Developmental psychology

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- Preface
- Theoretical problems of development psychology
  - 1.1 The subject, objectives and methods of psychology
  - 1.2 Conception of age and psychological development stages
- The problem of the periodization of mental development in developmental psychology
  - 2 The problem of the periodization of mental development in developmental psychology
  - 2.1 Biogenetic concepts in foreign developmental psychology
  - 2.2 The theory of Jean Piaget’s mental development
  - 2.3.Epigenetic principle of development by E.Erikson
  - 2.4 Cultural-historical concept of mental development by Vygotsky
- Psychological aspects of ontogenetic development period
  - 3.1.Newborn crisis
  - 3.2 Infancy (2-12 months)
  - 3.3 Toddlerhood (1-3 year)
  - 3.4 Preschool age (3- 6-7 year)
  - 3.5 Early school age (7—10,11 years)
  - 3.6 Adolescence (10-11 — 15-16 years)
  - 3.7 Youth (17-18 – 26 years)
  - 3.8 Aduldhood
  - 3.9 Late aduldhood
- Practice
  - 1.1 The subject, objectives and methods of psychology
  - 2 The problem of the periodization of mental development in developmental psychology
  - 2.4 Cultural-historical concept of mental development by Vygotsky
  - 3.4 Preschool age (3- 6-7 year)
  - 3.6 Adolescence (10-11 — 15-16 years)

- Алғы сөз
- Даму психологиясының теориялық мәселелері
  - 1.1 Психологияның пәні, міндеттері мен әдістері
  - 1.2 Жастың психологиялық тұжырымдамасы және психикалық дамудың кезеңділігі туралы мәселе
- Даму психологиядағы психикалық дамудың кезеңділігі туралы мәселе
  - 2 Даму психологиядағы психикалық дамудың кезеңділігі туралы мәселе
  - 2.1 Шетелдік және отандық психологиядағы қозғаушы күштердің, ақыл-ой дамуының көздері мен жағдайлары туралы пікірлер
  - 2.2 Ж.Пиаженің психикалық даму теориясы
  - 2.3.3Э. Эриксонның жеке тұлғаны дамытудың эпигенетикалық теориясы
  - 2.4 Л.С. Выготскийдің психикалық дамуының мәдени-тарихи тұжырымдамасы
- Онтогенетикалық даму кезеңдерінің психологиялық сипаттамалары
  - 3.1.Сәби дағдарысы
  - 3.2 Нәресте (2-12 ай)
  - 3.3 Ерте жастағы (1-3 жас)
  - 3.4 Мектепке дейінгі жас (3- 6-7 жас)
  - 3.5 Кіші мектептік жас (7-10,11 жас)
  - 3.6 Жасөспірім жас (10,11-15,16 жас)
  - 3.7 Жастық жас (17,18 – 26 жас)
  - 3.8 Кемел жас
  - 3.9 Кәрілік
- Практика
  - 1.1 Психологияның пәні, міндеттері мен әдістері
  - 2 Даму психологиядағы психикалық дамудың кезеңділігі туралы мәселе
  - 2.4 Л.С. Выготскийдің психикалық дамуының мәдени-тарихи тұжырымдамасы
  - 3.4 Мектепке дейінгі жас (3- 6-7 жас)
  - 3.6 Жасөспірім жас (10,11-15,16 жас)

2.2The theory of Jean Piaget’s mental development

The study of cognitive development—the changes that occur in children’s mental abilities over the course of their lives—is one of the most diverse and exciting topics in all of the developmental sciences. In this chapter we begin our exploration of the developing mind, focusing first on the many important contributions of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who charted what he (and others) believed to be a universal pattern of intellectual growth that unfolds during infancy, childhood, and adolescence.

By far the most influential theorist in the history of child development, Piaget combined his earlier interests in zoology and epistemology (the branch of philosophy concerned with the origins of knowledge) to develop a new science that he termed genetic epistemology, which he defined as the experimental study of the origin of knowledge. (Piaget used the term genetic in an older sense, meaning essentially developmental.)

Piaget began his studies by carefully observing his own three children as infants: how they explored new toys, solved simple problems that he prepared for them, and generally came to understand themselves and their world. Later, Piaget studied larger samples of children through what became known as the clinical method, a flexible question-and answer technique he used to discover how children of different ages solved various problems and thought about everyday issues. From these naturalistic observations of topics ranging from the rules of games to the laws of physics, Piaget formulated his grand theory of intellectual growth.

Piaget’s background in zoology is quite apparent from his definition of intelligence as a basic life function that helps the organism adapt to its environment. We observe such adaptation as we watch a toddler figure out how to turn on the TV, a school-age child decide how to divide candies among friends, or an adolescent struggle to solve a geometry problem. Piaget proposed that intelligence is “a form of equilibrium toward which all cognitive structures tend” (1950, p. 6). His point was simply that all intellectual activity is undertaken with one goal in mind: to produce a balanced, or harmonious, relationship between one’s thought processes and the environment. Such a balanced state of affairs is called cognitive equilibrium, and the process of achieving it is called equilibration. Piaget stressed that children are active and curious explorers who are constantly challenged by many novel stimuli and events that are not immediately understood. He believed that these imbalances (or cognitive disequilibria) between the children’s modes of thinking and environmental events prompt them to make mental adjustments that enable them to cope with puzzling new experiences and thereby restore cognitive equilibrium. So we see that Piaget’s view of intelligence is an “interactionist” model that implies that mismatches between one’s internal mental schemes (existing knowledge) and the external environment stimulate cognitive activity and intellectual growth. There is a very important assumption that underlies Piaget’s view of intelligence: If children are to know something, they must construct that knowledge themselves. Indeed, Piaget described the child as a constructivist—an individual who acts on novel objects and events and thereby gains some understanding of their essential features. Children’s constructions of reality (i.e., interpretations of objects and events) depend on the knowledge they have available to them: the more immature the child’s cognitive system, the more limited his or her interpretation of an event. For example, 4-year-old Robin told his mom after school one day, “Mommy, today at recess, a big cold wind came and almost blew me down! I think it knew that I was hot and it came to cool me down!” This child is making an important assumption that dominates his attempt at understanding—namely, that inanimate things, in this case wind, have intentions. He does not make the distinction between animate and inanimate objects, at least not the type of distinction that adults make. As a result, he constructs a very different interpretation of “reality” than his mother does.

According to Piaget, cognition develops through the refinement and transformation of mental structures, or schemes (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969). Schemes are unobservable mental systems that underlie intelligence. A scheme is a pattern of thought or action and is most simply viewed as some enduring knowledge base by which children interpret their world. Schemes, in effect, are representations of reality. Children know their world through their schemes. Schemes are the means by which children interpret and organize experience. For Piaget, cognitive development is the development of schemes, or structures. Children enter the world with some reflexes by which they interpret their surroundings, and what underlies these reflexes are schemes.

How do children construct and modify their intellectual schemes? Piaget believed that all schemes, all forms of understanding, are created through the workings of two inborn intellectual processes: organization and adaptation. Organization is the process by which children combine existing schemes into new and more complex intellectual schemes. For example, an infant who has “gazing,” “reaching,” and “grasping” reflexes soon organizes these initially unrelated schemes into a more complex structure—visually directed reaching—that enables him to reach out and discover the characteristics of many interesting objects in the environment. Although cognitive schemes may assume radically different forms at different phases of development, the process of organization is unchanging. Piaget believed that children are constantly organizing whatever schemes they have into more complex and adaptive structures.

The goal of organization is to promote adaptation, the process of adjusting to the demands of the environment. According to Piaget, adaptation occurs through two complementary activities: assimilation and accommodation.

Assimilation is the process by which children try to interpret new experiences in terms of their existing models of the world, the schemes they already possess. The young child who sees a horse for the first time may try to assimilate it into one of her existing schemes for four-legged animals and thus may think of this creature as a “doggie.” In other words, the child is trying to adapt to this novel stimulus by construing it as something familiar.

Yet truly novel objects, events, and experiences may be difficult to interpret in terms of one’s existing schemes. For example, our young child may soon notice that this big animal she is labeling a doggie has funny-looking feet and a most peculiar bark, and she may seek a better understanding of the observations she has made. Accommodation, the complement of assimilation, is the process of modifying existing structures in order to account for new experiences. So the child who recognizes that a horse is not a dog may invent a name for this new creature or perhaps say “What date?” and adopt the label that her companions use. In so doing, she has modified (accommodated) her scheme for four-legged animals to include a new category of experience—horses. Piaget believed that assimilation and accommodation work together to promote cognitive growth. They do not always occur equally as in the preceding example; but assimilations of experiences that do not quite “jibe” with existing schemes eventually introduce cognitive conflict and prompt accommodations to those experiences. And the end result is adaptation, a state of equilibrium, or balance, between one’s cognitive structures and the environment.

The stages of congnitive development by J.Piaget. From Piaget’s point of view—a perspective that stresses that cognitive development is an active process in which children are regularly seeking and assimilating new experiences, accommodating their cognitive structures to these experiences, and organizing what they know into new and more complex schemes. So two inborn activities—organization and adaptation— make it possible for children to construct progressively greater understandings of the world in which they live.

Piaget identified four major periods, or stages, of cognitive development: the sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years), the preoperational stage (2 to 7 years), the stage of concrete operations (7 to 11 years), and the stage of formal operations (11 years and beyond). These stages of intellectual growth represent qualitatively different levels of functioning and form what Piaget calls an invariant developmental sequence; that is, all children progress through the stages in the same order. Piaget argued that stages can never be skipped because each successive stage builds on the accomplishments of previous stages.

Although Piaget believed that the sequencing of intellectual stages is fixed, or invariant, he recognized that there are tremendous individual differences in the ages at which children enter or emerge from any particular stage. In fact, his view was that cultural factors and other environmental influences may either accelerate or retard a child’s rate of intellectual growth, and he considered the age norms that accompany his stages (and substages) as only rough approximations at best.

During the sensorimotor period, infants coordinate their sensory inputs and motor capabilities, forming behavioral schemes that permit them to “act on” and to get to “know” their environment. How much can they really understand by relying on overt actions to generate knowledge? More than you might imagine. During the first 2 years, infants develop from reflexive creatures with very limited knowledge into planful problem solvers who have already learned a great deal about themselves, their close companions, and the objects and events in their everyday world. So drastic is the infant’s cognitive growth that Piaget divided the sensorimotor period into six substages that describe the child’s gradual transition from a reflexive to a reflective being. Our review will focus on three important aspects of sensorimotor development: problem-solving skills (or means/ ends activities), imitation, and the growth of the object concept.

Reflex Activity (Birth to 1 Month). Piaget characterized the first month of life as a stage of reflex activity—a period when an infant’s actions are pretty much confined to exercising innate reflexes, assimilating new objects into these reflexive schemes (e.g., sucking on blankets and toys as well as on nipples), and accommodating their reflexes to these novel objects. Granted, this is not high intellect, but these primitive adaptations represent the beginning of cognitive growth.

Primary Circular Reactions (1 to 4 Months). The first non reflexive schemes emerge at 1 to 4 months of age as infants discover by chance that various responses that they can emit and control (e.g., sucking their thumbs, making cooing sounds) are satisfying and, thus, worth repeating. These simple repetitive acts, called primary circular reactions, are always centered on the infant’s own body. They are called “primary” because they are the first motor habits to appear and “circular” because they are repetitive.

Secondary Circular Reactions (4 to 8 Months). Between 4 and 8 months of age, infants are discovering (again by chance) that they can make interesting things happen to objects beyond their own bodies, such as making a rubber duck quack by squeezing it. These new schemes, called secondary circular reactions, are also repeated for the pleasure they bring. According to Piaget, 4- to 8-month-olds’ sudden interest in external objects indicates that they have begun to differentiate themselves from objects they can control in the surrounding environment.

Is an infant who delights in such repetitive actions as swatting a brightly colored mobile or making a toy duck quack engaging in planful or intentional behavior? Piaget said no: The secondary circular reaction is not a fully intentional response, because the interesting result it produces was discovered by chance and was not a purposeful goal the first time the action was performed.

Coordination of Secondary Reactions (8 to 12 Months). Truly planful responding first appears between 8 and 12 months of age, during the substage of the coordination of secondary circular reactions, as infants begin to coordinate two or more actions to achieve simple objectives. For example, if you were to place an attractive toy under a cushion, a 9-month-old might lift the cushion with one hand while using the other to grab the toy. In this case, the act of lifting the cushion is not a pleasurable response in itself, nor is it executed by chance. Rather, it is part of a larger intentional scheme in which two initially unrelated responses—lifting and grasping—are coordinated as a means to an end. Piaget believed that these simple coordinations of secondary schemes represent the earliest form of goal-directed behavior, and thus true problem solving.

Tertiary Circular Reactions (12 to 18 Months). Between 12 and 18 months of age, infants begin to actively experiment with objects and try to invent new methods of solving problems or reproducing interesting results. For example, an infant who had originally squeezed a rubber duck to make it quack may now decide to drop it, step on it, and crush it with a pillow to see whether these actions will have the same or different effects on the toy. Or she may learn from her explorations that flinging is more efficient than spitting as a means of getting food to stick to the wall. Although parents may be less than thrilled by such exciting new cognitive advances, these trial-and-error exploratory schemes, called tertiary circular reactions, reflect an infant’s active curiosity—her strong motivation to learn about the way things work.

Symbolic Problem Solving (18 to 24 Months). The crowning achievement of the sensorimotor stage occurs as infants begin to internalize their behavioral schemes to construct mental symbols, or images, that they can then use to guide future conduct. Now the infant can experiment mentally and may show a kind of “insight” in how to solve a problem. Piaget’s son Laurent nicely illustrates this symbolic problem solving, or inner experimentation:

Laurent is seated before a table and I place a bread crust in front of him, out of reach. Also, to the right . . . I place a stick, about 25 cm. long. At first, Laurent tries to grasp the bread . . . and then he gives up. . . . Laurent again looks at the bread, and without moving, looks very briefl y at the stick, then suddenly grasps it and directs it toward the bread . . . [he then] draws the bread to him (Piaget, 1952, p. 335).

Clearly, this is not trial-and-error experimentation. Instead, Laurent’s problem solving occurred at an internal, symbolic level as he visualized the stick being used as an extension of his arm to obtain a distant object.

Piaget recognized the adaptive significance of imitation, and he was very interested in its development. His own observations led him to believe that infants are incapable of imitating novel responses displayed by a model until 8 to 12 months of age (the same age at which they show some evidence of intentionality in their behavior). However, the imitative schemes of infants this young are rather imprecise. Were you to bend and straighten your finger, the infant might mimic you by opening and closing her entire hand (Piaget, 1951). Indeed, precise imitations of even the simplest responses may take days (or even weeks) of practice (Kaye & Marcus, 1981), and literally hundreds of demonstrations may be required before an 8- to 12-month-old will catch on and begin to enjoy sensorimotor games such as peekaboo or patty-cake.

Voluntary imitation becomes much more precise at age 12 to 18 months, as we see in the following example:

At [1 year and 16 days of age, Jacqueline] discovered her forehead. When I touched the middle of mine, she fi rst rubbed her eye, then felt above it and touched her hair, after which she brought her hand down a little and fi nally put her fi nger on her forehead (Piaget, 1951, p. 56).

According to Piaget, deferred imitation—the ability to reproduce the behavior of an absent model—fi rst appears at 18 to 24 months of age. Consider the following observation of the antics of Jacqueline, Piaget’s 16-month-old daughter:

Jacqueline had a visit from a little boy (18 months of age) who, in the course of the afternoon got into a terrible temper. He screamed as he tried to get out of a playpen and pushed it backward, stamping his feet. Jacqueline stood watching him in amazement, never having witnessed such a scene before. The next day, she herself screamed in her playpen and tried to move, stamping her foot . . . several times in succession (Piaget, 1951, p. 63).

Piaget believed that older infants are capable of deferred imitation because they can now construct mental symbols, or images, of a model’s behavior that are stored in memory and retrieved later to guide the child’s re-creation of the modeled sequence.

The preoperational period (2 to 7 years old) is marked by the appearance of the symbolic function— the ability to make one thing—a word or an object—stand for, or represent, something else. Judy DeLoache (1987, 2000) refers to the knowledge that an entity can stand for something other than itself as representational insight. This transition from the curious hands-on-everything toddler to the contemplative, symbolic preschool child is remarkable indeed. Consider, for example, that because 2- to 3-year-olds can use words and images to represent their experiences, they are now quite capable of reconstructing the past and thinking about or even comparing objects that are no longer present. And just how much does the ability to construct mental symbols transform a child’s thinking? David Bjorklund (2005) answers by noting that the average, symbolic 3-year-old probably has more in common intellectually with a 21-year-old adult than with a 12-month-old infant. Although a 3-year-old’s thinking will change in many ways over the next several years, it is similar to an adult’s in that both preschool children and adults think by manipulating mental symbols such as images and language, with most “thinking” being done covertly, “in the head.”

Language is perhaps the most obvious form of symbolism that young children display. Although most infants utter their first meaningful word by the end of the first year, it is not until about 18 months of age—the point at which they show other signs of symbolism such as inner experimentation—that they combine two (or more) words to form simple sentences. Does the use of language promote cognitive development? Piaget said no, arguing instead that language merely reflects what the child already knows and contributes little to new knowledge. In other words, he believed that cognitive development promotes language development, not vice versa. (We will have more to say about Piaget’s ideas about the relationship between language and thought later in this chapter.) A second major hallmark of the early preoperational period is the blossoming of pretend (or symbolic) play. Toddlers often pretend to be people they are not (mommies, superheroes), and they may play these roles with props such as a shoe box or a stick that symbolize other objects such as a baby’s crib or a gun. Although some parents are concerned when their preschool children immerse themselves in a world of make-believe and begin to invent imaginary playmates, Piaget felt that these are healthy activities. According to Marc Bornstein and his colleagues (1996), “In symbolic play, young children advance upon their cognitions about people, objects, and actions and in this way construct increasingly sophisticated representations of the world” (p. 293). In the box on page 262, we focus briefl y on children’s play and see how these “pretend” activities may contribute in a positive way to the child’s social, emotional, and intellectual development.

During Piaget’s concrete-operational period (7 to 11 years old), children rapidly acquire cognitive operations and apply these important new skills when thinking about objects and events that they have experienced. A cognitive operation is an internal mental activity that enables children to modify and reorganize their images and symbols to reach a logical conclusion. With these powerful new operations in their cognitive arsenal, grade-school children progress far beyond the static and centered thinking of the preoperational stage.

According to Piaget, the impressive thinking of concrete-operational children is limited because they can apply their operational schemes only to objects, situations, or events that are real or imaginable. The transitive inferences of concrete operators, for example, are likely to be accurate only for real objects that are (or have been) physically present. Seven- to 11-year-olds cannot yet apply this relational logic to abstract signifi ers such as the Xs, Ys, and Zs that we use in algebra. By contrast, formal operations, fi rst seen between the ages of 11 and 13 years of age, are mental actions performed on ideas and propositions. No longer is thinking tied to the factual or observable, for formal operators can reason quite logically about hypothetical processes and events that may have no basis in reality.

Egocentrism in child’s thinking by Piaget. In popular usage of the term, an egocentric person is a conceited and boastful individual who is preoccupied with his own self-importance. There is, however, a fundamental difference between the cognitive egocentricity of a child as defined by Piaget, and the egocentricity of an adult as is commonly understood. A child is egocentric because he cannot take someone else's point of view, an adult is egocentric because he will not - in one case, it is cognitive inability: in other, social insensitivity. "Cognitive egocentrism," according to Piaget “…stems from a lack of differentiation between one's own point of view and the other possible ones ... ". Decentering is defined as the "ability 10 shift mental perspective, in social relationships as well as in others." Egocentricity may also be defined as "the inability to decenter, to shin the given cognitive perspective (manque de de'centration)." Piaget has justified the use of the term "egocentrism" as opposed to "centrism" because "the initial centering of perspective is always relative to one's own position and action ... " All children are egocentric as they pass through the Piagetian cognitive continuum. Egocentrism is a developmental necessity which the child cannot escape. It is as unconscious as it is natural. It is a cognitive mode of dealing with reality, different at each developmental level. This term has been the most criticized and least understood of Piaget's concepts, but he has "insisted upon its epistemological meaning ... rather than on its popular or 'moral' meaning." At one point, however, even Piaget succumbed to the mounting criticism and stated: “We no longer call it “egocentric”, as one of us once did, in deference to the criticisms from many psychologists who are still not familiar with the practice in the exact sciences of using a term only in accordance with the definitions proposed, irrespective of its popular meanings and associations.”

Pinard and Laurendeau, however, engaged in replicating Piagetian research on large samples in Canada, Africa, and other places report: " ... it seems reasonable to conclude that, at least in the development of projective spatial concepts, the egocentric attitude is regular enough to suggest that it reflects a genuine and consistent form of mental organization." It matters little what we call it: egocentricity, or cognitive egocentricity, or Piagetian egocentricity, or X egocentricity. The important point is that it is significant enough not to be dismissed easily. Broadly speaking, cognitive egocentricity is a lack of differentiation between self and nonself; between subjective and objective; between psychological and physical; or it is an imbalance between assimilation and accommodation. In one of his books, Piaget defines it as: “... primacy of self-satisfaction over objective recognition ... and on the other, distortion of reality to satisfy the activity and point of view of the individual. In both cases it is unconscious, being essentially the result of failure to distinguish between the subjective and the objective”. Egocentricity is decentered when differentiation between the two polarities is achieved.

There are various aspects of cognitive egocentricity as the child moves along the Piagetian cognitive continuum through four developmental sequences; sensory motor (birth - 2 + years); preoperational (2 - 7 + years); concrete operational (7 - 11 + years); and formal operational (11 - 15 + years).

Sensory motor egocentrism (birth - 2 years). At the beginning of postnatal life, the neonate is directly egocentric. According to Piaget, ". . . consciousness starts with an unconscious and integral egocentricity," where self is at the center of reality, but is not aware of itself. "Psychoanalysis has called this ... "narcissism," but it is important to understand that it is a narcissism without Narcissus, i. e., without any sense of personal awareness as such." For the neonate, then, the self and the nonself are undifferentiated and global. The universe of the neonate, so to speak, is centered on his own body and on his own movements. During the next few months, the infant becomes indirectly egocentric, that is, the focus now shifts from his own body to objects around him. Also, the activity primarily centered on his own body now extends to objects in the environment. For example, the thumb-sucking (action centered on his own body) now extends to sucking anything the hand can grasp. The next important step in the decentering of cognitive egocentricity is the acquisition of object permanence. When an infant searches for a hidden object, it may be inferred that, for the infant, the object continues to exist independently of his perceptual activity or perceptual field. This behavior also suggests that some differentiation between self and nonself has taken place. “…the construction of solid and permanent objects is the first example of the transition from primitive total egocentricity to the final elaboration of an external universe .”

The evolution of practical space helps further in the decentering process. The uncoordinated sensory spaces (oral, visual, and tactile) on the neonate’s own body and centered on his own movements gradually develop into a practical space furnished with permanent objects. The ease of locomotion in the surrounding space during the second year of life also helps the child to coordinate his own displacements as well as the displacements of other objects. Here again, self is the reference point. The relationships and displacements are the first coordinated between self and the objects, and only later between one object and another object.

Piaget also refers to the primitive precausal egocentricity of the infant as “magico-phenomenalistic.” “Phenomenalistic” because two events contiguous in time and space are causally linked; “magico” because the infant almost appears to have a magical belief in his own activity as the casual agent. For example, when an infant pulls at the cords of a toy hanging above his crib, almost anticipating and hoping to produce an event at a distance, it is inferred that he has a magical belief in his own efficacy or that feelings and longings are sufficient to bring about an event. By the end of the second year, however, the child begins to understand the necessity of spatial contacts between objects. He can push an object, but he can be pushed also. The magical efficacy is diminished, but the differentiation between the subjective and objective is far from complete and has to be mastered during the next stage.

To summarize, then, the sensory motor egocentricity during the first two years of life implies a lack of differentiation between self and nonself, and a confusion between the activity of the self and the activity of the external world. This egocentricity is gradually decentered through a series of cognitive achievements which include the mastery of object permanence and evolution of practical space, There is a "miniature Copernican revolution" (14,p,79) which implies that for the child: (1) objects are external to self and self is only one object among many objects, and (2) objects exist independently of the activity of self and objects can act upon self just as self can act upon objects, Thus we find that the sensory-motor egocentricity becomes decentered and a state of equilibrium is reached, But as the child advances to the next developmental level - the preoperational period - a new form of egocentricity will have to be decentered, and a new form of equilibrium will have to be reached.

Preoperatiollal Egocentricity (2 - 7 years). The transition from the sensory motor to preoperational level is marked by the appearance of mental representation or what Piaget prefers to call "semiotic functions." The semiotic functions include deferred imitation (imitation in the absence of a model), mental imagery, symbolic play, drawing, and language. The cognitive functioning on the plane of representation as opposed to the plane of sensory motor action of the previous stage is a definite advancement over the previous cognitive mode of dealing with reality. But this itself traps the child in a new form of egocentricity. The sensory motor child had to master the object; the preoperational child has to master the symbol or the object symbolized. The sensory-motor child had to learn to cope with the physical world of permanent objects; the preoperational child has to learn to cope with two new additional worlds - the social world of people, and his own subjective world of inner representation. Preoperational cognitive egocentricity, then, implies a lack of differentiation between the symbol and the thing symbolized, between the inner psychological world and the outer physical world, and between self and the social world of people. Piaget has elaborated upon the cognitive egocentricity of this period at great length in several of his books: Language and Thought of the Child; Judgment and Reasoning of the Child; Child's Conception of Reality; Child's Conception of Physical Causality; Moral Judgment of the Child; The Psychology of the Child. According to Piaget, the preoperational egocentricity has two forms: logical egocentricity, and ontological egocentricity.

Thus there are two forms of egocentricity, the first logical and the second ontological. Just as the child makes his own truth, so he makes his own reality; he feels the resistance of matter no more than he feels the difficulty of giving proofs.

The first provides the key to the child's judgment and reasoning, and the second provides the key to the child's conception of reality and causality. Logical exocentricity, lacking reversibility, reflection, or deduction will be discussed as:

(a) Intellectual egocentricity,

(b) Linguistic egocentricity, and

(c) Symbolic egocentricity

Ontological egocentricity will be discussed in relation to the child's conception of reality and causalIty.

Logical Egocentricity. a. Intellectual egocentricity. "The intellectual egocentricity is ... nothing more than a lack of coordination, a failure to group relations with other individuals as well as with other objects." The first aspect of intellectual egocentricity manifests itself in the child's inability to compensate or coordinate differences in two dimensions. The three classical conservation experiments dealing with mass, weight, and volume are too well known to be discussed here in detail. It is sufficient to say that the child bases his judgments on only one dimension, or on one element of the situation. It is longer, therefore, it is more; or it is higher, therefore, it is more. The things as they appear have priority over things as they really are. The child's judgment is perception bound; he looks at static configurations rather than at transformations. His intuitive reasoning based on perception lacks reversibility; therefore, he cannot coordinate or compensate two dimensions in a given situation.

The second aspect of intellectual egocentricity is the child's inability to view a situation from any other perspective but his own. For example, a child's judgments about the left and right side of a person seated or standing opposite to him would be absolute judgments about his own left or right side. Or in the well-known experiment of the three mountains viewed from different perspectives, the child's judgments are based on the way the mountains look from his own particular perspective only. He cannot cope with the multiplicity of possible perspectives and remains blind to all but his own perspective, as if that were the only one possible. The third aspect of intellectual egocentricity is the inability to handle the logic of relations. "Paul is a boy" remains the same whatever the perspective, but in statements of brother-sister or brother-brother relationships, two points of view have to be coordinated at one-and-the-same time. A child will answer correctly that he has two brothers, Paul and John, but has difficulty answering correctly how many brothers John or Paul has; he will leave himself out because he cannot view himself from the position of John or Paul. If three objects are placed as A, B, C, the child will have no difficulty in stating that B is in the middle, but will have difficulty making a relative judgment that B is to the right of A and to the left of C, at one-and-the-same time. " ... the child fails to grasp the logic of relations for lack of having established reciprocity, first between himself and other people, and then between himself and things."

The fourth aspect of intellectual egocentricity may be seen in the moral reasoning of the child. In the early stages of moral development, the child has unilateral respect for the adult and is constrained by adult authority.

Constraint, on the other hand, is always the ally of childish egocentrism. Indeed it is because the child cannot establish a genuinely mutual contact with the adult that he remains shut up in his ego. The child is, on the one hand, too apt to have the illusion of agreement where actually he is following his own fantasy ...

Lessening of adult authority and increase in mutual respect and cooperation helps in moral development and decentering of egocentrism. Also, in making moral judgments about situations involving lying or dishonesty, a preoperational child disregards the intentions of the wrong doer and judges an act moral or immoral from the external or material consequences only. This attitude of objective responsibility in moral judgments is also an aspect of egocentricity.

1. Linguistic egocentricity

During the preschool period the child has acquired sufficient language to engage in verbal exchange but surprisingly enough much of the spontaneous language of the child is egocentric: repetition, monologue, or collective monologue. After analyzing the spontaneous speech of children over a period of one month during free play and free activity, Piaget found that 54-60% of the spontaneous speech of children between 3-5 years of age could be termed egocentric speech. For children between 5-7 years of age, 44-47% of spontaneous speech was egocentric. Most of the time children talk to themselves, about themselves, as a sort of running commentary accompanying their action, assuming that everybody knows and understands what they are thinking or talking about. For example, one child will say, "I am going to put a nail here;" another may say, "I am going to paint the hat red." They believe that the other person always knows what they are thinking about and is acquainted with their reason for doing so ... ." Very often the monologue will be sprinkled with "because," "you see," but it is to be understood that the child talks about his actions to no one in particular. "To put it quite simply, we may say that the adult thinks socially, even when he is alone, and that the child under 7 thinks egocentrically, even in the society of others." Egocentric speech becomes socialized speech vis-a-vis others. During play, when children are collaborating in action, a fight or disagreement may take place. It is solved first by hitting or pushing at the sensory motor level and only after some time at the symbolic level by means of a primitive dialogue, when each child will make his own assertions. It will be some time before there is even an attempt at primitive discussion when the child will try to communicate or will try to understand the viewpoint of the other child, or will defend his own point. The egocentric speech of the child becomes socialized speech only in social collaboration. Disagreements, contradictions, and genuine discussion decenter egocentric language. Piaget recognizes that environmental and situational variations may increase or decrease egocentric speech, and suggests systematic studies of children's discussions.

1. Symbolic egocentricity. The symbolic play is one of the main activities of the preschool child. The symbolic play is "the purest form of egocentric and symbolic thought, and it is the assimilation of reality to the subject's own interest and the expression of reality through the use of images fashioned by himself." The symbolic egocentricity implies a lack of differentiation between the symbol and its referent. Children believe that names are part of the physical property of objects and that by distorting a name, you distort the object itself. In their symbolic games, also, the same lack of differentiation between the symbol and the thing symbolized is quite apparent. When a child pretends to be father, mother, butterfly or bunny, he is engrossed and enveloped in the symbol he has created to such an extent that he forgets to be himself.

Symbolic play is, therefore, pure assimilation or incorporation of the external world into the subjective world of the child; where there are no rules, the child makes and violates his own rules. By means of symbolic play the child corrects external reality, resolves conflicts, and "above all, he compensates for and completes reality by means of a fiction." When children create imaginary playmates, they do not differentiate between what is real and what is imaginary. The imaginary companions are real, who dictate order, dispense justice and correct reality. The drawings of preoperational children have a certain element of "transparency." For example, a face in profile will have two eyes; potatoes will be seen in a man's stomach because he had them for dinner. Piaget refers to this "transparency" as "intellectual realism" in children's drawings, in contrast with the visual realism of a more advanced stage. Piaget explains this as an aspect of egocentricity, because the child draws what he knows should be there rather than what he sees there. Logical egocentricity, discussed as intellectual, linguistic, and symbolic is the key to understanding the limitations and achievements of the preoperational child's reasoning, thought, language, and play. Limitations are explainable in terms of cognitive egocentricity, and achievements help in the decentering of that egocentricity.

Ontological egocentricity: relates to the child's conception of reality and causality.

During this period of life the child may pester the adults with "why" questions or with questions relating to the origin of things. In order to answer children's questions at their level of understanding, We must first understand what the child's conception of reality is; and second, we must understand his particular cognitive mode of dealing with the reality at that time. Piaget has answered these questions in two of his books: Child's Conception of Reality, and Child's Conception of Physical Casualty. What is reality to the child? At the beginning of life there is no distinction between "the I" and the external world. The self and the world are one, but "a progressive splitting up of this protoplasmic consciousness into two complementary universes -- the objective and the subjective" constitutes the idea of reality. The ontological egocentricity is basically this: the inability of the child to differentiate between the subjective and the objective universe resulting in immature concepts of reality and immature judgments about physical causality. On one hand, mental phenomena are materialized - dreams are pictures on the walls, thought is a voice in the mouth, names reside in the object; on the other hand, physical phenomena are attributed psychological characteristics - clouds know where they are going, lamp posts send dreams to annoy us, wind is alive. Through progressive differentiation of the internal and the external, the realism of the child moves towards objectivity; but still, the self and the world remain very close. " ... there is never complete objectivity: at every stage there remain in the conception of nature what we might call "adherences," fragments of internal experience which still cling to the external world." Piaget distinguishes five forms of "adherences" which confuse child's judgments about physical causality: (1) Participation - almost magical belief that objects in the universe participate in human affairs, the sun and the moon follow us; (2) Animism - endowing life and consciousness to inanimate objects - the wind is alive; (3) Artificialism - everything is made for man: "the I" is replaced by "we;" - night comes so we can sleep; apples grow so we can eat them; (4) Finalism - everything has a function or purpose: rivers have to go to the ocean, or where else would they go; ships must float on the sea; and (5) Dynamism - notion of force: things have power almost like the muscular power of man; the air pushes the clouds. Piaget has attributed these various manifestations of precausality or "adherences" to the egocentricity of the child - the inability to separate the inner from the external world. The child sees the world in terms of and with reference to his own self.

There is therefore an egocentric logic and an egocentric ontology, of which the consequences are parallel: they both falsify the perspective of logical relations and of things, because they both start from the assumption that other people understand us and agree with us from the first and that things revolve around us with the sole purpose of serving us and resembling us.

But the very existence of pre causal thinking among children has been denied by some researchers and upheld by others. Pinard and Laurendeau examine this issue and reconcile the differences between Deutsche and Hazlit (who reject the concept) and Dennis and Russell (who uphold it) by concluding that methodological differences in analysis of data confounded the results. Their own replication of Piaget's research confirms beyond doubt the existence precausal thinking and hence of ontological egocentricity.

By the time the preoperational child has learned to differentiate between the psychological and the physical (attained objectivity), or has learned to view a situation from a perspective other than his own (attained reciprocity), or has learned to differentiate and coordinate multiple perspectives (attained relativity). the egocentricity has been decentered. He is functioning on a new cognitive plane --- the plane of concrete operations. The concrete operations, then, are instrumental in overcoming the preoperational egocentricity.

Concrete operational egocentricity (7-11 + years). Piaget has devoted very little space to discussing the egocentricity of this period. But if the cognitive development is orderly and continuous, the same principles of egocentricity, decentering, and equilibrium which apply to other periods apply to this period also.

The emergence of concrete operations ~ concrete because they are performed on concrete objects ~ enables the child to do several things which he was unable to do formerly. For example, he can handle logico-mathematical operations such as, numeration, seriation, classification, all of which involve reversibility_ But this new cognitive achievement imposes its own limitations and generates its own brand of egocentricity. The concrete operations are applied to the perceptual "givens" of here-and-now. So his mental formulations are attached to the empirical reality only, and are thus limited by it. His thinking is "describer-thinking" and the direction it takes is from actual to possible. His formulations are derived from the data; but if some evidence contradicts his formulations, he either rejects the data or tries to arrange the data to fit his own formulations. Thus the concrete operational "child often fails to distinguish between his concrete thinking; and secondly, it shows a lack of differentiation between mental formulations derived from data and the data themselves, especially when contrary evidence is presented.

Formal operational egocentricity (11+years). The emergence of formal operations frees the child from the limitations and egocentricity of concrete operations. Reasoning now becomes deductive based on verbal hypotheses of it ... , then ... It is capable of taking into account unlimited possibilities beyond the data, beyond the here-and-now. The child can now think about thoughts rather than about things that exist or he can perform what Piaget calls "second-order" operations. Reflection takes a round about turn, so to speak, similar to the Copernican revolution of the sensory motor child. The concrete operational child reasons from what is real to what is possible: the formal operational child reasons from what is possible to what is real. Thus there is a complete reversal in the direction which thinking takes. Reality now becomes one sub-set of N possible sets; formerly, possibility was simply an extension of reality. "Formal operations provide thinking with an entirely new ability that detaches and liberates thinking from concrete reality and permits it to build its own reflections and theories." According to Piaget all preadolescents and adolescents functioning at formal operational level have their own systems and theories to reform the world. This idealism is a natural and logical corollary of the hypothetical-deductive mode of thinking, which is the culmination of cognitive development. It is the belief in the power of his own reflection which is at the root of adolescent egocentricity. "It is metaphysical age par excellence; the self is strong enough to reconstruct the universe and big enough to incorporate it." The infant incorporates the universe into his corporal activities; the preschooler assimilates the world to his symbolic play; the concrete operational child assimilates it to his empirical formulations, and the adolescent incorporates the world into his grand schemes and theories. Once again, this supreme pinnacle of human achievement enslaves the preadolescent in a new kind of egocentricity - the metaphysical egocentricity. The messianic zeal to save humanity, to reform the world, and to change the establishment all stem from a cognitive mode of thought which transcends reality to the endless realm of possibilities. The egocentricity lies not in dreaming dreams, or formulating theories, or thinking possibilities, but in not recognizing the limitations which practical considerations of reality impose on the theoretical possibilities. Metaphysical egocentricity, then is a lack of differentiation between possibilities engendered by thought, and limitations imposed by reality. "The metaphysical egocentricity of the adolescent is gradually lessened as a reconciliation between formal thought and reality is effected. Equilibrium is attained when the adolescent understands that the proper function of reflection is not to contradict but to predict and interpret experience.”

Piaget and Inhelder have referred to the process of equilibration in several of their writings. Three classical factors - physical environment, innateness or hereditary program and social transmission (language and education) - have been generally accepted as pertinent to cognitive development. Piaget has postulated fourth factor, equilibration, which coordinates those three. This coordination itself is a kind of equilibration. A subject may go through trial and error, or compensate contradictions, use feedback information, or may resort to other regulations which are mostly self -regulations.

There are regulations in the course of embryological development, what Waddington calls homeorhesis. At the physiological level, homeostatis is a self-regulatory mechanism : similarly, in the nervous system, the ret1ex are is a homeostat. On the level of human conduct and even at the level of logical operational thinking there are similar self-regulatory mechanisms. The equilibration process is mostly self regulatory. Equilibrium is the attained compensation as a result of self regulation. Piaget insists 011 a difference between equilibration as a process and equilibrium as an attained state. He discusses three kinds of equilibrium: (l) Equilibrium between assimilation and accommodation; (2) Equilibrium between subsystems; and (3) Equilibrium between parts and totality of knowledge at a given time.

First, the child assimilates and integrates the environmental stimuli to the existing "competencies" and structures and in so doing it accommodates and modifies these very schemes to environmental stimuli. hypotheses and assumptions on the one hand and empirical evidence on the other. It is this lack of differentiation between assumption and fact that constitutes the egocentricity of the concrete operational period.”

In another place Piaget states, "Egocentrism must obviously be defined not only by primacy of assimilation over accommodation, but by lack of equilibrium between the two processes, one or other alternately predominating."

The second kind of equilibrium refers to the equilibrium between subsystems. The child may use two systems, e.g. number and length separately and experience no conflict between numerical and ordinal reference. But in experiments conducted by Inhelder and associates (16) where children had to integrate the two systems simultaneously, they experienced conflict and used self regulatory mechanisms. lnhelder reported a learning experimen t where subjects had to construct a road "just as long as" and parallel to the experimenter's road, but with shorter matches. In this experiment, the self-regulatory mechanism of equilibration proceeded through four steps: (1) No contradiction was felt and children used the two systems separately; (2) Conscious of the contradiction, they used the two systems alternately; (3) Inadequate effort at integration and resorting to compromise solution; and (4) Reciprocal adjustment instead of posthoc correction. When the two separate subsystems have been integrated or when equilibrium is attained, the child will explain "you need more matches when they are small, and the road goes less far but it has zig zags."

The third kind of equilibrium is between parts of knowledge a subject has and totality of knowledge at a given moment. There is differentiation into parts and integration of parts back into the whole or the total "structure d'ensamble." Piaget states that his cognitive equilibrium is quite different from the equilibrium in physics where it is a question of a balance of forces. Cognitive equilibrium is a system in which all parts are interdependent – there is a cycle of interaction among parts and it is open to influences from the outside. "This equilibrium between the integration and the differentiation of the parts in the whole has no equivalent in physics. It is only found in biological and cognitive equilibrium."

Each developmental level reflects a genuine and consistent form of mental organization. In other words, each developmental level has its own brand of' egocentrism or centrism. The sensory motor child has difficulty differentiating between self and nonself; the preoperational child has to separate the symbol from the thing symbolized; the concrete operational child has to differentiate between the data and the data derived conclusions; and the formal operational child has to distinguish between his abstract theories and practical considerations of reality. Egocentrism increases whenever the child has to cope with a new field of cognitive action, and subsides when he has mastered it, only to reassert itself. It is an achievement as well as a limitation; equilibrium as well as disequilibrium. The cognitive development over one's life span may be explained by "egocentrism/centrism/decentrism/ equilibration-equilibrium" model. "The ebb and flow of egocentrism across ontogenetic development is, of course, an expression - almost t a simplified restatement - of the general equilibration model which Piaget imputes to cognitive evolution ... "