INSTRUCTIONS FROM PROFESSORThe paragraph should include definitions and explanations of terms/concepts found in the
question. Using examples can be very helpful when explaining an idea or concept. The
textbook provides examples of constructs which you should include in your answers to the
questions. The text also describes research studies that pertain to the question you will be
answering. These also should be included in your answers. Other sources can be used for
information gathering, although your textbook should be your primary source. The paragraph
must be written in your own words, and not copied from the textbook or any other source.
Quoting should never be used. DO NOT QUOTE what the author says. The
answers/explanations must be written in your words.
Focus Area 3: Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage; and Preoperational Stage Pages 152 – 158
1. What is the Sensorimotor Stage and what is the age of onset?
2. Do infants and young children have a sense of self, and how has that been measured?
3. Identify the three principle characteristics of the Piaget’s Preoperational stage?
4. How do preoperational children behave relative to egocentrism, theory of mind,
differentiating appearance from reality, and conservation?
Focus Area 4: Piaget’s Stages of Concrete Operations &Formal Operations; and Erickson’s
Description of Human Development, Infancy and Childhood
Pages 159 – 164
1. What ages are the onset of Concrete vs Formal Operations, and what are the distinctions in
behaviors and abilities between them?
2. How do Piaget’s views on child development differ from Vygotsky’s?
3. What is Erikson’s theory of Social and Cultural development and what is accomplished at
each of the eight stages psychosocial development?
4. What are the categories of attachment, how have they been studied, and how does
attachment during early-childhood correlate with a person’s relationships later on in life?
Focus Area 5: Social Development in Childhood, Adolescence, Adulthood and Old Age, and
the Psychology of Facing Death
Pages 165 – 169
What occurs within teenagers during adolescence?
What are the types of identity formation that occur during adolescence?
What are the stages of adulthood, and how can we live our lives to avoid feelings of despair
during older age?
How do people cope with thoughts of death?
Focus Area 6: Gender, Cultural, Ethnic and Family Influences on Development
171-179
Pages
What are some of the differences and explanations for gender roles?
How can culture influence behaviors, and explain the differences between acculturation and
biculturalism?
Describe parenting styles and the associated behaviors and personality of children.
What impact do non-traditional families, divorce and parental conflict have on children.
Development
Arthur Tilley/Photodisc/Getty Images
MODULE 5.1
Cognitive Development
in Infancy and
Childhood
Research Designs for
Studying Development
Infancy
Jean Piaget’s View of
Cognitive Development
Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage
Piaget’s Preoperational
Stage
Piaget’s Stages of Concrete
Operations and Formal
Operations
How Grown Up Are We?
MODULE 5.2
Social and Emotional
Development
MODULE 5.3
Diversity: Gender,
Culture, and Family
Erikson’s Description of
Human Development
Infancy and Childhood
Social Development
in Childhood and
Adolescence
Adulthood
Old Age
The Psychology of Facing
Death
Gender Influences
Cultural and Ethnic
Influences
The Family
In Closing: Many Ways
of Life
In Closing: Social and
Emotional Issues
through the Life Span
In Closing: Understanding
Children
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module .
Cognitive Development in Infancy and Childhood
After studying this module, you should be able to:
●
Contrast cross-sectional designs and longitudinal designs.
●
Give examples of cohort effects.
●
Explain how psychologists infer the cognitive abilities of infants.
●
List and describe Piaget’s stages of cognitive development.
●
Discuss two methods of inferring the concept of object permanence.
●
Give examples to show that infants develop cognitive abilities gradually.
Research Designs for Studying
Development
Studying psychological development poses a special problem. Should a researcher study younger and older people at the same time, or study one group
of people repeatedly as they advance from one age to another? Each method has
strengths and limitations.
Myrleen Ferguson Cate/PhotoEdit
© Robin Kalat
▲
Young children’s artwork is amazingly inventive and revealing. One toddler, ½ years old,
proudly showed off a drawing that consisted
only of dots. Adults were puzzled. It is a rabbit,
the child explained, while making more dots:
“Look: hop, hop, hop . . . ” (Winner, ). When
my daughter, Robin, was years old, she drew
a picture of a boy and a girl wearing Halloween
costumes and drawing pictures (see Figure .).
For the little girl’s drawing, Robin pasted on
some wildlife photos that, she insisted, were the
little girl’s drawings. The little boy’s drawing was
just a scribble. When I asked why the little girl’s
drawing was so much better than the little boy’s,
Robin replied, “Don’t make fun of him, Daddy.
He’s doing the best he can.”
Often, as in this case, a drawing expresses
the child’s worldview. As children grow older, ▲ Figure . A drawing of two children drawing pictures, courtesy of 6-year-old Robin Kalat.
their art becomes more skillful, but often less
expressive. As we grow older, we gain many new
abilities and skills, but we lose something, too.
Studying the abilities of young children is challenging. They misunderstand
our questions and we misunderstand their answers. Our estimate of children
has progressed enormously as developmental psychologists have developed
clever new ways to test children. One theme you will encounter repeatedly in
this module is that we reach different conclusions about children depending on
how we measure some ability.
As we grow older, we mature, but we revert to childlike
behaviors when such behavior is acceptable.
M O D U L E 5 . 1 COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD /
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Table . Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Studies
Description
Advantages
Disadvantages
Example
. Quick
. No risk of confusing age
effects with effects of
changes in society
. Risk of sampling error
by getting different
kinds of people at
different ages
. Risk of cohort effects
Compare memory abilities
of -, -, and -year-olds
. No risk of sampling
differences
. Can study effects of
one experience on later
development
. Can study consistency
within individuals
over time
. Takes a long time
. Some participants quit
. Sometimes hard to
separate effects of age
from changes in society
Study memory abilities of
-year-olds, and of the
same children again and
years later
Jan
2012
Jan
2012
Jan
2012
Cross-sectional
Several groups of subjects
of various ages studied at
one time
Jan
2012
Jan
2014
Longitudinal
Jan
2016
One group of subjects
studied repeatedly as the
members grow older
Cross-Sectional and
Longitudinal Designs
A cross-sectional study compares groups of individuals
of different ages at the same time. For example, we
could compare drawings by -year-olds, -year-olds,
and -year-olds. Cross-sectional studies are acceptable for many purposes, but not always. For example, if you compared a random sample of -yearolds with a random sample of -year-olds, you
would find that the -year-olds have less interest in
sports. You would also find that, on average, -yearolds are shorter and have smaller heads. Why? One
explanation is that, on average, women live longer
than men. Women tend to be smaller, have smaller
heads, and show less interest in sports. The sample
of -year-olds you studied was not comparable to
the -year-olds.
A longitudinal study follows a single group of individuals as they develop. For example, we could
study a group of children from, say, age to age .
■ Table . contrasts the two kinds of studies. A longitudinal study necessarily takes years to complete.
Also, not everyone who participates the first time
is willing and available later. Selective attrition is the
tendency for certain kinds of people to drop out of a
study for many reasons, including health, moving far
away, or loss of interest. The kind of people who stay in the study may differ in
many ways from those who quit. Psychologists can compensate for selective attrition by discarding the earlier data for people who left the study.
Certain questions logically require a longitudinal study. For example,
to study the effects of divorce on children, researchers compare how each
child reacts at first with how that same child reacts later. To study whether
happy children become happy adults, researchers follow a single group
over time.
A sequential (or cross-sequential) design combines cross-sectional and
longitudinal designs. In a sequential design, a researcher starts with people of
different ages and studies them again at later times. For example, one might
study -year-olds and -year-olds and then examine the same children years
later:
First study
years later
Group A, age years
Group A, now years old
Group B, age years
Group B, now years old
✓
concecpkt
che
. At Santa Enigma College, the average first-year student has a
C-minus average, and the average senior has a B-plus average.
An observer concludes that, as students progress through
college, they improve their study habits. Based on the idea of selective attrition,
propose another possible explanation.
/ CHAPTER DEVELOPMENT
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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
remained thrifty and cautious (Rogler, ). In contrast, young people of today have had much more
leisure time and more opportunity for recreation
(Larson, ). Today’s youth tend to be more selfsatisfied than young people of the past (Twenge &
Campbell, ).
In the United States long ago, as in many countries today, it was customary for most people to
spend their lives in or near the neighborhood where
they were born. Today many people move great
distances, perhaps repeatedly, in search of a better
job. The results include less identification with their
community, few lasting friendships, and less feeling
of obligation to help their neighbors (Oishi, ).
According to Jean Twenge (), cohort effects are
similar to cultural differences. Much of today’s technology is so unfamiliar to many older people that
they feel like immigrants to this culture.
Answer
. The first-year students with the lowest grades (who lower
the grade average for first-year students) do not stay in
school long enough to become seniors.
Cohort Effects
If you had been born in , your childhood and
adolescence would have been very different from
today: no Internet, computers, iPods, cell phones,
air conditioners, automatic dishwashers, or appliances for washing and drying clothes. You would
have listened to radio instead of watching television.
Telephone calls to someone outside your hometown
were an expensive luxury. Few women or minorities
went to college, and they had limited job opportunities afterward. If you had lived then, how would you
have been different?
People of different generations differ in many
ways, called cohort effects (see ▼ Figure .). A cohort
is a group of people born at a particular time or a
group of people who enter an organization at a particular time. (We could talk about the cohort of students entering a college in a given year, or the cohort
of workers a corporation hires in a given year.)
The era in which you grew up is a powerful influence on your psychological development. For example, Americans whose youth spanned the Great
Depression and World War II learned to save money
and to sacrifice for the needs of the country. Even
after the war was over and prosperity reigned, most
✓
concecpkt
che
. Suppose you want to study
the effect of age on choice of
clothing. Would cohort effects
have greater influence on a longitudinal study or a
cross-sectional study?
Answer
Bettmann/Corbis
Ron Chapple/Corbis
. A cross-sectional study would show cohort effects. If
older people dress differently from younger people, it
may be that the older generation has always had different
standards or tastes.
▲ Figure . People born at different times grow up with different experiences. In an earlier
era, bathing suit inspectors prohibited “overly revealing” outfits that would seem modest today.
M O D U L E 5 . 1 COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD /
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drinking is particularly dangerous, and prolonged drinking is worse
The Fetus and the Newborn Binge
than brief drinking, but researchers cannot identify any level as “safe” (May
et al., ).
The reason for the nervous system damage is now understood: Developing
neurons require persistent excitation to survive. Without it, they activate a selfdestruct program, which is a way of weeding out the less useful neurons. Alcohol
interferes with the brain’s main excitatory neurotransmitter (glutamate) and facilitates the main inhibitory neurotransmitter (GABA). It therefore decreases
neurons’ arousal and makes many of them self-destruct (Ikonomidou et al.,
). Other drugs that interfere with excitatory transmission may be dangerous also, possibly including repeated exposure to anesthetic drugs (Gleich,
Nemergut, & Flick, ).
Still, it is remarkable that an occasional “high-risk” child—small at birth,
exposed to alcohol or other drugs before birth, from a disadvantaged family, a
victim of prejudice, and so forth—overcomes all obstacles to become healthy
and successful. Resilience (the ability to overcome obstacles) is poorly understood, but it relates partly to genetic influences, education, and supportive relatives and friends (Bonanno & Mancini, ).
✓
concecpkt
che
. By what mechanism does alcohol harm the brain of a fetus?
Answer
. Alcohol impairs excitatory transmission in neurons. Neurons that do not get enough
excitation during early development execute a self-destruct program.
Let’s begin at the beginning. During prenatal
development, everyone starts as a fertilized egg cell, or
zygote, that develops through its first few stages until
it becomes a fetus about weeks after conception. As
soon as weeks after conception, the nervous system
is mature enough to produce a few movements. The
first movements are spontaneous—that is, not elicited by any stimulus. Contrary to what we might have
guessed, the muscles and the nerves controlling these
movements mature before the sense organs. Those
spontaneous movements are essential, and without
them the spinal cord does not develop properly. Later,
but still before birth, the sense organs appear, the head
and eyes begin to turn toward sounds, and the brain alternates between waking and sleeping (Joseph, ).
The fetus does a good bit of yawning and hiccupping.
Presumably these behaviors serve some function, although that function remains unclear (Provine, ).
A serious risk arises if a fetus is exposed to alcohol. Any drugs that a mother takes reach the fetus’s
vulnerable developing brain (Hubbs-Tait, Nation,
Krebs, & Bellinger, ). If the mother drinks alcohol during pregnancy, the infant may develop fetal
alcohol syndrome, a condition marked by malformations of the face, heart, and ears; and nervous system
damage, including seizures, hyperactivity, and impairments of learning, memory, problem solving, attention, and motor coordination (Mattson, Crocker,
& Nguyen, ). The severity varies from severe to
barely noticeable, depending on the amount and
timing of the mother’s drinking (see ▼ Figure .).
Infancy
Research progress depends on good measurement. How can we measure psychological processes in infants who cannot talk and can barely control a few
muscles? A researcher monitors the few actions available to infants, drawing
inferences about their growing understanding of the world.
3
Anomalies of
head and face
2
Anomalies of heart
and other organs
1
0
1
2
3
David H. Wells/CORBIS
Mean number of anomalies per child
4
more
than 3
Ounces of alcohol drunk per day
a
b
▲ Figure . (a) The more alcohol a woman drinks during pregnancy, the more likely her
baby is to have anomalies of the head, face, and organs. (Based on data of Ernhart et al., 1987)
(b) A child with fetal alcohol syndrome: Note the wide separation between the eyes, a common
feature of this syndrome.
/ CHAPTER DEVELOPMENT
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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Percent of fixation time
36
32
28
24
20
16
12
8
4
0
Face
Circles
Newsprint
White
Yellow
Red
▲ Figure . Infants pay more attention to faces than to other patterns. These results suggest
that infants are born with certain visual preferences. (Based on Fantz, 1963)
Infants’ Vision
William James, the founder of American psychology, said that as far as an infant can tell, the world is a “buzzing confusion,” full of meaningless sights and
sounds. Since James’s time, psychologists have substantially increased their estimates of infants’ vision.
We can start by recording an infant’s eye movements. Even -day-old infants spend more time looking at drawings of human faces than at other patterns with similar areas of light and dark (Fantz, ; see ▲ Figure .). However,
infants do not have the same concept of “face” that adults do. As shown in
▼ Figure ., newborns gaze equally at distorted and normal faces. However, they
gaze longer at right-side-up faces than upside-down faces regardless of distortion. Evidently, the newborn’s concept of face is just an oval with most of its content toward the top (Cassia, Turati, & Simion, ).
Total fixation time (s)
Normal
Distorted
Normal upright
The ability to recognize faces continues developing for years. Parents in one study repeatedly read
a storybook with photographs of two children’s faces
from many angles and with many expressions. After
weeks, -year-old children easily recognized pictures of the two children. However, when they had
to choose between a normal picture and one with
altered spacing among the features, they guessed
randomly (Mondloch, Leis, & Maurer, ). By age
, a child easily sees the difference between the photos in ▼ Figure ., but -year-olds evidently do not.
The gradual improvement of face recognition depends on experience, and infants, like all
Normal
upside-down
Distorted upright
160
160
160
120
120
120
80
80
80
40
40
40
0
0
0
Distorted
upside-down
▲ Figure . Infants gaze about equally at normal and distorted faces, but they stare longer at
upright than upside-down faces. (Source: Cassia, Turati, & Simion, 2004)
M O D U L E 5 . 1 COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD /
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; see also ▼ Figure .). Evidently, for any kind
of locomotion, young children gradually learn
what they can and cannot do.
Sura Nualpradid/Shutterstock.com
Infants’ Hearing
▲ Figure . These faces differ only in the positions of the eyes, nose, and
mouth. Four-year-olds do not recognize which face is familiar. (Source:
Mondloch, Leis, & Maurer, 2006)
of us, become best at recognizing the kinds of
faces they frequently see. At age months, infants
are about as good at recognizing monkey faces
as human faces. (The test is to show one monkey
or human face for seconds, and then that face
and another one. If the infant looks more at the
new face, we infer that it recognized the old face.)
Over the next months, infants’ ability to recognize monkey faces declines, unless they have had
special training to pay attention to monkey faces
(Scott & Monesson, ).
By age months, infants have had much visual experience but almost no experience at crawling or reaching. Over the next several months, as
they increase their control of arm and leg movements, they learn to pick up toys, crawl around
objects, and in other ways coordinate what they see
with what they do. At first, they crawl indiscriminately, and parents need to supervise constantly
to prevent the infants from crawling off a bed or
tumbling down the stairs. After a couple weeks
of practice, they learn to avoid crawling off unsafe edges (Adolph, ). They learn that avoidance regardless of whether or not they have had
any experience of falling; the act of crawling gives
them a sense of distance and depth (Anderson et
al., ). They more quickly learn to avoid crawling off ledges if they had the experience of moving
around in a powered “baby go-cart” before they
were old enough to crawl (Dahl et al., ). Have
they learned fear of heights? Well, yes and no. It
depends on how we test them. Infants who have
learned not to crawl over an unsafe ledge show increased heart rate when held over what would be
an unsafe drop (Dahl et al., ). However, when
the same infants start to walk a few months later,
they again step indiscriminately, and parents need
to supervise them until they learn what is and is
not a safe step-off distance (Kretsch & Adolph,
Infants don’t do much, but one thing they do is suck.
Researchers use that response to measure hearing,
because infants suck more vigorously when certain
kinds of sounds arouse them.
In one study, the experimenters played a brief
sound and noted how it affected infants’ sucking
rate (see ▼ Figure .). On the first few occasions, the
sound increased the sucking rate. A repeated sound
produced less and less effect. We say that the infant became habituated to the sound. Habituation is
decreased response to a repeated stimulus. When the
experimenters substituted a new sound, the sucking
rate increased. Evidently, the infant was aroused by
the unfamiliar sound. When a change in a stimulus
increases a previously habituated response, we say
that the stimulus produced dishabituation.
Monitoring dishabituation tells us whether infants detect a difference between two sounds. For
example, infants who have become habituated to
the sound ba will increase their sucking rate when
they hear the sound pa (Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, &
Vigorito, ). Apparently, even month-old infants
notice the difference between ba and pa, an important distinction for later language comprehension.
Infants, in fact, appear to distinguish among
all sounds that occur in any language. Within a few
months, however, they begin to distinguish more
▲ Figure . Infants who are starting to crawl learn
not to go over deep edges. A few months later when
they are starting to walk, they have to learn again what
is safe and what is unsafe.
/ CHAPTER DEVELOPMENT
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In a follow-up study, pregnant women read a
nursery rhyme three times in a row, twice a day. By
age weeks postconception (shortly before birth),
fetuses showed a heart rate response to the familiar rhyme, and not to a different rhyme (Krueger &
Garvan, ). In another study, researchers played a
simple piano melody for fetuses to hear twice daily for
the last three weeks before birth. Six weeks later, those
infants (and not other infants) showed a larger heart
rate response to the familiar melody than to a different melody (Granier-Deferre, Bassereau, Ribeiro,
Jacquet, & deCasper, ). This study shows memory
of prenatal experiences lasting at least six weeks.
Normal
sucking rate
Sucks produce
the sound ba
Sucks still produce the
sound ba 5 minutes
later (habituation)
Sucks now produce
the sound pa
10
20
30
40
50
✓
concecpkt
che
Sucks per minute
. Suppose a newborn sucks to
turn on a tape recording of its
father’s voice. Eventually,
the baby habituates and the sucking frequency
decreases. Now the experimenters substitute the
recording of a different man’s voice. What would
you conclude if the sucking frequency increased?
What if it remained the same? What if it decreased?
▲ Figure . After repeatedly hearing a ba sound, the infant’s sucking habituates.
When a new sound, pa, follows, the sucking rate increases. (Based on results of
Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971)
accurately among the sounds that are important in the language they are about
to learn. For example, the Japanese language does not distinguish between the
sounds l and r. At first, Japanese infants respond differentially to the two sounds,
but within a few months they stop. Similarly, in German the difference between
u and ü alters the meaning of a word, but in English it doesn’t. In some of the
languages of India, the difference between k and a harder version of k makes
a difference, but in English, it doesn’t. In English, the accent on one syllable
or the other changes the meaning (consider decade vs. decayed and weakened
vs. weekend), but in French, accent doesn’t matter. At first, infants distinguish
among all these sound differences, but within a few months, they get better at
distinguishing among sounds important in their language, and worse at distinguishing sound differences meaningless in their language (Byers-Heinlein
& Fennell, ; Kuhl, Williams, Lacerda, Stevens, & Lindblom, ; Tsuji &
Cristia, ). All this takes place long before they understand what any of those
words mean.
Carolyn Rovee-Collier (, ) demonstrated
that infants can learn a response and remember
it. She attached a ribbon to an ankle so that an infant could activate a mobile by kicking with one leg
(see ▼ Figure .). Two-month-old infants quickly
. Suppose an infant habituates to the sound ba, but when
we substitute the sound bla, the infant fails to increase the
sucking rate. What interpretation would be likely?
. Evidently, the infant does not hear a difference between ba and bla. (This is a
hypothetical result; the study has not been done.)
Answer
. If the frequency increased, we would conclude that
the infant recognizes the difference between the father’s
voice and the other voice. If the frequency remained the
same, we would conclude that the infant did not notice a
difference. If the sucking frequency decreased, we would
conclude that the infant recognizes a difference, and we
would assume that the infant preferred the sound of the
father’s voice.
✓
concecpkt
che
Answer
How could we measure learning and memory in infants who cannot speak?
Many studies have used the fact that infants learn to suck harder on a nipple
if their sucking turns on a sound. Investigators then determined whether infants suck harder for some sounds than for others. In one study, babies younger
than days old could turn on a tape recording of a woman’s voice by sucking
on a nipple. The results: They sucked more frequently to turn on recordings of
their own mother’s voice than another woman’s voice (DeCasper & Fifer, ).
Apparently, they preferred their own mother’s voice. Because they showed this
preference as early as the day of birth, psychologists believe that the infants
learned the sound of the mother’s voice before birth.
Carolyn Rovee-Collier
Infants’ Learning and Memory
▲ Figure . Two-month-old infants rapidly learn to
kick to activate a mobile attached to their ankles with
a ribbon. They remember how to activate the mobile
when tested days later. (From Hildreth, Sweeney, &
Rovee-Collier, 2003)
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learned this response and generally kept the mobile
going nonstop for a full -minute session. (Infants
have little control over their leg muscles, but they
don’t need much control to keep the mobile going.)
They remembered what to do when the ribbon was
reattached several days later, to the infants’ evident
delight. Six-month-old infants remembered the
response for weeks. Even after they forgot it, they
quickly relearned it (Hildreth, Sweeney, & RoveeCollier, ).
Jean Piaget’s View of
Cognitive Development
Somewhat older children are much easier to test,
and one quickly discovers that their thinking differs
from that of adults. The theorist who made this point
most influentially was Jean Piaget (pee-ah-ZHAY;
–).
Early in his career, while administering IQ tests
to French-speaking children in Switzerland, Piaget
was fascinated that so many children of a given age
gave the same incorrect answer to certain questions. He concluded that children have qualitatively
different thought processes from adults. According to Piaget, as children develop intellectually, they do more than accumulate facts. They construct new
mental processes.
In Piaget’s terminology, behavior is based on schemata (the plural of
schema). A schema is an organized way of interacting with objects. For instance,
infants have a grasping schema and a sucking schema. Older infants gradually
add new schemata and adapt their old ones through the processes of assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation means applying an old schema to new
objects or problems. For example, when a child sees animals move and then sees
the sun and moon move, the child may assume that the sun and moon are alive,
like animals. Accommodation means modifying an old schema to fit a new object
or problem. A child may learn that “only living things move on their own” is a
rule with exceptions and that the sun and moon are not alive.
Infants shift back and forth between assimilation and accommodation.
Equilibration is the establishment of harmony or balance between the two. A discrepancy occurs between the child’s current understanding and some evidence
to the contrary. The child accommodates to that discrepancy and achieves an
equilibration at a higher level. Similar processes occur in adults. When you see a
new mathematical problem, you try several familiar methods until you find one
that works. That is, you assimilate the new problem to an old schema. However,
if the new problem is sufficiently different, you modify (accommodate) your
schema to find a solution. In this way, said Piaget, intellectual growth occurs.
Piaget contended that children progress through four major stages of intellectual development:
. The sensorimotor stage (from birth to almost years)
. The preoperational stage (from just before to years)
. The concrete operations stage (from about to years)
. The formal operations stage (from about years onward)
The ages are variable, and not everyone reaches the formal operations stage.
However, all people progress through the stages in the same order. Let’s consider
each of Piaget’s stages.
Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage
Piaget called the first stage of intellectual development the sensorimotor stage
because at this early age (the first ½ to years) behavior is mostly simple motor
responses to sensory stimuli—for example, the grasp reflex and the sucking reflex. According to Piaget, infants respond only to what they see and hear at the
moment. In particular, he believed that children during this period fail to respond to objects they remember seeing even a few seconds ago. What evidence
could he have for this view?
what’s the evidence?
Bill Anderson/Science Source
The Infant’s Concept of Object Permanence
Jean Piaget (on the left) demonstrated that children with
different levels of maturity react differently to the same
experience.
Piaget argued that infants in the first few months of life lack the concept of object
permanence, the idea that objects continue to exist even when we do not see or hear them.
That is, for an infant, “Out of sight, out of existence.”
How would he know that? Piaget drew his inferences from observations like this:
Place a toy in front of a -month-old infant, who reaches out for it. Later, place a toy
in the same place, but before the infant has a chance to grab it, cover it with a clear
glass. The infant removes the glass and takes the toy. Now repeat that procedure but
use an opaque (nonclear) glass. The infant, who watched you place the glass over the
toy, makes no effort to remove the glass and obtain the toy. Next, place a thin barrier
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Hypothesis An infant who sees an event that would be impossible (if objects are permanent) will be surprised and therefore will stare longer than will an infant who sees
a similar but possible event.
Method Infants aged or months watched a series of events. The infant watched the
Doug Goodman/Science Source
▲
between the infant and the toy. An infant who cannot see the toy does not reach for it
(Piaget, /) (see Figure .).
According to Piaget, the infant does not know that the hidden toy continues to
exist. However, the results vary depending on circumstances. For example, if you show
a toy and then turn out the lights, a -month-old infant reaches out toward the unseen
toy if it was a familiar toy but not if it was unfamiliar (Shinskey & Munakata, ). A
study by Renee Baillargeon () also suggests that infants show signs of understanding object permanence when they are tested differently.
Doug Goodman/Science Source
experimenter raise a screen to show the track and then watched a toy car go down a slope
and emerge on the other side of the screen, as shown here. This was called a “possible” event.
▲ Figure . (a) A 6- to 9-month-old child reaches for
a visible toy but not one that is hidden behind a barrier
(b) even if the child sees someone hide the toy. According
to Piaget, this observation indicates that the child hasn’t
yet grasped the concept of object permanence.
Possible event. The box is behind the track, and the car passes by the box.
The researchers measured how long the child stared after the car passed by. They
repeated the procedure until the child’s staring time decreased for three trials in a row
(showing habituation). Then the experimenters presented a series of “possible” events,
as just described, and “impossible” events like this:
In an impossible event, the raised screen showed
a box on the track where the car would pass. After
the screen lowered, the car went down the slope and
emerged on the other side. (The experimenters pulled
the box off the track after lowering the screen.) The experimenters measured each child’s staring times after
both kinds of events. They repeated both events two
more times, randomizing the order of events.
Results As shown in ▼ Figure ., infants stared longer
after seeing an impossible event. They also stared longer
after the first pair of events than after the second and
third pairs (Baillargeon, ).
Interpretation Why did the infants stare longer at the
Impossible event. The raised screen shows a box on the track where the car would pass.
After the screen lowers, the car goes down the slope and emerges on the other side.
impossible event? The inference—admittedly only an inference—is that the infants found the impossible event
surprising. To be surprised, infants had to expect that the
box would continue to exist. If so, even -month-old infants have some understanding of object permanence,
as well as elementary physics. A later study with a slightly
different method demonstrated object permanence in
infants as young as ½ months (Baillargeon, ).
Still, remember that -month-olds failed Piaget’s
object permanence task of reaching out to pick up a
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Second, concepts develop gradually. An infant may
show a concept in one situation and not another.
70
Sense of Self
Impossible event
50
40
30
Possible event
20
10
0
0
1
2
3
Test pair
▲ Figure . Infants stared longer after watching
impossible events than after watching possible events.
(From Baillargeon, 1986)
hidden object. Do infants understand object permanence or not? Evidently, it is not a good question. Infants
use a concept in some situations and not others. The
same is true for all of us. Did you ever learn a grammatical rule in English class and then violate it in your own
speech? Did you ever learn a math formula and then fail
to apply it to a new situation?
Other psychologists modified this procedure to
test many other infant concepts. Researchers put five
objects behind a screen, added five more, and removed
the screen. Nine-month-olds stared longer when they
saw just five objects than when they saw ten, suggesting some understanding of addition (McCrink & Wynn,
). Researchers buried a ball in the sand and then
retrieved apparently the same ball from the same or a
different location. Infants stared longer when the ball
emerged from the new location (Newcombe, Sluzenski, &
Huttenlocher, ). When infants watched an animated
display in which a larger figure and a smaller figure
crossed paths, -month-olds stared longer if the larger
one bowed and stepped aside to let the smaller one
pass (Thomsen, Frankenhuis, Ingold-Smith, & Carey,
). If we assume that staring means surprise, then
infants apparently understand something about social
dominance. Related studies suggest that -month-olds
understand that liquids can pass through a barrier, but
solids cannot (Hespos, Ferry, & Rips, ). However, infants as old as months show no surprise if you place
a toy into a container and then pull out a toy of different shape or color (Baillargeon, Li, Ng, & Yuan, ).
Evidently, infants imagine that objects can magically
change shape or color.
Here are two conclusions: First, we should be cautious about inferring what infants or anyone else can or
cannot do, because the results vary with the procedures.
Do young children have a concept of “self”? How
would we know? Here is the evidence: Someone
puts a spot of unscented rouge on an infant’s nose
and then puts the infant in front of a mirror. Infants
younger than ½ years old either ignore the red spot
on the baby in the mirror or reach out to touch the
mirror. At some point after age ½ years, infants
instead touch themselves on the nose, indicating that they recognize themselves in the mirror
(see ▼ Figure .). Infants show this sign of selfrecognition at varying ages; the age when they first
show self-recognition is about the same as when
they begin to act embarrassed (M. Lewis, Sullivan,
Stanger, & Weiss, ). They show a sense of self in
both situations or in neither.
Before this time, do infants fail to distinguish
between self and other? Perhaps, but we cannot be
sure. Before age ½, we see no evidence for a sense
of self, but absence of evidence is not evidence of
absence. Perhaps younger infants would show a
sense of self in some other test that we have not yet
devised.
Thierry Berrod, Mona Lisa Production/Science Source
Looking time (sec)
60
▲ Figure . If someone places a bit of unscented
rouge on a child’s nose, a 2-year-old looking at a mirror
shows self-recognition by touching his or her own nose.
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Piaget’s Preoperational Stage
By age ½ to , children begin speaking. A child who asks for a toy obviously understands object permanence. Nevertheless, young children still misunderstand
much. They do not understand how a mother can be someone else’s daughter.
A boy with one brother will assert that his brother has no brother. Piaget refers
to this period as the preoperational stage because the child lacks operations, which
are reversible mental processes. For a boy to understand that his brother has a
brother, he must be able to reverse the concept of “having a brother.” According
to Piaget, three typical aspects of preoperational thought are egocentrism,
difficulty distinguishing appearance from reality, and lack of the concept
of conservation.
Egocentrism: Failing to Understand Other
People’s Perspective
▲
According to Piaget, young children’s thought is egocentric. Piaget did
not mean selfish. Instead, he meant that a child sees the world as centered
around himself or herself and cannot easily take another person’s perspective.
If you sit opposite a preschooler, the child can describe how the blocks
on the table look from the child’s side but not how they would look from
your side.
Another example: Young children hear a story about Lucy, who wants her
old pair of red shoes. Lucy’s brother Linus enters the room, and she asks him to
bring her red shoes. He goes and brings back her new red shoes, and she is angry because she wanted the old red shoes. Young children hearing the story are
surprised that he brought the wrong shoes because they knew which shoes she
wanted (Keysar, Barr, & Horton, ).
However, young children do sometimes understand another person’s perspective. In one study, - and -year-old children had to tell an adult to pick up a
particular glass. If a child saw that the adult could see two glasses, the child usually said to pick up the “big” or “little” glass to identify the right one. If the child
saw that the adult could see only one glass, the child often said just “the glass”
(Nadig & Sedivy, ; Figure .).
✓
concept
check
. Which of the following is the clearest example of egocentric
thinking?
a. A writer who uses someone else’s words without giving credit
b. A politician who blames others for everything that goes wrong
c. A professor who gives the same complicated lecture to a freshman class as to a
convention of professionals
. c is a case of egocentric thought, a failure to recognize another person’s point
of view.
Answers
Theory of Mind: Understanding that Different
People Know Different Things
To say that a child is egocentric implies that he or she does not understand what
other people know or don’t know. Psychologists say that a young child lacks, but
gradually develops theory of mind, which is an understanding that other people
have a mind, too, and that each person knows some things that other people don’t
know. How can we know whether a child has this understanding? Here is an
example of a research effort.
▲ Figure . Sometimes, a child saw that the adult
could see two glasses. At other times, it was clear that the
adult could see only one. If two glasses were visible, the
child usually told the adult which glass to pick up, instead
of saying, “pick up the glass.” (From Nadig & Sedivy, 2002)
what’s the evidence?
Children’s Understanding of Other People’s Knowledge
and Beliefs
How and when do children first understand that other
people have minds and knowledge? Researchers have
devised clever experiments to explore this question.
Hypothesis A child who understands that other people
have minds knows that someone could have a false belief.
Method A child watches and listens as an adult acts out
this story: Maxi sees his mother put chocolate into the
blue cupboard. He plans to return later and get some.
However, while he is absent, his mother moves the
chocolate to the green cupboard. The questions are:
Where will Maxi look for the chocolate? If his grandfather is available to help, where will Maxi tell him to look?
If an older brother wants to take the chocolate, and Maxi
wants to prevent the brother from finding the chocolate,
where will he point? (See ▼ Figure ..)
Results Older children answer correctly: Maxi looks
in the blue cupboard and tells his grandfather to get
chocolate from the blue cupboard, but tells his brother
to look in the green cupboard. Younger children answer
incorrectly, as if they thought Maxi had all the correct
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Answer
. It means that the child has “theory of mind.” The child
understands that Maxi, who was absent while the mother
moved the chocolate, will have a false belief.
We might be tempted to the simple interpretation that young children lack theory of mind, but at
some point they suddenly gain it. However, development is seldom a sudden, all-or-nothing process. In
the “Maxi” situation, it is likely that many -year-olds
don’t fully understand the questions. In a later study,
-year-olds watched as a Lego figure representing a girl
put bananas (which she liked to eat) in one of two refrigerators. Then the girl moved forward, with her back
to the refrigerators, while the experimenter moved the
bananas from one refrigerator to the other. When the
experimenter invited the child to play with the girl figure and asked, “What is she going to do now?” in most
cases the child moved the figure to the refrigerator
that previously had the bananas, indicating theory of
mind. However, if the experimenter asked where the
girl would look for the bananas, the child answered
with the wrong refrigerator (Rubio-Fernández &
Geurts, ). That is, a nonverbal response showed
that the child understood what the girl would know,
but answering in words caused confusion. In an even
more simplified task, even -month-olds showed an
understanding of theory of mind (Senju, Southgate,
Snape, Leonard, & Casibra, ). In short, gaining
theory of mind—or any other concept—is not a sudden transition. A child can show indications of understanding in some ways or situations and not in others.
Distinguishing Appearance
from Reality
▲ Figure . Maxi watches his mother place
chocolate in one place. While he is absent, she moves
it. Where will Maxi look for it? Younger children point
to the new location, suggesting they do not understand
that Maxi will have an incorrect belief.
information that the observers themselves had. The
percentage of children answering correctly increases
from age to age , and most children beyond about
½ answer correctly (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, ;
Wimmer & Penner, ).
Interpretation Evidently, children gradually develop
in their ability to understand other people’s thoughts,
beliefs, and knowledge.
✓
concecpkt
che
. If the chocolate is now in the
green cupboard, what does it
mean if a child says Maxi will
look in the blue cupboard?
During Piaget’s preoperational stage, children apparently do not distinguish clearly between appearance and reality. For example, a child who sees you
put a white ball behind a blue filter will say that the
ball is blue. When you ask, “Yes, I know the ball looks
blue, but what color is it really?” the child replies that
it really is blue (Flavell, ). Similarly, a -year-old
who encounters a sponge that looks like a rock will
say that it really is a rock, but a child who says it is a
sponge will also insist that it looks like a sponge.
However, the results depend on exactly how we
ask the question. Psychologists showed -year-olds a
sponge that looked like a rock and let them touch it.
When the investigators asked what it looked like and
what it was really, most of the children said “rock”
both times or “sponge” both times. However, if the
investigators asked, “Bring me something so I can
wipe up some spilled water,” the children brought
the sponge. And when the investigators asked, “Bring
me something so I can take a picture of a teddy bear
with something that looks like a rock,” they brought
the same object. So evidently, the children did
understand that something could be a sponge and
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a A 21/2-year-old is shown a small room where a stuffed animal is hidden.
Child is unable to find the stuffed animal in the larger room.
Child is told
that the machine
expands the room.
Child stands out
of the way during
some noises and
then returns.
b Child is shown a small room where a stuffed animal is hidden.
Child is able to find the stuffed animal in the “blown-up” room.
▲ Figure . If an experimenter hides a small toy in a small room and asks a child to find a
larger toy “in the same place” in the larger room, most 2½-year-olds search haphazardly.
(a) However, the same children know where to look if the experimenter says this is the same
room as before, but a machine has expanded it (b).
look like a rock, even if they didn’t say so (Sapp, Lee, & Muir, ). Repeatedly,
we are seeing this pattern: A child can show a concept in one way and not another.
Also consider this experiment: A psychologist shows a child a playhouse
room that is a scale model of a full-size room. The psychologist hides a tiny toy
in the small room and explains that a bigger toy just like it is “in the same place”
in the bigger room. (For example, if the little toy is behind the sofa in the little
room, the big toy is behind the sofa in the big room.) Then the psychologist asks
the child to find the big toy in the big room. Most -year-olds go to the correct
place at once (DeLoache, ). Most ½-year-old children, however, search
haphazardly (see ▲ Figure .a).
Again, the results depend on how we ask the question. As before, a psychologist hides a toy in the small room while the child watches. Then the psychologist shows the child a “machine that can make things bigger.” The psychologist
aims a beam from the machine at the room and takes the child out of the way.
They hear some chunkata-chunkata sounds, and then the psychologist shows
the full-size “blown-up” room and asks the child to find the hidden toy. Even
½-year-olds go immediately to the correct location (DeLoache, Miller, &
Rosengren, ; see ▲ Figure .b). (Incidentally, the children had no doubt
that the machine had expanded the room. Many continued to believe it even
after the psychologist explained what happened!)
Developing the Concept of Conservation
According to Piaget, preoperational children lack the concept of conservation.
They fail to understand that objects conserve such properties as number, length,
volume, area, and mass after changes in the shape or arrangement of the objects.
They cannot perform the mental operations necessary to understand the trans-
formations. ■ Table . shows typical conservation
tasks. For example, if we show two equal glasses with
the same amount of water and then pour the contents of one glass into a third glass that is taller and
thinner, preoperational children say that the third
glass contains more water (see ▼ Figure .).
I once thought perhaps the phrasing of the
questions tricks children into saying something
they do not believe. If you have the same doubts,
find a -year-old child and try it yourself with your
own wording. Here’s my experience: Once when I
was discussing Piaget in my introductory psychology class, I invited my son Sam, then ½ years old,
to take part in a class demonstration. I started with
two glasses of water, which he agreed contained
equal amounts of water. Then I poured the water
from one glass into a wider glass, lowering the water level. When I asked which glass contained more
water, Sam confidently pointed to the tall, thin one.
After class he complained, “Daddy, why did you
ask me such an easy question? Everyone could see
that there was more water in that glass! You should
have asked me something harder to show how
smart I am!” The following year, I brought Sam, now
½ years old, to class for the same demonstration.
I poured the water from one of the tall glasses into
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Table . Typical Tasks Used to Measure Conservation
Conservation of number
Preoperational children say that these two rows contain the same number
of pennies.
Preoperational children say that the second row has more pennies.
Conservation of volume
Preoperational children say that the two same-size containers have the same
amount of water.
250 cc
250 cc
Preoperational children say that the taller, thinner container has more water.
250 cc
250 cc
Conservation of mass
Preoperational children say that the two same-size balls of clay have the same
amount of clay.
Preoperational children say that a squashed ball of clay contains a different
amount of clay than the same-size round ball of clay.
▲ Figure . Preoperational children don’t understand that the volume of water remains constant despite changes in its appearance. During
the transition to concrete operations, a child finds conservation tasks difficult and confusing.
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Tony Freeman/PhotoEdit
of your classes again!” The question that used to be embarrassingly easy had
become embarrassingly difficult.
The next year, when he was ½, I tried again (at home). This time he
answered confidently, “Both glasses have the same amount of water, of course.
Why? Is this some sort of trick question?”
Tony Freeman/PhotoEdit
a wider one and asked him which glass contained
more water. He looked and paused. His face turned
red. Finally, he whispered, “Daddy, I don’t know!”
After class he complained, “Why did you ask me
such a hard question? I’m never coming back to any
At about age , children enter the stage of concrete operations and begin to understand the conservation of physical properties. The transition is gradual, however. A -year-old may understand that squashing a ball of clay does not change
its weight but still think that squashing it changes how much water it displaces
when dropped into a glass.
According to Piaget, during the stage of concrete operations, children perform
mental operations on concrete objects but still have trouble with abstract or hypothetical ideas. For example, ask this question: “How could you move a mountain
of whipped cream from one side of the city to the other?” Older children enjoy devising imaginative answers, but children in the concrete operations stage
complain that the question is silly.
Or ask, “If you could have a third eye anywhere on your body, where would
you put it?” Children in this stage generally respond immediately that they
would put it right between the other two, on their foreheads. Older children suggest more imaginative ideas such as on the back of their head, in the stomach
(so they could watch food digesting), or on the tip of a finger (so they could peek
around corners).
Finally, in Piaget’s stage of formal operations, adolescents develop logical, deductive reasoning and systematic planning. According to Piaget, children reach
the stage of formal operations at about age . Later researchers found that many
people reach this stage later or not at all. Thinking with formal operations demonstrates planning. For example, we set up five bottles of clear liquid and explain
that it is possible to mix some combination to produce a yellow liquid. The task is
to find that combination. Children in the concrete operations stage plunge right
in with no plan. They try combining bottles A and B, then C and D, then perhaps
A, C, and E. Soon they have forgotten which combinations they’ve already tried.
Adolescents in the formal operations stage approach the problem more systematically. They may first try all the two-bottle combinations: AB, AC, AD, AE, BC, and
so forth. If those fail, they try three-bottle combinations: ABC, ABD, ABE, ACD,
and so on. By trying every possible combination only once, they are sure to
succeed. ■ Table . summarizes Piaget’s four stages.
✓
concecpkt
che
. In which of Piaget’s stages is
each of these children?
a. Child understands conservation
but has trouble with abstract and hypothetical
questions.
b. Child performs well on tests of object permanence but has trouble with conservation.
c. Child has schemata but does not speak in complete
sentences and fails tests of object permanence.
d. Child performs well on hypothetical questions
and other tasks.
Answer
. a. concrete operations stage; b. preoperational stage;
c. sensorimotor stage; d. formal operations stage.
Piaget’s Stages of Concrete Operations
and Formal Operations
Are Piaget’s Stages Distinct?
Piaget regarded the four stages of intellectual development as distinct. He believed a transition from
one stage to the next required a major reorganization of thinking, like a caterpillar metamorphosing
into a chrysalis or a chrysalis metamorphosing into
a butterfly. That is, intellectual growth has periods of
revolutionary reorganization.
Later research casts doubt on this conclusion. If it were true, then a child in a given stage
of development—say, the preoperational stage—
should perform consistently at that level. In fact,
children’s performance fluctuates as a task is made
more or less difficult. For example, consider the
conservation-of-number task, in which an investigator presents two rows of seven or more objects,
spreads out one row, and asks which row has more.
Table . Summary of Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
Stage and Approximate Age
Achievements and Activities
Limitations
Sensorimotor (birth to ½ years)
Reacts to sensory stimuli through reflexes and
other responses
Little use of language; seems not to understand
object permanence in the early part of this stage
Preoperational (½ to years)
Develops language; can represent objects
mentally by words and other symbols; can
respond to objects that are remembered but
not present
Lacks operations (reversible mental processes); lacks
concept of conservation; focuses on one property
at a time (such as length or width), not on both at
once; still has trouble distinguishing appearance
from reality
Concrete operations ( to years)
Understands conservation of mass, number,
and volume; can reason logically with regard to
concrete objects that can be seen or touched
Has trouble reasoning about abstract concepts and
hypothetical situations
Formal operations ( years onward)
Can reason logically about abstract and
hypothetical concepts; develops strategies; plans
actions in advance
None beyond the occasional irrationalities of all
human thought
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of conservation, mainly on their own. Teaching a
concept means directing children’s attention to the
key aspects and letting them discover the concept. In
contrast, Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky ()
argued that educators should not wait for children
to rediscover the principles of physics and mathematics. Indeed, the value of language is that it lets us
profit from the experience of previous generations.
Vygotsky certainly did not mean that adults
should ignore a child’s developmental level. Rather,
every child has a zone of proximal development, the
distance between what a child can do alone and
what is possible with help. Instruction should remain
within that zone. For example, one should not try to
teach a typical -year-old the concept of conservation of volume. However, a -year-old who does
not yet understand the concept might learn it with
help and guidance. Similarly, children improve their
recall of lists or stories if adults help them understand and organize the information (Larkina, Güler,
Kleinknecht, & Bauer, ). Vygotsky compared
this help to scaffolding, the temporary supports that
builders use during construction: After a building is
complete, the scaffolding is removed. Good advice
for educators is to be sensitive to a child’s zone
of proximal development and pursue how much
further they can push a child.
a
b
▲ Figure . (a) With the standard conservation-ofnumber task, preoperational children answer that the
spread-out row has more items. (b) With a simplified
task, the same children say that both rows have the
same number of items.
Preoperational children reply that the spread-out
row has more. However, when Rochel Gelman ()
presented two rows of only three objects each (see
▲ Figure .) and then spread out one of the rows,
even - and -year-old children usually answered
that the rows had the same number of items.
Whereas Piaget believed children made distinct
jumps from one stage to another, most psychologists
today see development as gradual and continuous
(Courage & Howe, ). That is, the difference between older children and younger children is not so
much a matter of gaining a new ability. It is a matter
of using their abilities in more and more situations.
✓
concecpkt
che
Differing Views: Piaget
and Vygotsky
. What would Piaget and Vygotsky
think about the feasibility
of teaching the concept of
conservation?
Answer
. Piaget recommended waiting for a child to discover the
concept by himself or herself. For Vygotsky, the answer
depends on the child’s zone of proximal development.
An adult can help a child at the right age.
One implication of Piaget’s view is that children
must discover certain concepts, such as the concept
©Geo Martinez/Shutterstock.com
How Grown Up Are We?
The zone of proximal development is the gap between what a child does alone and
what the child can do with help.
Both Piaget and Vygotsky implied that we start
with infant cognition and eventually attain adult
thinking, which we practice from then on. Are they
right, or do we sometimes slip into childish ways of
thought?
Consider egocentric thinking. Young children
seem to assume that whatever they know or understand, other people will know or understand also.
Sometimes, adults make the same mistake. Suppose
you say, “The daughter of the man and the woman
arrived.” Did one person arrive (who is the daughter
of the man and the woman) or two people (the man’s
daughter and some other woman)? You know what
you meant, but you might overestimate how well
other people understand you (Keysar & Henly, ).
/ CHAPTER DEVELOPMENT
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we suppress our childlike ways of thinking, but we
don’t lose them completely. You still have a child’s
mind hidden inside you.
✓
concecpkt
che
Answer
. How could you get someone to
pour you a larger than average
drink?
. Ask to have the drink in a short, wide glass.
Another example: According to Piaget, after about age , we all understand
conservation of number, volume, and so forth. If we show two equally tall, thin
containers of water and pour the water from one of them into a wider container,
older children and adults confidently say that the two containers have equal
amounts of water. However, let’s test in a different way: We give people a tall, thin
glass or a short, wide glass and invite them to add as much juice as they want.
Adults as well as children usually put more juice into the short, wide glass, while
thinking that they are getting less juice than usual. Even professional bartenders generally pour more liquor into a short, wide glass than into a tall, thin one
(Wansink & van Ittersum, ). Evidently, even adults don’t fully understand
conservation of volume if they are tested in this way. In short, as we grow older,
in closing module .
Understanding Children
Jean Piaget called attention to the ways in which children differ
from adults. They are not just slower or less well informed; they
process information differently. Everything that we do develops
over age. But as you can see, it takes much work to pin down
exactly what infants and small children understand, and what
they misunderstand.
Furthermore, the changes are gradual and incomplete.
Even adults revert to childlike thinking at times. Development
is not a matter of suddenly gaining cognitive skills. It is a matter
of applying skills more consistently and under a wider variety of
conditions.
Summary
●
●
●
●
●
●
Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Cross-sectional
studies examine people of different ages at the same time.
Longitudinal studies monitor people as they grow older. A
sequential design combines both methods. (page )
Cohort effects. Many differences between young people and
old people are not due to age but to the era in which they
grew up. (page )
Prenatal development. The brain begins to mature long before
birth. Exposure to drugs such as alcohol decreases brain activity and releases neurons’ self-destruct programs. Some people
manage to do well in life despite unpromising circumstances.
(page )
Inferring infant capacities. We easily underestimate newborns’
capacities because they have so little control over their muscles. Careful testing demonstrates greater abilities than we
might have supposed. (page )
Infant vision and hearing. Newborns stare at some visual patterns longer than others. They habituate to a repeated sound
but dishabituate to a slightly different sound, indicating that
they hear a difference. (page )
Infant memory. Newborns suck more vigorously to turn on
a recording of their own mother’s voice than some other
woman’s voice, indicating that they recognize the sound of
the mother’s voice. Infants just months old learn to kick and
move a mobile, and they remember how to do it several days
later. (page )
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
Piaget’s view of children’s thinking. According to Jean Piaget,
children’s thought differs qualitatively from adults’ thought.
He believed children grow intellectually through accommodation and assimilation. (page )
Piaget’s stages of development. Children in the sensorimotor
stage respond to what they see, hear, or feel at the moment. In
the preoperational stage, they lack reversible operations. In
the concrete operations stage, children reason about concrete
problems but not abstractions. Adults and older children are
in the formal operations stage, in which they plan strategies
and deal with hypothetical or abstract questions. (page )
Egocentric thinking. Young children often fail to understand
other people’s point of view. (page )
Theory of mind. Children gradually develop their ability to
assess other people’s knowledge and beliefs, including false
beliefs. (page )
Appearance and reality. Young children sometimes seem not
to distinguish between appearance and reality. However, with
a simpler task, they do distinguish. Children may show a concept under some conditions and not others. (page )
Vygotsky. According to Lev Vygotsky, children must learn new
abilities from adults or older children, but only within their
zone of proximal development. (page )
Adults. Adults revert to childlike reasoning in certain situations. (page )
M O D U L E 5 . 1 COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD /
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Key Terms
accommodation (page )
assimilation (page )
cohort (page )
conservation (page )
cross-sectional study (page )
dishabituation (page )
fetal alcohol syndrome (page )
fetus (page )
egocentric (page )
equilibration (page )
habituation (page )
longitudinal study (page )
object permanence (page )
operation (page )
preoperational stage (page )
schema (pl. schemata) (page )
selective attrition (page )
sensorimotor stage (page )
sequential design (page )
stage of concrete operations (page )
stage of formal operations (page )
theory of mind (page )
zone of proximal development (page )
zygote (page )
Review Questions
1. Which of these characterizes a cross-sectional study of
development?
(a) Researchers compare people from several cultures.
(b) Researchers compare one group of people at several times
as they grow older.
(c) Researchers compare people of different ages, at the same
time.
(d) Researchers examine many aspects of behavior, for one
group of people at one point in time.
2. Suppose a survey reports different political leanings by older
adults than younger adults. A possible explanation is that
people change their views as they age. Another is that older
people have different priorities from younger people. What is
still another possibility?
(a) Demand characteristics
(b) A cohort effect
(c) Zone of proximal development
(d) Equilibration
3. Theoretically, which of the following drugs should produce
effects similar to those of fetal alcohol syndrome, if a mother
takes them during pregnancy?
(a) Cocaine (which increases activity at dopamine synapses)
(b) Anti-anxiety drugs (which increase activity at inhibitory
synapses)
(c) Nicotine (which stimulates acetylcholine synapses)
(d) Caffeine (which increases heart rate)
4. Suppose an infant habituates to the sound ba, but when
we substitute the sound boo, the infant fails to increase the
sucking rate. What interpretation would be likely?
(a) The infant hears a difference between the two sounds.
(b) The infant does not hear a difference between the two
sounds.
(c) The infant prefers the sound ba.
(d) The infant prefers the sound boo.
5. Suppose a newborn sucks to turn on a tape recording of its
father’s voice. Eventually the infant habituates and the sucking frequency decreases. Now the experimenters substitute
the recording of a different man’s voice. Which of the following results would indicate that the infant detects a difference
between the two voices?
(a) The sucking rate increases.
(b) The sucking rate decreases.
(c) The sucking rate remains the same.
6. What evidence suggests that even 6- to 8-month-old infants
understand object permanence?
(a) They reach around an opaque barrier to grasp an unseen
toy.
(b) They ask for toys that they do not currently see.
(c) They stare longer at events that would be impossible if
unseen objects continue to exist.
(d) After they have repeatedly seen one toy and habituated
to it, they dishabituate when they see a new toy.
7. To demonstrate “theory of mind,” what must a child understand?
(a) That someone else can have a false belief
(b) That human mental abilities are more advanced than
those of other species
(c) That mental activity is inseparable from brain activity
(d) That all mental activity requires sensory input
8. A child watches an experimenter hide a small toy in a small
room, and then tries to find a larger version of the same toy
hidden “in the same place” in a larger room. At what age can
most children first succeed on this task?
(a) 4 years old
(b) 3 years old
(c) It depends on how you ask the question.
(d) It depends on the child’s interest in the toy.
9. One year ago, Sarah did not seem to understand conservation of
number, volume, or mass. Today she does. According to Piaget,
Sarah has progressed from which stage to which other stage?
(a) Preoperational stage to concrete operations stage
(b) Sensorimotor stage to preoperational stage
(c) Concrete operations stage to formal operations stage
(d) Formal operations stage to concrete operations stage
10. Which of the following would be evidence in favor of
Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development”?
(a) Most 3-year-olds can observe a toy hidden in a small
room and use it to locate a larger toy in a larger room,
but 2½-year-olds cannot.
(b) It is possible to teach conservation of volume to many
6-year-olds but not many 4-year-olds.
(c) Children in the stage of concrete operations have trouble
with abstract or hypothetical ideas.
(d) Intellectual development varies from one culture to
another.
Answers: 1c, 2b, 3b, 4b, 5a, 6c, 7a, 8c, 9a, 10b.
/ CHAPTER DEVELOPMENT
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module .
Social and Emotional Development
After studying this module, you should be able to:
●
Characterize Erikson’s stages of social and emotional development.
●
Explain how psychologists measure attachment in young children.
●
with basic trust versus mistrust. An infant with a
supportive environment forms strong attachments
that positively influence future relationships with
other people (Erikson, ). An infant who is mistreated fails to form a trusting relationship and has
trouble developing close ties with people later.
In adolescence, the key issue is identity. Most
adolescents in Western societies consider many
options of how they will spend the rest of their lives.
Discuss the major social and emotional issues people face during
adolescence, adulthood, and old age.
You are a contestant on a new TV game show, What’s My Worry? Behind the
curtain is someone you cannot see, who has an overriding concern. You are
to identify that concern by questioning a psychologist who knows this person
well, asking only questions that can be answered with a single word or phrase.
Here’s the catch: The more questions you ask, the smaller the prize. If you guess
correctly after the first question, you win $,. After two questions, you win
$, and so on. Your best strategy is to ask as few questions as possible and
then make an educated guess.
What would your first question be? A good one would be: “How old is this
person?” The worries of teenagers differ from those of -year-olds, which differ
from those of older adults. Each age has its own concerns, opportunities, and
pleasures.
Erik Erikson divided the human life span into eight periods that he called ages
or stages. At each stage, he said, people have specific tasks to master, and each
stage generates its own social and emotional conflicts. ■ Table . summarizes
Erikson’s stages.
According to Erikson, failure to master the task of any stage leaves unfortunate consequences that carry over to later stages. For example, an infant deals
Bettmann/Corbis
Erikson’s Description of Human
Development
Erik Erikson emphasized that each age has special conflicts.
Table . Erikson’s Stages of Human Development
Stages
Main Conflict
Typical Question
Infant
Basic trust versus mistrust
Is my social world predictable and supportive?
Toddler (ages –)
Autonomy versus shame and doubt
Can I do things by myself or must I always rely on others?
Preschool child (ages –)
Initiative versus guilt
Am I good or bad?
Preadolescent (ages –)
Industry versus inferiority
Am I successful or worthless?
Adolescent (early teens)
Identity versus role confusion
Who am I?
Young adult (late teens and early s)
Intimacy versus isolation
Shall I share my life with another person or live alone?
Middle adult (late s to retirement)
Generativity versus stagnation
Will I succeed in my life, both as a parent and as a worker?
Older adult (after retirement)
Ego integrity versus despair
Have I lived a full life or have I failed?
M O D U L E 5 . 2 SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT /
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They entertain alternative identities and consider
many possible futures.
According to Erikson, the key decision of young
adulthood is intimacy or isolation—that is, sharing
your life with someone else or living alone. The quality of an intimate relationship has enormous impact
throughout adult life.
If you live a full life span, you will spend about
half your life in middle adulthood, where the issue is
generativity (producing something important, e.g.,
children or work) versus stagnation (not producing). If all goes well, you take pride in your success. If
not, then your difficulties and disappointments continue into old age, where the issue is integrity versus
despair.
You might describe the main concerns of
certain ages differently from what Erikson said.
Nevertheless, two of his general points seem valid:
Each stage has its own special difficulties, and an
unsatisfactory resolution to the problems of one age
produces extra difficulty in later life. Let’s examine
in more detail some of the major social and emotional issues of particular ages.
Infancy and Childhood
An important aspect of human life is attachment—
a feeling of closeness toward another person.
Attachments begin in infancy. John Bowlby ()
proposed that infants who develop good attachments have a sense of security and safety, and those
without strong attachments have trouble developing close relations later as well. Later research
confirms this idea. A longitudinal study found that
toddlers who received lower-quality care developed
into young adults who had trouble forming strong
romantic attachments. They erupted into verbal
hostility with their partners significantly more often
than most other people do (Oriña et al., ).
Most research on attachment has measured it in
the Strange Situation (usually capitalized), pioneered
by Mary Ainsworth (). In this procedure, a mother
and her infant (typically to months old) come
into a room with many toys. Then a stranger enters
the room. The mother leaves and then returns. A few
minutes later, both the stranger and the mother leave.
Then the stranger returns, and finally, the mother
returns. Through a one-way mirror, a psychologist
observes the infant’s reactions to each coming and
going. Observers classify infants’ responses in the
following categories:
●
Securely attached. The infant uses the mother as
a base of exploration, cooing at her, showing her
toys, and making eye contact with her. The infant
shows some distress when the mother leaves
but cries only briefly if at all. When she returns,
●
●
●
the infant goes to her with apparent delight, cuddles for a while, and then
returns to the toys.
Anxious (or resistant). Responses toward the mother fluctuate between
happy and angry. The infant clings to the mother and cries profusely when
she leaves, as if worried that she might not return. When she does return, the
infant clings to her again but does not use her as a base to explore the toys.
A child with an anxious attachment typically shows many fears, including a
strong fear of strangers.
Avoidant. While the mother is present, the infant does not stay near her and
seldom interacts with her. The infant may or may not cry when she leaves
and does not go to her when she returns.
Disorganized. The infant seems not even to notice the mother or looks away
while approaching her or covers his or her face or lies on the floor. The
infant alternates between approach and avoidance and shows more fear
than affection.
The prevalence of the various attachment styles differs from one country to another, but the secure pattern is usually the most common (Ainsworth, Blehar,
Waters, & Wall, ). Of course, many children do not fit neatly into one category or another, and some who are classified as “secure” or “avoidant” are more
secure or avoidant than others. Most children remain stable in their classification from one time to another (Moss, Cyr, Bureau, Tarabulsy, & Dubois-Comtois,
). In fact, psychologists can predict later attachment behavior from observations on infants as young as months. In the Still-Face Paradigm, a parent plays
with a child and then suddenly shifts to an unresponsive, expressionless face.
Infants who continue looking at the parent with little sign of distress are likely
to show a strong, secure attachment at a year old and beyond (Braungart-Rieker
et al., ).
The Strange Situation also can be used to evaluate the relationship between
child and father (Belsky, ), child and grandparent, or other relationships.
As a rule, the quality of one relationship correlates with the quality of others.
For example, most children who have a secure relationship with the mother also
have a secure relationship with the father, and chances are the parents are happy
with each other as well (Elicker, Englund, & Sroufe, ; Erel & Burman, ).
Most infants who have a secure relationship with their parents at age months
continue to have a close relationship with them decades later (Waters, Merrick,
Treboux, Crowell, & Albersheim, ). Those who show a secure attachment in
infancy are more likely than others to form high-quality romantic attachments
in adulthood (Roisman, Collins, Sroufe, & Egeland, ). They are quick to resolve conflicts with romantic partners and other people (Salvatore, Kuo, Steele,
Simpson, & Collins, ).
Why do some children develop more secure attachments than others? One
reason is that children differ genetically in their temperament—their tendency to
be active or inactive, and to respond vigorously or quietly to new stimuli (Bouchard,
Lykken, McGue, Segal, & Tellegen, ; Matheny, ). Temperament is fairly
consistent throughout life for most people (Durbin, Hayden, Klein, & Olino,
). Those with a “difficult” temperament are frightened more easily than others from infancy through adulthood (Kagan, Reznick, & Snidman, ; Kagan &
Snidman, ; Schwartz, Wright, Shin, Kagan, & Rauch, ). How long an infant fixates on one object at a time at age months correlates with self-control
at age years, and impulse control at age years correlates with impulse control
in adulthood (Papageorgiou et al., ; Slutske, Moffitt, Poulton, & Caspi, ).
Attachment style also relates strongly to how responsive the parents are to
the infants’ needs, including holding, touching, facial expressions, and so forth.
Gentle touch can be very reassuring (Hertenstein, ). Developing a secure attachment takes time and effort. One study examined children who were reared
in an orphanage in Africa, Asia, eastern Europe, or Latin America for one to three
years before adoption by a U.S. family. By three months after adoption, about
/ CHAPTER DEVELOPMENT
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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
The status of adolescents varies among cultures and eras. If you had been born in the s
or early s, or in many parts of the world today,
your education probably would have ended in your
early teens, if not before, and you would have begun
working full-time or taking care of your children.
In Western societies today, improved health and
nutrition have lowered the average age of puberty
(Okasha, McCarron, McEwen, & Smith, ), but
the economic situation encourages young people to
stay in school and postpone marriage, family, and
career. The result is a long period of physical maturity without adult status.
Adolescence is often described as a time of “storm
and stress.” Most adolescents report occasional
✓
concecpkt
che
. If a child in the Strange Situation clings tightly to the
mother and cries furiously when she leaves, which kind of
attachment does the child have?
Answer
. In the United States, this pattern would indicate an anxious or insecure attachment. In
Japan, however, it is an understandable reaction to a surprising experience.
Social Development in Childhood
and Adolescence
©Syda Productions/Shutterstock.com
half of the children showed an attachment to their adopting parents, and by
nine months, about two-thirds showed a secure attachment (Carlson, Hostinar,
Mliner, & Gunnar, ).
Patterns of attachment are similar across cultures, with a few apparent exceptions. However, what appears to be a difference in attachment sometimes
reflects difficulties in measurement. In one study, Western psychologists observing Black children in South Africa found low consistency between measurements of attachment in one situation and another. When they enlisted local people as co-investigators, the local observers, who understood the local customs,
reported data with much greater consistency (Minde, Minde, & Vogel, ).
Another study reported an unusually high prevalence of “anxious attachment”
among Japanese infants. However, Japanese mothers customarily stay with their
babies almost constantly, including bathing with them and sleeping in the same
bed. When the Japanese mothers were persuaded to leave their infants alone
with a stranger, it was in many cases a new experience for the infant, who reacted
with horror. The same reaction by a U.S. child would have a different meaning
(Rothbaum, Weisz, Pott, Miyake, & Morelli, ).
Doug Menuez/PhotoDisc./Getty Images
Jeremy Horner/Encyclopedia/Corbis
Whereas attachment to parents or other caregivers is critical for infants, relationships with age-mates become increasingly important during childhood
and adolescence. Around puberty, the onset of sexual maturity, sexual interest
begins to enter into peer relationships.
Children learn social skills by interacting with brothers, sisters, and friends close to
their own age.
(a) American teenagers are financially dependent
on their parents but have the opportunity to spend
much time in whatever way they choose. (b) In many
nontechnological societies, teenagers are expected to do
adult work and accept adult responsibilities.
M O D U L E 5 . 2 SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT /
Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
periods of moodiness and conflict with their parents
in early adolescence, though the conflicts decrease
in later adolescence (Laursen, Coy, & Collins, ).
As a rule, adolescents who receive sympathetic support and understanding experience less conflict
with their parents (R. A. Lee, Su, & Yoshida, ).
Of course, we need to ask what caused what. Did the
sympathetic parents cause the adolescents to feel
less conflict, or did calm, well-behaved adolescents
bring out the best in their parents?
Adolescence is also a time of risk-taking behaviors, not only in humans but in other species, too
(Spear, ). Adolescents are certainly aware of
the dangers. If asked about the advisability of drunk
driving, unprotected sex, and so forth, they describe
the dangers as well as adults do. Why, then, don’t
they behave like adults? Well, most of the time they
do, at least when they take time to consider their decisions. They make impulsive, risky decisions mainly when they decide quickly, especially under peer
pressure (Luna, Padmanabhan, & O’Hearn, ).
One hypothesis to explain impulsive behavior
in adolescents is that the prefrontal cortex, important for inhibiting inappropriate behaviors, is slow to
mature, not reaching full maturity until the late teens
or early s (Luna, Padmanabhan, & O’Hearn, ).
However, this cannot be the full explanation. Take a
look at the following items and quickly rate each on
a scale from (very bad idea) to (very good idea):
Ride a bicycle down a staircase.
Eat a salad.
Swim with alligators.
Watch the stars on a clear night.
Take unknown pills at a party.
People between ages and responded to items
like these. If making cautious decisions depended
on brain maturation, we should expect ratings on
the risky items to be highest in the youngest participants, and gradually decreasing for older ones.
In fact, as ▼ Figure . shows, acceptance of risky
Risk favorability
20
15
10
5
0
10–14
18–25
15–17
26–30
Age
▲ Figure . On average, people around age 20 gave
higher acceptability ratings to risky activities than did
those who were either younger or older. (Based on data
from Shulman 2014)
activities increased up to about age before declining (Shulman, ). In fact,
in many situations -year-olds do take greater risks than young teenagers. The
reason for the risk taking may not be a lack of inhibition, so much as it is a greater
urge for excitement.
Identity Development
As Erikson pointed out, adolescence is a time of “finding yourself,” determining
“who am I?” or “who will I be?” It is when most people first construct a coherent
“life story” of how they got to be the way they are (Habermas & Bluck, ).
An adolescent’s concern with decisions about the future and the quest for
self-understanding has been called an identity crisis. The term crisis implies more
emotional turbulence than is typical. Identity development has two major elements: whether one is actively exploring the issue and whether one has made
any decisions (Marcia, ). We can diagram the possibilities using the following grid:
Has explored or is
exploring the issues
Has not explored
the issues
Decisions
already made
Identity
achievement
Identity
foreclosure
Decisions
not yet made
Identity
moratorium
Identity
diffusion
Those who have not yet given any serious thought to making decisions and
who have no clear sense of identity are said to have identity diffusion. They are
not actively concerned with their identity at the moment. Identity diffusion is
more common among people with low self-esteem and a hopeless, pessimistic attitude toward life (Phillips & Pittman, ). If you think you have little
chance of achieving anything, there is no reason to decide on any goals or ambitions. People in identity moratorium are considering the issues but not yet making
decisions. They experiment with various possibilities and imagine themselves in
different roles, but postpone any choices.
Identity foreclosure is a state of reaching firm decisions without much thought.
For example, a young man might be told that h…
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