Justin Rohrer

Developmental Psychology
Improper diet for developing toddlers
3/3/14

Piaget and Preoperational Stage

Piaget called the age period from 2 to 7 the preoperational stage, in this stage he
emphasized that children of this age were not yet able to perform mental operations (cognitive
procedures that follow certain logical rules.) Piaget specified a number of areas of preoperational
cognitive mistakes that are characteristic of early childhood, including conservation,
egocentrism, animism, and classification. According to Piaget children in early childhood lack
the ability to understand conversation or the principle that the amount of a physical substance
remains the same even if its physical appearance changes. In his best known demonstration of
this mistake Piaget showed young children two identical glasses holding equal amounts of water
and asked them if the two amounts of water were equal. They usually answered yes because
they understood that much, but when Piaget would take the water from the glass and pour it in a
taller, thinner glass and asked the children the again if the two amounts were equal to which most
of the children answered no. This meant that the child had failed to recognize that the amount
of water was the same even though the appearance had changed. Piaget thought the mistakes
came from two kinds of cognitive deficiencies, centration and reversibility. Centration means
that young childrens thinking is centered or focused on one noticeable aspect of a cognitive
problem to the exclusion of other important aspects and reversibility is the ability to reverse an
action mentally. Another cognitive limitation of the preoperational stage is egocentrism.
Egocentrism is the inability to distinguish between your own perspective and another persons
perspective. One aspect of egocentrism is animism, or the tendency to attribute human thoughts
and feelings to inanimate objects and forces. Piaget said that when children believe that the

Justin Rohrer
Developmental Psychology
Improper diet for developing toddlers
3/3/14
thunder is angry and the moon is following them this shows their animistic thinking. It also
shows their egocentrism, by the way that they are attributing the thoughts and feelings that they
might have themselves to things that are inanimate. Another thing that preoperational children
lack is the capacity for classification, meaning that the children have difficulty understanding
that objects can be simultaneously part of more than one group. Just like with conservation, the
cognitive limitations of centration and lack of reversibility are at the root of the error. The ages 2
to 7 are a very long period in a childs cognitive development. So although Piaget called this
whole span the preoperational stage he also separated it into two sub stages, the symbolic
function sub stage and the intuitive thought sub stage. The symbolic function sub stage is the first
of the sub stages lasting from ages 2 to 4. This is when the child first becomes capable of
representational thought and of using symbols to represent the world. Language is the most
important indicator of the capacity to think in terms of symbols, because words are symbols.
Play is another area where symbolic functions are evident early in the preoperational stage. The
second sub stage is the intuitive thought sub stage and it lasts from ages 4 to 7. During this
period children become highly curios about the world and often ask the question why?. This
shows that they have begun to think logically because their questions show that they are
wondering how one event leads to another. Through the questions they learn about nature and the
world, but they are unable to explain how they know what they know. This is why the sub stage
is called intuitive, because they dont know why they know it but just know that they know it.