Jean Piaget: The preoperational stage (Part 2)

Transductive reasoning is anothecharacteristic of the preconceptual substage. In this form of flawed reasoning, the child assumes that there is a cause and effect between two events occur- ring simultaneously. For example, a child who has missed breakfast may declare it cannot be morn- ing because breakfast has not been prepared; obvi- ously, the preparation of breakfast does not cause the onset of morning. Transductive reasoning often leads to incorrect assumptions. Perhaps the most serious deficiency of this substage of preoperational thought is egocentrism. Children 2 to 4 years old view the world from a very narrow perspective. They have difficulty visualizing the perspective of others and do not adapt their rapidly developing language skills to facilitate the listener’s understanding. Motor activities help in this regard because they increase a child’s capability to interact socially by providing a means of loco- moting to other children, thereby creating an outlet for social activity and enhanced social awareness. Increased social interaction expands the child’s sensitivity to the needs and feelings of others and generally reduces the egocentrism characteristic of this stage of cognitive development. The intuitive substage, an extension of the pre- conceptual substage, is characterized by reduced egocentrism and continued improvement in the use of symbols. Piaget called this substage “intuitive” because the child’s understanding of the ways of the world are based on the appearance of objects and events that may not accurately depict reality. As in the first substage of preoperations, Piaget continued to characterize cognitive development by the child’s limitations. In both substages, the preoperational child is incapable of an ability Piaget called conservation. Conservation is realizing that certain characteristics of something may remain the same when the appearance is rearranged. The concept of conservation is exemplified by Piaget’s classic test involving a ball of clay. When the ball is manually transformed into an elongated sausage, the child incapable of conserva- tion responds that the elongated clay weighs more. The child capable of conservation knows that the spatial transformation of the clay has no effect on the weight of the clay. The inability to conserve results from the child’s difficulty in attending to more than one aspect of a problem-solving situation at one time. Preoperational children cannot “decenter” their attention from one particular component of the problem. Once they attain this ability, they can concentrate on more than one aspect of that problem. In the ball of clay example, the child with conservation ability can ponder the weight, length, and even the width of the clay rather than being restricted to one aspect of the clay. Inability to decenter attention can also have significant implications in motor development. By this time in a child’s life, many new motor activities, such as games, have become popular. The inability to simultaneously consider multiple aspects of a problem inhibits the child’s efforts at games or activities involving complex strategies or multiple movements for each child. Considern a game of soccer: Their attention becomes so focused on their objective of scoring a goal that they are impervious to the possibility of passing off to a teammate. Source:«Human Motor Development”-A Lifespan approach (Greg Payne, Larry Isaacs) Recent Articles