In this video I discuss Piaget’s preoperational stage of cognitive development as well as the related issues of conservation, theory of mind, and egocentrism. I also briefly describe autism spectrum disorder, which is associated with deficits in awareness of the emotions, intentions, and beliefs of others.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to look at the preoperational stage of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development along with some related topics. Now the preoperational stage is the second stage in Piaget’s theory and it lasts from about age 2 to about age 6. The reason it’s called the preoperational stage is that children in this stage don’t yet understand the physical operations of the world. They’re still kind of figuring out how the physical world operates.

Now one way we can see this is in the concept of conservation. So Piaget found that if he took two lumps of clay that were the same size and he asked children about these lumps and they said these are the same and then he flattened one of them out into a different shape, now the children will believe that this piece of clay had more clay, that it was bigger. And this didn’t just apply to lumps of clay, Piaget found that this could be done with other things like glasses of liquid. So you take two glasses of liquid that the children will agree are the same amount, and then if you just pour that liquid into a tall thin glass. Suddenly, the children will believe that this glass has more. This could also be applied to rows of objects; so you take two identical rows of objects here, the children agree that they’re the same and then if you just spread one of those rows out the children will believe that this row now has more.

Piaget thought that the explanation for this is that the children are not able to interrelate their schema at this stage. They’ve built up some schema for the world; they’re building up these knowledge structures of how things function, but they don’t really understand the relationships between the different schema that they have. And so for instance, in the case of the liquid in a glass, he thought children understand that the height matters in terms of how much liquid is in the glass and the width matters in terms of how much liquid is in the glass but they don’t really understand how these connect to each other. And so when they have to answer “which one has more?”, they base their answer on just one of their schema. So the height is very obvious there, that one is dramatically different from the other and so they use that to just come up with their answer because they don’t really know how to figure out well, how much width matters compared to the height. That’s very complicated and so they base their answer on just the simple idea that well, the height is bigger so it’s bigger now.

Another concept related to this preoperational stage is the idea of theory of mind. So during this stage children are beginning to develop a theory of mind, which means they are beginning to recognize that different people have different minds and those different minds can have different ideas. Piaget thought that during this stage children show egocentrism and this means they’re not able to recognize that other people have different knowledge about the world; they have different thoughts, they have different ideas, different motivations. He thought they’re unable to take on the viewpoints of others. They think, “if I know something, everybody knows something. If there’s a thought in my head, it’s in everybody else’s head too. If I see something, everyone can see it.”

And so one way that Piaget demonstrated this was through a mountain task, where he had a model of a mountain on the table here. And the child would first go to one side and tell what they could see from that side. In this case, from this side the child isn’t able to see this tree over here. So if you’re standing on one side of the mountain, you can’t see the tree, but if you’re standing on the other side of the mountain then you can see the tree. And so the child would get experience seeing these different viewpoints of the mountain and then the child would come over here and would be asked “what do you see?” The child would say “well, I see a tree” then you’d ask “what about this person over here, can this person see the tree?” and the child will say “yes, they can see the tree, yes”. “What does this person? They see a tree.” Even though the child has been on that side of the mountain, they should know that you can’t see the tree from that side. And so this demonstrates their egocentrism. They think if they can see something everyone can see it.

Now another way we can assess theory of mind is false belief tests. This is where different characters in a situation have different levels of knowledge about that situation. So one very common false belief test is called the Sally-Anne test and this involves two characters Sally and Anne and this is usually done with dolls to demonstrate to children. And so we’ll take one of the characters, Sally, will take a marble and she’ll hide that marble in a basket. That’s Sally’s basket. Ok, Sally hides the marble in Sally’s basket and then Sally leaves the room. She can’t see anything in there. And then Anne takes the marble out of Sally’s basket and she moves it over to Anne’s basket and hides it there. And then Sally comes back into the room. And the child is asked “where will Sally look for the marble? Sally wants to get the marble where is she going to look for it?”

And, of course, the correct answer is that Sally will look in Sally’s basket because that’s where she put the marble and she doesn’t know that it’s been moved. But children who are still showing this egocentrism, who aren’t quite able to develop the idea that different people have different thoughts, the children will think Sally will look in Ann’s basket because the child knows that the marble is in Ann’s basket. They’re not able to recognize that Sally doesn’t know, that Sally wasn’t there when Ann moved it, so Sally shouldn’t know to look in Ann’s basket. So this is one way we can assess the development of theory of mind in young children.

Now once children are able to recognize that different people have different knowledge about the world, they are now able to keep secrets. They’re able to use deceit and manipulation. They recognize that you can actually trick people by putting different thoughts into their mind while you know the truth or you know the real reason for something. So this is demonstrated in a study by Joan Peskin involving a puppet of a monkey that she calls the “mean monkey”. So the mean monkey gives the children a choice of two stickers; one of which the child wants and one the child doesn’t really want. And so when the monkey asks the child “which sticker do you want?” the reason it’s called the mean monkey is the mean monkey always takes the sticker that the child wants. So the monkey will ask the child “which sticker do you like?” and children who are about 3 years old will repeatedly tell the monkey the sticker that they actually want. And the monkey will take it and then it will give them the ugly sticker that they don’t want.

But when they get a little bit older around age 5 or 6, they realize that you can mislead the monkey. They recognize that they can have a thought in their mind of which sticker they like, but they can tell a different thought for the monkey and fool him. And so at this age when the monkey asks the children “which sticker do you really want” the children will point to the sticker that they don’t want, the monkey will take it, and then the children actually get the sticker they want. This demonstrates that they now have a more developed theory of mind and they’re able to recognize that they can know something that the monkey doesn’t know.

And the last related idea here is Autism Spectrum Disorder. This is a neurodevelopmental disorder that’s associated with deficits in language, motor skills, and socialization, and one aspect of Autism Spectrum Disorder seems to be deficits in awareness of the emotions, intentions, and beliefs of others. And so things like false belief tests can be used to partially assess Autism Spectrum Disorder. Now, it’s not the case that everyone with autism will fail something like the Sally-Anne test and there are people who fail the Sally-Anne test who do not have autism. They might fail it for other reasons, so it’s not conclusive. I’m not saying that something like the Sally-Anne test can definitely be used to identify autism.

And I should also point out that autism is associated with intellectual disability and this is different from many popular portrayals of portrayals of autism in movies and TV shows. So many people with autism show intellectual disability and it’s very rare for people with autism to show heightened ability in areas like music or mathematics. It does happen, but it’s very, very rare but it’s quite common in movies and TV shows. And in the past few decades there’s been a dramatic increase in the diagnoses of Autism Spectrum Disorder and this has led people to wonder whether there really is an increase in the incidence of autism or if this rise in diagnoses is related to misdiagnosis of this disorder.

And some critics have proposed that the dramatic rise in autism is actually this label of Autism Spectrum Disorder is being applied to a broad range of different developmental problems; it’s become a catch-all diagnosis for any neurodevelopmental problem. And that’s part of the reason why we might have seen this dramatic rise over the past few decades. Ok, I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!