Piaget, part one: the baby scientist and the preschool mind

Transcript

SoheeAn aunt is playing with her eleven-month-old nephew. She hides a little toy duck under the left couch cushion. He digs it out, delighted. She does it again. And again. Then, while he watches, she hides it under the right cushion.

RyanAnd he goes straight back to the left cushion.

SoheeHe saw her move it! He watched the whole thing. And Jean Piaget would have been thrilled, because that mistake has a name, and it tells us something about how a baby's mind works.

RyanWelcome to EPPP Prep, the podcast. I'm Ryan.

SoheeI'm Sohee. This is the first of two episodes on Piaget, the theorist the exam returns to again and again. Today: infancy and the preschool years.

RyanA little background first. Piaget trained as a biologist and philosopher, and he spent more than five decades studying how children think. In Paris in the 1920s, he noticed qualitative differences in how children of different ages, including his own three, answered questions and explained the world.

SoheeAnd one of his early insights was to pay attention to children's wrong answers, because the wrong answers were a window into their reasoning.

RyanHis theory is the classic example of discontinuous development. Thinking changes in stages, with a distinct shift in how we reason at each new stage.

SoheeFour stages. Sensorimotor, roughly birth to two. Preoperational, roughly two to seven. Concrete operational, about seven to eleven. And formal operational, from about eleven into adulthood.

RyanNow the engine that drives it. Piaget said children build schemas. A schema is a mental framework that helps us organize and interpret information.

SoheeAnd schemas change through two processes. Assimilation is when new information fits what you already know. Accommodation is when you have to change your knowledge because something doesn't fit.

RyanThe psychology textbook has a lovely example. Two-year-old Abdul has a schema for dogs, because his family has a Labrador. He sees dogs in picture books: dog! That's assimilation. Then he sees a sheep for the first time and says, look, dog!

SoheeStill assimilation, just a wrong one. His schema was too broad. When his mom explains it's a sheep, he modifies his dog schema and forms a new one for sheep. That's accommodation.

RyanHere's a quick way to remember it. Assimilation, the world fits into my head. Accommodation, my head changes to fit the world.

SoheeStage one, sensorimotor. Babies learn about the world through their senses and their motor actions. Lifespan Development lays out Piaget's six substages.

RyanSubstage one, simple reflexes, birth to one month. Substage two, primary circular reactions, one to four months: the baby repeats actions with their own body, like thumb sucking.

SoheeSubstage three, secondary circular reactions, four to eight months. Now the repeated action involves the environment, like shaking a rattle to hear it.

RyanSubstage four, eight to twelve months. The baby coordinates those reactions into goal-directed behavior. And this is when Piaget said infants develop object permanence.

SoheeObject permanence is the understanding that objects don't cease to exist when they can't be observed. The classic test: put a toy under a blanket. If the baby lifts the blanket and reaches for it, they understand the toy still exists.

RyanAnd the milestone checklists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, echo this. By one year, most babies look for things they see you hide, like a toy under a blanket.

SoheeSubstage five, twelve to eighteen months, tertiary circular reactions. The toddler experiments. What if I drop this off the high chair? What if I throw it? People call toddlers in this stage little scientists.

RyanAnd substage six, eighteen months to two years, the beginnings of thought. Two big developments. Symbolic thought, the ability to mentally represent objects, people, or events that aren't present. And deferred imitation, imitating someone after a delay.

SoheeLike a toddler who watched her sibling eat with chopsticks at lunch, and later tries using two markers as chopsticks while she plays.

RyanOkay, back to our aunt and the duck. Piaget tested exactly this. Hide an object in spot A several times. The infant finds it. Then hide it in spot B while the infant watches. Infants typically look in spot A.

SoheeThat's the A not B error. And Piaget's interpretation was that the infant's understanding of object permanence is still incomplete.

RyanNow, here's where modern research pushes back. Lifespan Development says that with better tools, we've learned Piaget underestimated infants. Using methods that don't require reaching, researchers found infants as young as four months recognize aspects of object permanence.

SoheeThe psychology textbook describes a study by Baillargeon. Three-month-olds watched a truck roll down a track and appear to pass right through a solid box. They looked significantly longer at that impossible event.

RyanBaillargeon concluded they already knew solid objects can't pass through each other. Something Piaget would have said was beyond their abilities.

SoheeSo for the exam, hold both. Piaget's account, object permanence in the sensorimotor stage, late in the first year in Lifespan Development's table. The psychology textbook says five to eight months, and calls the exact age somewhat controversial. And the critique, that looking-time studies show some of it earlier.

RyanPause and think. A nine-month-old watches his mom leave the room and then crawls to the doorway to look for her. When he was three months old, he didn't. What's the attainment?

SoheeObject permanence. Searching for something, or someone, who has gone out of sight shows he represents her as still existing. The tempting distractors would be conservation, egocentrism, or hypothetical reasoning, and those all belong to later stages.

RyanOn to stage two, preoperational, about two to seven. It's called pre-operational because children don't yet have operations, the logical, reversible mental actions, like mental arithmetic.

SoheeWhat they do have is symbols. Words and images stand for things. That's why this is the age of pretend play. A crayon becomes a rocket. A row of stuffed animals becomes a classroom.

RyanBut Piaget described some limits. The big one is egocentrism. Not selfishness. It's difficulty telling apart one's own thoughts and perspective from other people's.

SoheeThe psychology textbook's example: three-year-old Kenny picks an Iron Man action figure as a birthday present for his older sister, because he likes it, so surely she will too.

RyanAnd the classic test is the three-mountains task. A child sits on one side of a model of mountains, a doll on the other side, and the child picks the picture showing the doll's view. At age four, children consistently chose their own view. By seven, they could identify the doll's.

SoheeA related feature is animism, the belief that objects are alive and have consciousness. The moon is following me. Or a child who gets hurt playing with blocks may want to punish the blocks, as if they did it on purpose.

RyanNow, research after Piaget expanded this into theory of mind, the awareness that your own beliefs and perspectives differ from other people's. The psychology textbook places it between three and five years.

SoheeAnd the test is the false-belief task. A child watches someone hide a toy and leave the room. A second person moves the toy. Where will the first person look?

RyanA child with theory of mind says, the original spot, because she didn't see it moved. Younger children say the new spot. They assume the first person knows what they know.

SoheeThe second big limit is centration, focusing on only one feature of a situation at a time. And that's why preoperational children fail conservation tasks.

RyanConservation is understanding that changing how something looks doesn't change its mass, number, or volume. Pour liquid from one of two identical beakers into a taller, narrower container, and the preschooler says the tall one has more. They're centered on height.

SoheePause and think. Two preschoolers each get a cookie. One cries, because her friend's cookie was broken into two halves, and two is more than one. The parent breaks her cookie in half too, and now she's perfectly happy. What's going on?

RyanNo conservation. She's centered on the number of pieces, not the amount of cookie. The psychology textbook has the same idea with Kenny, who thought his pizza slice cut into five pieces was more than his sister's slice.

SoheeHow does the exam test all this? Usually it describes a behavior and asks for the stage or the concept. Searching for a hidden object, object permanence, sensorimotor. Pretend play and egocentrism, preoperational. Failing a conservation task, preoperational.

RyanAnd watch the critique questions. If a stem describes infants looking longer at an impossible event, the point is that infants know more, earlier, than Piaget thought.

SoheeRecap. Schemas grow through assimilation, fitting new things in, and accommodation, changing the schema.

RyanSensorimotor has six substages, from reflexes to circular reactions to symbolic thought and deferred imitation. Object permanence comes in substage four, about eight to twelve months, and the A not B error shows it's still fragile.

SoheeNewer methods find aspects of object permanence as early as four months. Preoperational thinking is symbolic, but egocentric and centered, so conservation isn't there yet. Theory of mind shows up in the false-belief task.

RyanAnd if you've ever felt like that baby looking under the wrong cushion, going back to an old answer even after you saw the new one, that's normal learning. Your schemas are accommodating.

SoheeNext time we'll finish Piaget and add moral reasoning. Keep going. You're doing the work. Thanks for listening to EPPP Prep.

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