Pre-operational Stage of Piaget's Cognitive Development

In this essay, I will be describing the pre-operational stage of cognitive development brought to prominence by Swiss clinical psychologist Jean Piaget. “A central component of Piaget’s developmental theory of learning and thinking is that both involve the participation of the learner. Knowledge is not merely transmitted verbally but must be constructed and reconstructed by the learner.” (Ginn, 1995: 3). Firstly, I will give a brief outline of what the preoperational stage is and then proceed to describe four aspects which the preoperational stage affects; centration, egocentrism, animism, play, and symbolism.

The preoperational stage follows the sensory motor stage, making it the second stage of Piaget’s cognitive development theory. The stage occurs in a child around the age of two and lasts until about the age of seven. Through observation Piaget discovered that during this preoperational stage of their lives, the ability to use logic to separate, innovate and transform ideas will prove difficult for most children. However, the preoperational stage is also said, by academics such as Gross, to “reflects a remarkable intellectual advance.” (Gross, 1985:36)

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Firstly, I am going to subdivide the preoperational period and primarily explain the pre-conceptual stage which begins at the age of two and lasts until the age of four years old. During the preconceptual stage of thinking, children have a more ridged understanding of the way things function, and can divide their internal representations into segments and categories, however, they cannot differentiate between the categories and segments therefore, if they encounter two different elements of it at different times, they perceive them to be the same object. During the pre-conceptual stage, “there is a rapid development of language nut some overgeneralisation occurs as the child makes early attempts at conceptualisation. All men may be ‘daddy’.” (Lansdown, 1984: 105). A prolific example of this is noted in an account Piaget tells of his son who sees a snail and then a few metres along the footpath sees another snail and yet is convinced that it must be the same snail (Le Francois, 2000). In this stage children think narrowly as opposed to either deductively or inductively. To think deductively or inductively refer to making generalisations or reasoning from more breaking down areas of information to reach a logical conclusion. Transductive reasoning is the inability to correctly process cause and effect relationships, an example of this would be assuming a mouse was a rat because the mouse has a long scaly tail which fits into the child’s rat schema. It is also during this stage of cognitive development also that that egocentrism is expected to be seen more predominantly in a child’s thought process than in any other stage. Egocentrism is a characteristic meaning the inability to be empathetic. It is the belief “that others see the world in precisely the way they do.” (Martin et al., 2010: 510)

Moving on to egocentrism, Piaget believed that due to egocentrism a young child is fixated on the idea that others around them share the same perceptions as them. A scenario to exemplify this would, if a book was held upright, the child may query a within it without realising the person seated opposite is only able to see the back of the book. More to this, during the preoperational stage, children are incapable of engaging in connected conversation amongst themselves. “In egocentric speech, what each child says is unrelated to what the speaker said.” (Giddens, 2009; 287)

In link with ego centrism, ‘Animism’ is also an important characteristic of the pre-operational stage. “This term was re-defined in the 1970s by Piaget as young children’s beliefs that inanimate objects are capable of actions and have life-like qualities.” (Beran, T. N. et al, 2011: 539) This is exemplified in cases where a child(ren) may believe that a car won’t start because it is suffering from fatigue or poorly, or they punish a piece of furniture when they run into it, because it must have intended to maliciously hurt them. A reason for this characteristic of the stage, is that the Pre-operational child often assumes that everyone and everything is like them, which was formerly referred to as ego centrism. Consequently, since the child can feel pain, and has emotions, so must everything else.

Further reports regarding Piaget and cognitive development informs us, “Piaget conceives of animistic development in the child as characterized by certain definite stages. Children in the first stage consider anything and living which is of some use or is in good condition, i.e. not broken, damaged nor separated from its normal context. In the second stage, anything that moves is considered living. This contrasts with the more restricted third stage in which the child distinguishes spontaneous movement from the movement imposed by an outside agent; life being identified with spontaneous movement. In the fourth, or adult, stage life is restricted either to animals or to animals and plants.” (Russell, R. W., 1940; 353)

The final topic of discussion is that of ‘symbolism’. This is when something can stand for or represent something else. ‘Moral realism’ is a fourth aspect of this stage, this is the belief that the child’s way of thinking about the difference between right and wrong, is shared by everyone else around them.  “Piaget saw social interaction as the key to how we overcome the instability of the symbols we each individually construct.” (Becker, J., & Varelas, M., 2001; 2). One aspect of a situation, at one time, is all that they can focus on, and severe difficulty is found in perceiving it to be anything else. Due to this aspect of the stage, children begin to have deference and insist on strictly following the rules always.

In conclusion, the preoperational is the most crucial stage of cognitive development as most children showcase a great advance in emotional abilities and intellect during this stage, as inferred by the aspects affected previously discussed; symbolism, play, egocentrism and animism.

References

Becker, J., & Varelas, M. (2001). Piaget’s Early Theory of the Role of Language in Intellectual Development: A Comment on DeVries’s Account of Piaget’s Social Theory. Educational Researcher,30(6), 22-23. Retrieved from http://0-www.jstor.org.serlib0.essex.ac.uk/stable/3594445

Beran, T. N., Ramirez-Serrano, A., Kuzyk, R., Fior, M., & Nugent, S. (2011). Understanding how children understand robots: Perceived animism in child-robot interaction. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 69(7), 539-550.

Ginn, W. Y. (1995). Jean Piaget-intellectual development. Retrieved January, 4(20), 10.

Gross, T. F. (1985). Cognitive development. Brooks/Cole Pub Co.

Lansdown, R. (1984). Child Development: Made Simple. Heinemann.

Lefrancois, G. R. (2001). Of children: An introduction to child and adolescent development. Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.

Martin, G. N., Carlson, N. R., & Buskist, W. (2010). Psychology. Harlow. England: Pearson.

Mead, M. (1932). An Investigation of the Thought of Primitive Children, with Special Reference to Animism. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 62, 173-190. doi:10.2307/2843884

Russell, R. W. (1940). Studies in animism: II. The development of animism. The Pedagogical Seminary and Journal of Genetic Psychology, 56(2), 353-366.

Sutton-Smith, B. (1966). Piaget on play: a critique. Psychological Review, 73(1), 104-110.