Intellectual Development: Piagetian Task Paper

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Intellectual Development: Piagetian Task Paper The preoperational stage occurs roughly between the ages two and seven. Language development is a major stepping stone of this period. Piaget noted that children in this stage do not yet understand logic, cannot mentally process information, and are unable to take the point of view of other people. He called this Egocentrism. Egocentrism is a child’s inability to see a situation from another person’s point of view. According to Piaget, children in this stage assume that all people see, hear, and feel exactly the same way the child does. Piaget would test his theory using a task involving three mountains. He found that children assume all other people will see the same view of the three mountains they do. At age seven, thinking is no longer egocentric as the child can see more than their own point of view. Another part of the preoperational stage is conservation. Piaget stated that children, despite seeing an equal amount of an object, when altered into another size or shape, the child would assume the object had adjusted its original amount. Piaget conducted a number of similar studies on conservation of number, length, mass, weight, volume, and quantity. Through these studies, he found that few children showed any understanding of conservation prior to the age of five. The next stage of cognitive development is called the concrete operational stage. During this stage, which occurs from age seven to twelve, a child shows increased use of logical thinking. One of the most important developments in this stage is an understanding of reversibility, or awareness that actions can be reversed. An instance of this is being able to reverse the order of relationships between mental categories. For example, a child can recognize her sibling is a boy, and that a boy is a human, not an animal. Seriation is another
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