Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [236]
By five, children effortlessly remember thousands of words, but the longest number they can repeat after hearing it read slowly is four digits long. By six or seven they can remember five digits, and by nine to twelve, six. This increase, however, comes about less from maturation than from the knowledge of how to remember. Before going to school children do not “rehearse” (repeat or review) information or use associative strategies; parents of a first-grader are often puzzled that their child can’t remember what went on at school that day. But in school children gradually learn memory strategies and soon know how, for instance, to visualize themselves in class at the beginning of the school day and so recall what happened first, and next, and next.24
Sense of self, sense of competence: The young child’s explorations of its world are a measure of his sharpening sense of self and growing sense of competence. At nine months, children still mouth and bang objects or aimlessly turn them over and over, but toward the end of their first year they begin to explore actual uses of those objects: they try drinking from a toy cup, “talking” into a toy phone, and so on. They become interested in investigating new territory and will momentarily crawl out of the mother’s sight; they turn whatever knobs and dials they can reach; they open closet and cupboard doors and take everything out. Such activities show what many developmentalists call “the attainment of competence.” Exploratory behavior, contrary to behaviorist theory, is not the consequence of rewarded acts but is spontaneous and self-initiated; the human infant and child has a need to investigate his own capacity for acting on objects, intervening in events, and widening his horizons.25
Another indication of the growth of the sense of competence is the smile of a child nearing two, even if no one is present, on successfully building a tower, putting a final piece in a puzzle, or fitting a dress on a doll. At the same time the child is becoming aware of failure and its meaning about the self. Jerome Kagan and his colleagues have noted that between fifteen and twenty-four months, children show anxiety if an adult demonstrates a form of advanced play and then tells them it is their turn. The play may consist of making a doll cook food in a pan and then have two dolls eat dinner, or making three animals take a walk and then hide under a cloth to avoid getting wet. Faced with the challenge of following such a relatively complicated scenario, children will fuss, cry, or cling to their mother. Kagan has interpreted this as evidence of the child’s fear of being unable to remember or to carry out the play in front of the adult, since if no onlooker is present, the child will often try out the modeled act or some part of it.26
Language and thought: Piaget believed that language plays only a limited role in the development of thought and that logical thinking is primarily nonlinguistic and derives from actions—first, doing things to the world around one, and later, doing things to one’s mental images of those things.27 Developmentalists in the Soviet Union and America found evidence to the contrary. Although it is true that some thinking is nonlinguistic, language is a set of symbols that give the child extraordinary freedom to manipulate the world mentally and to behave appropriately toward new stimuli without needing to experience them directly (“It’s hot—don’t touch”). Jerome Bruner, an eminent developmentalist, has long maintained that language is a crucial part of the child’s symbol