Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development – Preoperational Stage

Описание: Need help preparing for the Psych/Soc section of the MCAT? MedSchoolCoach expert, Ken Tao, will teach everything you need to know about the preoperational stage of Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development. Watch this video to get all the MCAT study tips you need to do well on the psychology section of the exam!

The second stage of Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development is the preoperational stage, which occurs during the ages of two to seven. During this stage, children learn to think using symbols, but their thinking can be illogical. Pretend play is one way children use symbols in this stage and examples include sword fighting with sticks and pretending to drink out of an empty cup. In these examples, sticks are used as symbols for swords and an empty cup is used as a symbol for a beverage. Another important development during this stage is the rapid development of language. Although children in this stage can understand and speak a language, this doesn’t mean that they have the same level of reasoning and logic as adults.

One developmental phenomenon of this stage is egocentrism, which is when children fail to consider perspectives other than their own. They believe that others perceive a situation in the same way that they perceive a situation. For example, a boy displaying egocentrism may think that a toy car would be a good gift for his sister because he would like the toy himself. He fails to consider that his sister might have different interests than himself. Another example of egocentrism is seen with the Three Mountain Task.

This task is a famous experiment that Piaget developed, where a child is placed in front of a setup with three mountains on a table. Depending on where the child is placed, he will see the mountains from a particular perspective. The child is then asked, “what would someone else see if they were standing at a different position?” The child is egocentric if they always say that other people, regardless of their position around the table, will see the same things as he does.

This is the preoperational stage, which means that children in this stage have preoperational reasoning; they do not understand conservation or transformations. Mastery of this developmental phenomenon occurs during the concrete operational stage.

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