Pre-concrete

• Jean Piaget's second stage of cognitive development

  Lasting from ages 2 to 7, characterized by the expansion in the use of symbolic thought
• Preoperational Thought


  • Beginning of the ability to reconstruct in thought what has been established in behavior
• Preoperational Thought


  • Symbolic Function
  • Intuitive Thought
• Symbolic Function


  Being able to think about something in the absence of sensory or motor cues
• Symbolic Function


  • Use of symbols, or mental representations such as words, numbers, or images to which a person has attached meaning
  • Deferred Imitation: children imitate an action at some point after observing it
  • Pretend Play: fantasy play, dramatic play, or imaginary play; children use an object to represent something else
  • Language
• Intuitive Thought


  Begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to all sorts of questions
• Children begin to able to understand the symbols that describe physical spaces
• Piaget believed that children cannot yet reason logically about causality
• Transduction


  They mentally link two events, especially events close in time, whether or not here is logically a causal relationship
• Identities


  The concept that people and many things are basically the same even if they change in outward form, size, or appearance
• Animism


  Tendency to attribute life to objects that are not alive
• Centration


  The tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others
• Centration


  • Children cannot Decenter (think about several aspects of a situation at one time)
  • Involves on focusing on one dimension while ignoring the other
  • Irreversibility: failure to understand that an action can go in two or more directions
• Egocentrism


  Young children center so much on their own point of view that they cannot take in another's
• Conservation


  The fact that two things are equal remain so if their appearance is altered, as long as nothing is added or taken away
• Theory of Mind


  The awareness of the broad range of human mental states – beliefs, intents, desires, dreams, and so forth – and the understanding that others have their own
• Theory of Mind


  • Allows us to understand and predict the behavior of others and makes the social world understandable