Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [233]
At one year, four months, twelve days, Jacqueline has just been wrested from a game she wants to continue and placed in her playpen, from which she wants to get out. She calls, but in vain. Then she clearly expresses a certain need [i.e., to go to the bathroom], although the events of the last ten minutes [attest that] she no longer needs to. No sooner has she left the playpen than she indicates the game she wishes to resume!14
The child is acquiring a rudimentary ability to imagine or predict the results of certain simple actions and to conduct trial-and-error experiments in the mind. Henceforth, says Piaget, intellectual development proceeds “in the conceptual-symbolic rather than purely sensorimotor arena.”15
Preoperational (18–24 months to 7 years): Now the child rapidly acquires images, concepts, and words and becomes better able to talk and think about external objects and events in symbolic terms. The two-year-old shoves a wooden block around the floor and makes the sounds of a truck; the three-year-old pretends to drink out of an empty toy cup. At first, the child learning to talk regards things and their names as one and the same (the two-year-old sees a bird and says “Bird!” and if an adult uses the word “bird” the child says, “Where bird?”), but eventually learns that the word is a symbol, detachable from what it stands for. From then on, he or she is able to talk and think about absent things and past or future events.16
But the child’s internal representation of the world is still primitive, lacking such organizing concepts as causality, quantity, time, reversibility, comparison, and perspective. The child cannot perform mental operations involving these ideas; hence it is the “preoperational” stage. (By “operation” Piaget meant any mental routine that transforms information for some purpose. Classifying, subdividing, recognizing the parts in a whole, and counting are typical operations.) This is why the five-year-old thinks that six buttons spread out are more than six closely bunched, and water transferred to a tall thin glass is more than it was in a wide shallow glass. Even when children learn to count, for some time they do not grasp that 2×3 has to equal 3×2. Shown a bunch of flowers, most of which are yellow, and asked, “Are there more flowers or more yellow flowers?” they answer “Yellow.”
The preoperational child is also “egocentric” (as was the sensorimotor child), a term Piaget defined as incapable of imagining how things look from another perspective. Piaget would show four- to six-year-olds a model of three mountains, put a little doll in a particular place amidst the mountains, display a set of photographs of the mountains taken from different positions, and ask the children which one showed what the doll was now seeing. The children always chose the view they themselves saw. Similarly, he reported, preoperational children have trouble imagining what other people are thinking, and often speak without realizing that the other person is unfamiliar with what they are talking about.
Concrete operations (7 to 12 years): By seven or thereabouts, children shift to a distinctly new and more competent level of thinking. Now they can perform such operations as counting and classifying, and can understand and think about relationships. Where the preoperational child knows the word “brother” but cannot say what a brother is and knows what “big” is but cannot say which is the bigger of two big things, the operational child can deal with both.17 Mentally reversing a procedure is another operation. When a child can imagine pouring water back from the tall thin container into the original one, he acquires the concept of reversibility and with it that of “conservation,” the recognition that quantity does not change when shape does.
Children in this stage also become aware that events outside themselves have causes outside themselves. Preoperational children will say it gets