preschoolers drawings are symbols of objects peoples and events in their lives and symb symbolism is also expressed as symbolic or pretend play which requires a certain level of cognitive sophistication based on the use and recollection of symbols uh pre-operational children also have uh numerous mental limitations that ref uh that reflect cognitive immaturity this is something that P talked about uh these limitations can include things like egocentrism uh problems with causality this causes that a confusion of mental and physical events and something called centration the lack of conservation like conservation of mass or volume and the irreversibility and difficulty with class inclusion so let me give you uh one example um so for instance egocentrism which in this case does not mean vain or self-centered but it means really the inability to take literally take the Viewpoint of another person um to do this P had something he would call the three mountains test and a child would sit at one end of a table and there would be three model mountains on it and in this Arrangement one of the mountains would for instance be to the left of the others and what P would do is he would ask the child uh if a doll who was sitting for instance on the side or the other end of the table would also see that same Mountain as being on the right side now they wouldn't they would probably see it on the left side if they were on the other side um but children below a a certain age simply would say that other people saw what they saw and they would be surprised if they didn't um and this was really the development I mean and so that's entric really the ability to see the perspective of others So eventually when a kid understands that for instance their mom or dad don't already know what happened to them at school that's uh a milestone in this development uh now there's a lot of things that can affect cognitive development one thing here we want to mention is What's called the home environment now home here is an acronym and it stands uh for the home observation for the measurement of the environment it's actually a way of gathering information about the place where people uh live now let me just talk about something very quickly first it's something called cognitive scaffolding this is temporary support provided by a parent or a teacher to the learning of children and parents should approach children through What's called the zone of proximal development and this is the range of activities that a child is able to do not on their own but they are able to do it when somebody is with them assisting them uh they still do it but with this uh social structure um and that's a way that children can develop new cognitive skills and they can function working with more skilled people now back to the home assessment the a home observation for the measurement of the environment is this rather elaborate thing if people come into the house they uh check all sorts of things like uh parental emotional and verbal responsiveness they look at avoidance of restrictions and Punishment they look at the organization of the physical environment they look at the provision of appropriate playing materials parental involvement opportunities for a variety in Daily stimulation so all sorts of things um what's interesting about it is scores on this home Inventory are actually better predictors of a young child's later IQ than things like well infant IQ which would be hard to assess anyhow or the mother's IQ or even or the family social class in fact the scores from the home uh home Inventory for a child are actually associated with that same child's occupational success as an adult um also a couple notes about early childhood education I'll just mention that research suggests that preschool education enables children to get an early start on achievement in school so studies of programs like Head Start and other intervention programs show that environmental enrichment can enhance the cognitive development of economically disadvantaged children and something also about television American children spend more time watching television than they do in school and so television has a great potential for teaching a variety of cognitive skills social behaviors and attitudes particularly when you look at things like we talked about before the uh social theories of learning that's was vigotsky we talked about social cognitive learning by looking what happens with other people that's Albert bandura's work and so television has the potential to play a role in these particular things now uh let's take a quick look at what's called the theory of mind this is a child's beliefs about what the mind is how it works and um here's an one interesting study it's done by uh researchers Moses and F Fel and three-year-olds were showing a video um in which a clown comes into a room um well we have this little girl Kathy she puts her crayons into a bag uh she leaves it on the table this clown in the video walks into the room picks up the bag puts the crayons in the drawer puts rocks in the bags and puts puts the bag back on the table so anyhow the little girl left a bag full of crayons but now it's a bag full of rocks uh and the got changed in the girl's absence and then when asked if they thought Kathy would expect to find rocks or crayons in the bags now Kathy left it with crayon so that's what she should expect most three-year-olds gave the incorrect answer demonstrating their own difficulty in understanding that the other person's beliefs would be different from their own so that's a form of egocentrism um also the appearance and reality distinction that's the difference between real events and mental events fantasies misleading appearances and P believed that children don't differentiate reality from appearances or mental events uh until maybe the ages of seven or eight next a little bit about memory so most people don't remember remember stuff from their very young childhood in fact there's something called infantile Amnesia you don't remember your your infancy at all um and not many people remember things from when they were very young however there are exceptions to this now you have autobiographical memory and it's facilitated when children talk about events with others and by the age of four most children can remember events that occurred for instance a year year and a half earlier uh on the other hand major events like for this kid uh Hurricane Katrina um because it's such a an a huge traumatic and socially embedded experience they're more likely to remember it uh much longer in their lives um also we got a little bit here about development of memory so certain things can help children develop memory these include for instance what the child is asked to remember they find it easy to remember events that follow a fixed and logical order also how interested the child is they show better recognition and recall for the toys uh which really peque their interest um whether the retrieval cues or reminders are available so if they if they depend more on cues provided by others then they'll they'll do better um and what measure of memory is used so verbal reports where the person has to say what they remember may not be indicative of how much they remember as opposed to for instance a performance or physical measurement where they can show you something um also children could be T strategies such as rehearsal and organization to help improve their memories just like adults can um the last thing in this particular section is about language development so this one this uh chart shows ages from Two and a Half to four and the kinds of developments that occur so for instance uh very early on we have a rapid increase in vocabulary there's no babbling at three you have a vocabulary about a thousand words they can use yes no questions they can embed sentences and use negatives which are cognitively rather sophisticated uh by four the the vocabulary is again much larger speech is fluent and they can coordinate sentences and then you have some example sentences here on the side so children's language skills show extensive development during the preschool years their vocabulary increases rapidly with the new with new additions every day and through something called Fast mapping the child quickly attaches a new word to its appropriate concept and so you have something that's called the grammar explosion of the third year and this results in the expanding of the child's sentence structure to include words missing in what's called telegraphic speech that's what you see up at the top two cups it broke that's telegraphic um after this grammar explosion children begin adding articles conjunctions possessive adjectives pronouns prepositions to their everyday speech so by this age their speech is nearly 100% intelligible reaching total fluency by the fourth year so their articulation improves their vocabulary expands then begins in new more complex sentences it's also around this stage that children start to develop abstract thinking like scripts uh this is where a person a child describes an abstract concept but they describe it more in terms of the sequence of activities the specific behaviors the order that they occur uh the sequence as opposed to just the um inherent characteristics of the concepts themselves and that's it for this section