Pre-operational stage: characteristics of this developmental stage according to Piaget

Let's see what the second stage of psychological development is like according to Jean Piaget.

In his theory of cognitive development, Jean Piaget divided the growth of cognitive abilities in childhood into four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operations and formal operations.

In the following we will focus on the preoperational stage, the second of these stages, in which aspects that stand out areIn this stage, aspects such as a very egocentric vision, the beginnings of symbolic thinking and the belief that every object is alive stand out.

What is the preoperational stage?

The preoperational stage is a stage within Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development, succeeding the sensorimotor stage and coming before that of concrete operations and formal operations. This stage occurs between 2 and 6 years of age and its name is due to the fact that, when Piaget conceptualized it, he thought that children at that age were not capable of abstract mental operations, thought that children at that age were not capable of abstract mental operations, their thinking being strongly influenced by how they perceived immediate things.Their thinking is very much influenced by how they perceive immediate things.

The preoperational stage presents a number of achievements with respect to the sensorimotor stage. Among the most important are the fact that, as would be expected, cognitive abilities have been developing to such an extent that the child possesses abilities such as making use of internal images, managing schemas, having language and using symbols, which will be fundamental in the development of self-awareness.

The main milestone of this stage is to to provide the child with greater representational knowledge, improving his or her ability to communicate and learn.improving their ability to communicate and learn. They begin to use persuasive tools to get what they want, such as toys or candy. However, because they do not fully understand logic, they are not yet able to manipulate information in such a way as to ensure that they can satisfy their desire or make others see their point of view.

As children grow older, they experience changes in the way they understand and grasp ideas, while expressing them better. That is to say, he builds up experiences about what is happening around him, and progressively forms a more coherent and logical way of thinking. In addition, they begin to be able to understand that something can represent something else, i.e., they begin to use symbols, making objects transform, transforming, transforming, transforming and transforming.They also begin to understand that something can represent something else, i.e., they begin to use symbols, making objects transform, momentarily, into something else (e.g., a spoon is an airplane).

It is called preoperational because the child is not yet able to use logic in such a way as to transform, combine or separate ideas efficiently. He does not understand concrete logic, so he is not able to manipulate information mentally and take other people's point of view.

In the preoperational stage there are two substages.

1. Symbolic and preconceptual sub-stage (2-4 years)

The child uses concrete images to understand the world, but does not yet acquire abstract or generalizable ideas.. Words have a meaning based on their lived experience, not on what has been explained to them without having been given a real example to represent it.

They use preconceptions, which are closely linked to their sensory experience, which is why it is so important that children from 2 to 4 years old relate a lot with nature to expand their world.

2. Intuitive or conceptual substage (4-7 years)

The child's mind is dominated by immediate perception. Intuition plays a fundamental role in this stage. since it involves the internalization of perceptions in the form of representative images that prolong the sensorimotor schemes without rational coordination. That is to say, the child, based on what he has seen, intuitively dares to generalize what he already knows.

Characteristics of this stage

Jean Piaget attributed several characteristics to children in the preoperational stage.

1. Centering

Focusing is the tendency of the infant to concentrate on only one aspect of an object or situation at a time.. That is, children at this stage have trouble thinking about more than one feature and keeping them all in mind simultaneously.

The opposite situation, i.e., being able to shift their attention to another aspect, either of the same situation or object or of another, is decentration and, sooner or later, they acquire it.

They acquire it sooner or later, their ability to decenter varies according to the type of situation.. It is easier for them to shift their focus of attention in non-social situations than in social ones.

2. Egocentrism

Children's thinking and communication at this stage is typically egocentric. By egocentrism we mean that their way of seeing and describing things is typically self-centered. their way of seeing and describing things revolves around their experience, i.e., they are self-centered..

Thus, preoperational children assume that what they see, hear, and feel is also being seen, heard, and felt by others.

3. Play

Although children from 2 to 7 years of age play, their way of doing so is in parallel. That is, they play often, and may even play with several children in the same room. However, they do not interact, each one is absorbed in their own things and rarely play collectively.

Although it is normal for parents to try to motivate their children to play with the other children, the truth is that according to Piaget, the normal thing to do at this age is to play without sharing or creating any bond with other children of the same age.. This would be due to the fact that children do not yet understand the capacity of speech and the rules by which it is governed.

4. Symbolic representation

Symbolic representation is the ability to perform an action, either through words or by using objects, to represent something else. Language is the pinnacle of symbolic representation since by means of phonemes and graphemes we are able to represent objects, ideas and actions.

Although important, Piaget considers that it is not language that facilitates cognitive development, but rather there would be an inverse relationship. That is, it would be the normative cognitive development itself that would promote the development of language and its use as a symbolic representation.

Symbolic play

Related to the capacity for symbolic representation, preoperational children are able to play at something they are not, such as superheroes, firemen, doctors... That is, they can symbolically represent being other people.

They are also able to do this with objects, such as taking a broom and pretending to be a horse. Objectively, it is clear that it is a broom, and the child understands this, but also, with the intention of amusing himself, he turns it in his mind into the animal and pretends to ride on it. It is also at this age that children can invent an imaginary friend.

In symbolic play, infants advance in their knowledge of how the world works. What people, objects and the actions they can perform are like. Thus, they build increasingly sophisticated representations of the world from their experiences. As symbolic play increases, the more egocentric vision is reduced.

6. Animism

Animism is the belief that inanimate objects, such as toys, pencils, cars, or any other objects, possess human feelings and intentions.. That is, according to Piaget, the child of the preoperational stage considers that the natural world is alive, conscious and has a purpose.

Within this characteristic, Piaget detected four stages:

The first one goes from 4 to 5 years of age, being the one in which the child believes that almost everything is alive and has a purpose..

During the second stage, between 5 and 7 years of age, the child only considers as alive those objects that move and attributes a purpose to them.

The third stage, between 7 and 9 years of age, the child only considers as alive those objects that move spontaneously.

The last stage is between 9 and 12 years of age, and based on what he has learned both from his family environment and from school, the child understands that only plants and animals are alive. the child understands that only plants and animals have life..

7. Artificialism

Artificialism is the fact that preoperational children think that aspects of the environment such as clouds, stars, animals or any other are fabricated by people. by people. This is a very normal characteristic at this age, a mixture of not yet knowing how the world works and their interest in the natural world.

8. Irreversibility

Irreversibility is the fact that preoperational children are unable to reverse the directionality of a sequence of events to its starting point. That is, after having done a series of actions, for example, with lego pieces or any other similar type of toy, children would not be able to do the reverse steps to return to the same point, children would not be able to make the reverse steps to return to the same point where they were at the beginning..

The three mountains experiment

Piaget wanted to test at what ages infants still had an egocentric perspective of reality. To this end, in 1956, in collaboration with the psychologist Bärbel Inhelder, he applied the three mountains experiment, which consists of presenting children with a model of three mountains. One has a snowy summit, another has a small house at the top, and the third has a cross at the top.

Piaget and Inhelder's premise was that if the child has an egocentric perspective, he will assume that others see the same perspective that he has of the mountains.. On the other hand, if the child has overcome egocentrism, he will be able to understand that others do not necessarily see exactly the same thing as he does, and he will be able to indicate what it is that they are seeing. Thus, the main objective of Piaget and Inhelder was to see at what age children were able to decenter their attention and indicate what others could see.

The method was simple. The child who was the subject of the experiment was shown the model and was told that he could walk around it and wonder a little about what he saw. After a while, the child was taken and made to sit on a chair to have a static view of the model. Then, a doll was taken and placed in various positions on the table.

Once this was done, the child was presented with several photographs of the mountains, taken from different positions.. The task was for the child to indicate which photograph showed the same perspective as the doll was seeing. Thus, if the child pointed to the photograph that corresponded to his or her own view, the child was still egocentric. On the other hand, if he pointed to what the doll saw and got it right, then it was a sign that he had overcome his egocentric view.

After conducting the experiment, Piaget and Inhelder found that 4-year-olds had a vision that was almost always egocentric, since they tended to indicate the image that represented what they themselves saw and showed no signs of being aware that the doll saw something different. It was from the age of 6 that we began to see children who were able to understand that what the doll saw was different, although they rarely got it right. Those who did get it right were almost always children from the age of 7-8.

Criticism of Piaget: The problem of the police dummies

But despite the findings of Piaget and Inhelder in 1956, Martin Hughes argued in 1975 that this experiment did not make sense to children because it was difficult for them to understand it. It was too complicated for infants of that age to have to match their own visual perspective to those shown in the photographs and to pretend to guess what the doll saw.

Based on this, Hughes devised a task that he had was easier for the children to understand.. He showed the infants a model comprising two walls that crossed perpendicularly, forming a Greek cross with four corners. For the experiment he also used three dolls, two of which were policemen and one a thief.

First, a police doll was placed in various positions, and the children were asked to select that same doll. The purpose of this was to make sure that the child understood what was being asked of him, since at such young ages the problem may not be having an egocentric view, but not fully understanding spoken language. If the child made mistakes, the task was re-explained and the child tried again. Interestingly few made mistakes in the first trials.

Once it was established that the children understood the experiment, the actual experiment began. Hughes introduced a second police dummy, placing it at the end of two walls. The child was asked to take the thief dummy and hide it from both policemen, i.e., he had to take into account two different points of view.

The sample Hughes worked with ranged from 3 to 5 years old and about 90% were able to give correct answers. Based on this, Hughes devised a more complex situation, with more walls and a third policeman, and even 90% of the 4 year olds were successful. With this Hughes demonstrated that the children had overcome their egocentric view at the age of only 4 years, being able to assume the perspective of the other child.being able to assume the perspective of the other person much earlier than Piaget had claimed with his three mountains experiment.

Bibliographical references:

• Borke, H. (1975). Piaget's mountains revisited: Changes in the egocentric landscape. Developmental Psychology, 11(2), 240.
• Piaget, J. (1929). The child's concept of the world. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Piaget, J. (1951). Egocentric thought and sociocentric thought. J. Piaget, Sociological studies, 270-286.
• Piaget, J., & Cook, M. T. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children. New York, NY: International University Press.
• Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1956). The Child’s Conception of Space. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Hughes , M. (1975). Egocentrism in preschool children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Edinburgh University.
• Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., & Bornstein, M. H. (1996). Variations in Children’s Exploratory, Nonsymbolic, and Symbolic Play: An Explanatory Multidimensional Framework. Advances in infancy research, 10, 37-78.