7 Cognitive Development in the Preschool Years

Do you ever talk to yourself? Why? Chances are, this occurs when you are struggling with a problem, trying to remember something, or feel very emotional about a situation. Children talk to themselves too. Piaget interpreted this as egocentric speech or a practice engaged in because of a child’s inability to see things from another’s point of view. Vygotsky, however, believed that children talk to themselves in order to solve problems or clarify thoughts. As children learn to think in words, they do so aloud before eventually closing their lips to engage in private speech or inner speech.

Thinking out loud eventually becomes thought accompanied by internal speech, and talking to oneself becomes a practice only engaged in when we are trying to learn something or remember something. This inner speech is not as elaborate as the speech we use when communicating with others ^[11].

Contrast with Piaget 

Piaget was highly critical of teacher-directed instruction, believing that teachers who take control of the child’s learning place the child into a passive role^[12]. Further, teachers may present abstract ideas without the child’s true understanding, and instead they just repeat back what they heard. Piaget believed children must be given opportunities to discover concepts on their own. As previously stated, Vygotsky did not believe children could reach a higher cognitive level without instruction from more learned individuals. Who is correct? Both theories certainly contribute to our understanding of how children learn.

Information Processing 

Information processing researchers have focused on several issues in cognitive development for this age group, including improvements in attention skills, changes in the capacity, and the emergence of executive functions in working memory. Additionally, in early childhood memory strategies, memory accuracy, and autobiographical memory emerge. Early childhood is seen by many researchers as a crucial time period in memory development ^[13].

attention

Changes in attention have been described by many as the key to changes in human memory ^{[14] [15]}. However, attention is not a unified function; it is comprised of sub-processes. The ability to switch our focus between tasks or external stimuli is called divided attention or multitasking. This is separate from our ability to focus on a single task or stimulus, while ignoring distracting information, called selective attention. Different from these is sustained attention, or the ability to stay on task for long periods of time. Moreover, we also have attention processes that influence our behaviour and enable us to inhibit a habitual or dominant response, and others that enable us to distract ourselves when upset or frustrated. 

Selective Attention 

Children’s ability with selective attention tasks, improve as they age. However, this ability is also greatly influenced by the child’s temperament^[16], the complexity of the stimulus or task ^[17], and whether the stimuli are visual or auditory ^[18]. Guy et al. ^[19] found that children’s ability to selectively attend to visual information outpaced that of auditory stimuli. This may explain why young children are not able to hear the voice of the teacher over the cacophony of sounds in the typical preschool classroom ^[20]. Jones and his colleagues found that 4- to 7-year-olds could not filter out background noise, especially when its frequencies were close in sound to the target sound. In comparison, 8- to 11-year-old children often performed similar to adults.

Memory 

Based on studies of adults, people with amnesia, and neurological research on memory, researchers have proposed several “types” of memory (see Figure 4.14). Sensory memory (also called the sensory register) is the first stage of the memory system, and it stores sensory input in its raw form for a very brief duration; essentially long enough for the brain to register and start processing the information. Studies of auditory sensory memory show that it lasts about one second in 2-year-olds, two seconds in 3-year-olds, more than two seconds in 4-year-olds, and three to five seconds in 6-year-olds ^[21]. Other researchers have also found that young children hold sounds for a shorter duration than do older children and adults, and that this deficit is not due to attentional differences between these age groups, but reflects differences in the performance of the sensory memory system ^[22]. The second stage of the memory system is called short-term or working memory. Working memory is the component of memory in which current conscious mental activity occurs.

Working memory often requires conscious effort and adequate use of attention to function effectively. As you read earlier, children in this age group struggle with many aspects of attention and this greatly diminishes their ability to consciously juggle several pieces of information in memory. The capacity of working memory, that is the amount of information someone can hold in consciousness, is smaller in young children than in older children and adults. The typical adult and teenager can hold a 7-digit number active in their short-term memory. The typical 5-year-old can hold only a 4-digit number active. This means that the more complex a mental task is, the less efficient a younger child will be in paying attention to, and actively processing, information in order to complete the task.

Changes in attention and the working memory system also involve changes in executive function. Executive function (EF) refers to self-regulatory processes, such as the ability to inhibit a behaviour or cognitive flexibility, that enable adaptive responses to new situations or to reach a specific goal. Executive function skills gradually emerge during early childhood and continue to develop throughout childhood and adolescence. Like many cognitive changes, brain maturation, especially the prefrontal cortex, along with experience influence the development of executive function skills.

 

A child shows higher executive functioning skills when the parents are more warm and responsive, use scaffolding when the child is trying to solve a problem, and provide cognitively stimulating environments for the child^[23]. For instance, scaffolding was positively correlated with greater cognitive flexibility at age two and inhibitory control at age four^[24]. In Schneider, Kron-Sperl and Hunnerkopf’s ^[25]longitudinal study of 102 kindergarten children, the majority of children used no strategy to remember information, a finding that was consistent with previous research. As a result, their memory performance was poor when compared to their abilities as they aged and started to use more effective memory strategies.

 

The third component in memory is long-term memory, which is also known as permanent memory. A basic division of long- term memory is between declarative and non-declarative memory.  Declarative memories, sometimes referred to as explicit memories, are memories for facts or events that we can consciously recollect. Declarative memory is further divided into semantic and episodic memory.  Semantic memories are memories for facts and knowledge that are not tied to a timeline,  episodic memories are tied to specific events in time.  Non- declarative memories, sometimes referred to as implicit memories, are typically automated skills that do not require conscious recollection.  

Neo-Piagetians

As previously discussed, Piaget’s theory has been criticized on many fronts, and updates to reflect more current research have been provided by the Neo-Piagetians, or those theorists who provide “new” interpretations of Piaget’s theory. Morra, Gobbo, Marini and Sheese^[26] reviewed Neo-Piagetian theories, which were first presented in the 1970s, and identified how these “new” theories combined Piagetian concepts with those found in Information Processing. Similar to Piaget’s theory, Neo- Piagetian theories believe in constructivism, assume cognitive development can be separated into different stages with qualitatively different characteristics, and advocate that children’s thinking becomes more complex in advanced stages. Unlike Piaget, Neo-Piagetians believe that aspects of information processing change the complexity of each stage, not logic as determined by Piaget.

 

Neo-Piagetians propose that working memory capacity is affected by biological maturation, and therefore restricts young children’s ability to acquire complex thinking and reasoning skills. Increases in working memory performance and cognitive skills development coincide with the timing of several neurodevelopmental processes. These include myelination, axonal and synaptic pruning, changes in cerebral metabolism, and changes in brain activity ^[27].

 

Myelination especially occurs in waves between birth and adolescence, and the degree of myelination in particular areas explain the increasing efficiency of certain skills. Therefore, brain maturation, which occurs in spurts, affects how and when cognitive skills develop.  Additionally, all Neo-Piagetian theories support that experience and learning interact with biological maturation in shaping cognitive development ^[28].

Children’s Understanding of the World 

Both Piaget and Vygotsky believed that children actively try to understand the world around them. More recently developmentalists have added to this understanding by examining how children organize information and develop their own theories about the world.

Theory-Theory

The tendency of children to generate theories to explain everything they encounter is called theory-theory. This concept implies that humans are naturally inclined to find reasons and generate explanations for why things occur. Children frequently ask questions about what they see or hear around them. When the answers provided do not satisfy their curiosity or are too complicated for them to understand, they generate their own theories. In much the same way that scientists construct and revise their theories, children do the same with their intuitions about the world as they encounter new experiences ^[29]. One of the theories they start to generate in early childhood centers on the mental states; both their own and those of others.

Theory of Mind

Theory of mind refers to the ability to think about other people’s thoughts. This mental mind reading helps humans to understand and predict the reactions of others, thus playing a crucial role in social development. One common method for determining if a child has reached this mental milestone is the false belief task, described below.

 

The research began with a clever experiment by Wimmer and Perner^[30], who tested whether children can pass a false-belief test (see Figure 4.17). The child is shown a picture story of Sally, who puts her ball in a basket and leaves the room. While Sally is out of the room, Anne comes along and takes the ball from the basket and puts it inside a box. The child is then asked where Sally thinks the ball is located when she comes back to the room. Is she going to look first in the box or in the basket? The right answer is that she will look in the basket, because that’s where she put it and thinks it is; but we have to infer this false belief against our own better knowledge that the ball is in the box.

This is very difficult for children before the age of four because of the cognitive effort it takes. Three-year-olds have difficulty distinguishing between what they once thought was true and what they now know to be true. They feel confident that what they know now is what they have always known ^[31]. Even adults need to think through this task ^[32].

 

To be successful at solving this type of task the child must separate what he or she “knows” to be true from what someone else might “think” is true. In Piagetian terms, they must give up a tendency toward egocentrism. The child must also understand that what guides people’s actions and responses are what they “believe” rather than what is reality. In other words, people can mistakenly believe things that are false and will act based on this false knowledge. Consequently, prior to age four children are rarely successful at solving such a task ^[33]. Researchers examining the development of theory of mind have been concerned by the overemphasis on the mastery of false belief as the primary measure of whether a child has attained theory of mind. Wellman and his colleagues^[34] suggest that theory of mind is comprised of a number of components, each with its own developmental timeline.

 

Two-year-olds understand the diversity of desires, yet as noted earlier it is not until age four or five that children grasp false belief, and often not until middle childhood do they understand that people may hide how they really feel. In part, because children in early childhood have difficulty hiding how they really feel.

 

This awareness of the existence of theory of mind is part of social intelligence, such as recognizing that others can think differently about situations. It helps us to be self-conscious or aware that others can think of us in different ways and it helps us to be able to be understanding or be empathetic toward others. Moreover, this mind-reading ability helps us to anticipate and predict people’s actions. The awareness of the mental states of others is important for communication and social skills ^[35].

 

The many theories of cognitive development and the different research that has been done about how children understand the world has allowed researchers to study the milestones that children who are typically developing experience in early childhood. Understanding how children think and learn has proven useful for improving education.

 

In 2010, Ontario introduced the full day kindergarten program which was fully implemented by 2014. Children can attend the program at 3 years 8 month of age. There is a year one and a year two of the program. In 2016 The Kindergarten Program document was released describing a play-based curriculum which includes four frames to guide teaching, learning and assessment of learning. Overall and specific expectations are described in each of the four frames.

The frames are:

• Self-regulation and Well-Being

• Belonging and Contributing

• Problem Solving and Innovating

• Demonstrating Literacy and Mathematics Behaviours

In each kindergarten classroom an RECE and a qualified teacher registered with the Ontario College of Teachers (OCT) work in partnership as an educator team to implement the curriculum. There is an expectation for the educator team to observe children’s play, ‘notice and name’ the learning and assess individual progress against the Overall and Specific Expectations. The progress is formally shared with families as their child moves through Year One and Year Two of the Kindergarten Program. In the delivery of the curriculum the educator team provides opportunities for children to demonstrate the expectations, and design and implement learning opportunities specifically related to the expectations. Two of the four frames; Problem Solving and Innovating and Demonstrating Literacy and Mathematics Behaviours relate directly to children’s cognitive development. In the latter frame children are expected to, for example, use language to communicate their thinking and to solve problems, to demonstrate an interest in writing and reading, to demonstrate cardinality and the ability to subitize, to describe the properties of three-dimensional solids and to identify, create and describe simple patterns in mathematical terms ^[36]. 

Application of “The Kindergarten Program”  to the Early Years

Even before they enter kindergarten, the mathematical knowledge of children from low-income backgrounds lags far behind that of children from more affluent backgrounds. Ramani and Siegler ^[37] hypothesized that this difference is due to the children in middle- and upper-income families engaging more frequently in numerical activities, for example playing numerical board games such as Chutes and Ladders. Chutes and Ladders is a game with a number in each square; children start at the number one and spin a spinner or throw a dice to determine how far to move their token. Playing this game seemed likely to teach children about numbers, because in it, larger numbers are associated with greater values on a variety of dimensions. In particular, the higher the number that a child’s token reaches, the greater the distance the token will have traveled from the starting point, the greater the number of physical movements the child will have made in moving the token from one square to another, the greater the number of number-words the child will have said and heard, and the more time will have passed since the beginning of the game. These spatial, kinesthetic, verbal, and time- based cues provide a broad-based, multisensory foundation for knowledge of numerical magnitudes (the sizes of numbers), a type of knowledge that is closely related to mathematics achievement test scores ^[38].

Playing this numerical board game for roughly 1 hour, distributed over a 2-week period, improved low-income children’s knowledge of numerical magnitudes, ability to read printed numbers, and skill at learning novel arithmetic problems. The gains lasted for months after the game-playing experience ^[39]. An advantage of this type of educational intervention is that it has minimal if any cost—a parent could just draw a game on a piece of paper.

Autism: Defining Spectrum Disorder 

Sometimes children’s brains work differently. One form of this neuro-diversity is Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).  ASD describes a range of conditions classified as neuro-developmental disorders in the fifth revision of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The DSM-5, published in 2013, redefined the autism spectrum to encompass the previous (DSM-IV-TR) diagnoses of autism, Asperger syndrome, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS), and childhood disintegrative disorder. These disorders are characterized by social deficits and communication difficulties, repetitive behaviours and interests, sensory issues, and in some cases, cognitive delays.

 

Autism spectrum disorders are considered to be on a spectrum because each individual with ASD expresses the disorder uniquely and has varying degrees of functionality. Many have above-average intellectual abilities and excel in visual skills, music, math, and the arts, while others have significant disabilities and are unable to live independently. About 25 percent of individuals with ASD are nonverbal; however, they may learn to communicate using other means.

In Canada 1 in 66 children between the ages of 5 and 17 years of age are diagnosed on the ASD spectrum ^[40]. Males are four times more likely to be diagnosed than females. The statistics are one in 44 males compared to one in 165 females ^[41].

Summary

In this chapter we looked at:

• Piaget’s preoperational stage.
• Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory.
• Information processing.
• How young children understand the world.
• The Full Day Kindergarten Program
• Autism spectrum disorder.