Same thing happens with other primates and dolphins.
Peek-a-boo only works when the child has started to understand object permanence but it’s still new to him. Otherwise it would work as well with 2-month-old babies as with 7-month olds. With toddlers it’s just a game like any other, but with babies you can usually see surprise when you ‘reappear,’ and it’s not like babies can pretend to be surprised.
My larger cat seems to have it half figured out. He sleeps against a mirror, on a counter, and seems to understand that his reflection isnt another cat. When I come to visit him there, he watches me in the mirror, and if I manipulate something interesting behind his back he’ll turn around to give it a swat or a sniff.
Its hard to put something on his fur though. Cats seem more sensitive to stuff, and it will irritate him before he sees it in the reflection.
Sure, but the physical development is also important. This is a reason why trying for force feed math lessons on toddlers isn’t going to work for them.
As an amateur magician, it’s been really interesting to see what types of magic can be comprehended by what age of children. You can’t enjoy magic until you have a strong enough comprehension of the world in which to realize that your understanding is being tested. Before a certain age, it’s all magic. Then toddlers will begin to realize that coins put into a hand should remain there. Ropes cut in half and then restored are more complicated, and the child needs to be maybe four or five. Anything involving cards is not until the kid is much older.
Actually to some degree it is, albeit not one that is thrown overnight.
Brian development occurs in waves that are to a large extent predetermined. Exposure before the brain is ready to respond to the stimulation with rapid increase in synapses and modification of existing one won’t do much. (It must also be noted that pruning of excess synapses is just as critical a developmental function and also timed … it won’t occur earlier no matter what the experiences are, and is timed to occur in different cortices at different points in time. Not a switch being thrown but in defined windows of time, not before.)
This really should not be a hard concept to grasp, think of physical development: no matter how much 6 year old boys work out they won’t develop bulky muscles. Wait a few years and put some testosterone in the mix and weight training can easily lead to bulk. The body needs to be ready for the experience for the experience to cause certain kinds of change, and so with the brain.
A two month old won’t have object permanence no matter how much you practice it and a toddler/early preschooler won’t get conservation of mass no matter how hard you try to teach it.
Your method of measuring rainfall by volume in cm^3 divided by aperture area in cm^2 is a great way to measure rainfall. Area is width times length, and volume is width times length times height. So when you divide volume by area, you have wlh/wl, which leaves height. Not-so-coincidentally, height is exactly how weather guys measure rainfall.
Your method and their method are exactly the same.
I remember as a little kid being told that rainfall is measured in height, and thinking that was a really stupid method, because a large bucket would collect more rain than a small one, and so you’d have to somehow specify how wide the collection area was. It really bugged me as a kid because I was sure the values they were collecting were meaningless.
But I didn’t realize that volume/collection area would just leave height. It doesn’t matter if your collector is a thin cylinder or a wide rectangular trough. It cancels out.
Replications of Piaget’s studies with other cultures have shown that the environment has more influence on stages of development than previously thought. Pierre Dasen’s study demonstrated that Aboriginal children acquire the concept of conservation much later than European children. His research even showed that some Aboriginal adults did not have conversation. However, on spatial/mapping tasks, the Aborigines came out ahead of the Europeans.
If we think about the traditional Aboriginal environment and lifestyle (hunter-gatherers in an area with sparse rainfall, no vessels to carry water), it makes sense that they would not develop conservation.
I was just thinking about that question this morning, and wondering why the idea of different volumes of water would be so different than similar shaped objects. It’s obvious that at 21 months, toddlers do not have a consistent grasp of “bigger,” but at 46 months they do. (Actually, we before that, but I’m using the age of my experimentees.) A three-year-old will consistently pick out bigger and smaller cookies if they are the same shape, but have more difficulty if one is a flat cookie and the other is a “glob” or dome-shaped cookie, to use our Tokyo Child Development Specialist’s terminology.
I wonder that if we lived in a culture which spent a lot of time pouring water from one container to another, if the child would develop that ability earlier, and if so, how much earlier?
I also don’t know if this invalidates the basic concept of Piaget’s studies, but rather means that there is an environmental aspect which also needs to be taken into consideration.
Dansen’s view has been that his cross cultural studies validated Piaget’s theories. The hierarchal stages were found to be universal and reflective of deep structural cognitive processes. The exact rate was cultural dependent within ranges.
Are we sure? Because there’s an old joke about a village idiot who was constantly offered a choice between a nickel and a dime so they could laugh at him behind his back when he took the bigger one. When someone finally privately asked him why, he said, “The minute I take the dime, they’re going to stop playing the game.”
Maybe the three year olds have figured out that the minute they consistently estimate the volume of a three dimensional shape the cookies quit coming.
I’m pretty sure that this is joking, but if you know three-year-olds, you don’t see that level of sophistication yet. I don’t remember the exact terminology, but it’s the ability to see the world from another person’s point of view. Maybe “other minds?”
They do experiments where two people are there in a room and they hid something in a box. One person leaves and the other person moves the object. They then ask the child where the other person will look for the object, and three year olds will point to the new hiding place.
We see it with hide and seek. Right now, Beta-chan believes that the game is about knowing where a person is, and pretending to look for them (which is what I have to do, as her hiding places aren’t that clever) rather than really hiding, which requires understanding that the other person don’t know everything you do.
You are referencing “Theory of Mind”, the ability to imagine seeing the world from the other’s POV, to have a theory that the other has a mind and to imagine what that mind is experiencing.
Some elements of Theory of Mind are extant before three-years-old, albeit not usually enough to have that sophisticated level of manipulation.
You also see it in how kids play, initially pretty much ignoring other babies or more so treating them as objects, then"parallel play", aware of the other child and imitating them to some degree but not really playing together, to true interactive play as Theory of Mind emerges.
Theory of Mind underlays both empathy and the ability to out-manipulate others; kind of interesting that.
And Theory of Mind is tied up with the ability to lie. Up until around 3, the kids assume you have the same knowledge they do (like with the hiding TokyoBayer referenced (I thought it was going to be so confusing having two dopers with such similar names and I’ve only just got that they’re the same person updated!)).
My dad tells the story of me at around that age, right on the borderline - refusing to say if I’d tidied my room because I knew he’d be angry. I didn’t think of saying yes, but I knew that if he was asking, he wasn’t sure.
It’s apparently a recognised milestone and we should be dead proud when our kids start lying like dogs.
I parallel played with my younger sister. To this day she remembers me as being the fun(read peaceable) one to play with. Our older brother wanted to dictate the terms of play, so the two of them would squabble.
When I outgrew parallel play, I stopped playing, or only played by myself.
Pertinent fact: older brother is 13 months older than I, younger sister is 34 months younger(2 months short of 3 years).
The development period I am referencing of is when she was about 7-8, and he was 11-12. For completeness sake, I was about 10.
Left Hand, so far your argument consists of insults and a magical ability to understand the inner workings of the juvenile mind based on proximity. I take this to mean you don’t understand the work that you are citing. Your examples again contradict your own assertion. In this thread you’ve now stated a virtual miracle where a group of children who had not reached the stage of mental development you claim exists, suddenly within a few minutes reach that stage. All of them at exactly the same time, quite remarkable.
Now let’s start with your initial claim, that young children do not understand the principle of conservation of volume because their brains are not sufficiently developed to comprehend it. You offer as the means of proofthis test. I’ll take it that the video is nothing but a dramatic presentation, because otherwise it is unscientific drivel. Since you are an expert on Piaget I’m sure you can tell me in detail the specific methodology he used, so why don’t you start there? Are you able to see the flaws in the video clip you present as a valid test of something? And can you explain how a valid test of this nature determines something about the development stages of a child’s mind? All I see is a test designed to obtain a specific answer from children too young to participate in the test because they lack the requisite background knowledge. Even if using valid methodology, there is no way that test can determine why a child would or would not know the answer.
All that is needed to disprove your claim is a single child who can give the ‘correct’ answer after having the principle explained to them. Can you, based on your in depth knowledge of this theory, describe how the attempts to disprove were conducted. I’d be surprised if you can, because your own anecdote disproves your theory.
You have the opportunity to show you understand the theory you claim I don’t. I don’t claim to have any knowledge of it, so if I lack understanding, that would be completely understandable. But you haven’t yet demonstrated an understanding of the thing you claim to be expert on.
Well, no, that would simply establish the amazing existence of a highly unusual and precocious kid who somehow developed far in advance of all other kids. It would be fascinating, but it wouldn’t really disprove the idea. Exceptional cases are fascinating, but they don’t necessarily disprove general rules. You can sometimes find nine year old kids doing integral calculus, but it doesn’t disprove the rule that calculus is a high-school/college course.
I’m not quite sure what your major point is in this thread, but Piaget, while dated, still is held in admiration and approval by most scientists studying the idea. Object permanence and the concept of volume, and a lot of other signs of abstract thinking, tend to appear, quite suddenly, in children, at about the age of two and a half.
Scientific American had an article on the “doll house model of this room” experiment. At about age two and a half, kids suddenly realized, “Wait, that doll house model is of this very room I’m in!” Below that age, they never understood that. By a later age, such as we adults, it’s painfully obvious. But it is right about that age – two and a half – that the light bulb goes on, and “abstract thought” becomes possible.
I understand your point about disproof. That was my lead in to a more in depth discussion about the nature of this type of science. This is an area where both proof and disproof are elusive. I am not criticizing Piaget either, because I still know nothing material about his work. Also, your age of 2 1/2 is about half the age the experts have told me is the age that developmental stage is reached. However, 2 1/2 is about the age where you see children begin to actually reason at all, and they can participate in any kind of testing at all (though I doubt with reliable results for any but simple matters).
All I’ve stated from the beginning of an old squabble on this subject is this: If a person doesn’t know something, it’s because they haven’t learned it. To claim it is based on a stage of mental development requires more than an obviously flawed testing technique.
In contrast to what, exactly?
My daughter is almost four. She understands that I am an American, that her mother is Taiwanese and we live in Japan. She knows that Daddy, his family and some of his friends speak English, her mother, her mother’s family and some of her mother’s friends speak Chinese. Almost everyone else speaks Japanese.
She knows that two cookies are more than one cookie. If I separate legos into two unequal piles, she can pick out the larger one 100% of the time as well as correctly identify if they are the same, without needing me to give leading questions.
I’ve just talking about this to give a background level of abilities. She’s reasonably intelligent and doesn’t seem to have any learning disabilities.
If we fill two similar cups (A and B) of water she will correctly identify that they are the same 100% of the time, without fail.
If we then have her pour one cup “A” into another one which is taller and skinnier, then she will incorrectly say that the taller one has more. She says this 100% of the time.
When we pour the water back into “A” she will then correctly say the two cups are the same. It doesn’t seem to bother her that she believes that the volumes are changing.
OK, now my question to you, and I offer her services to conduct any reasonable experiment, is how exactly is she supposed to learn that the amounts are the same, regardless if they are in different sized cups? She’s the one pouring the water. She should see that no extra gets added or any removed.
What would be a valid test or are you claiming there isn’t a way? If so, why is she correctly able to tell which has more when the cups are identical?
What I would emphasize is that, in some cases, the mind is too young to be able to learn it. The stage of mental development really does make a difference. It is simply not possible to teach a very, very young child things like object permanence, conservation of volume, or how to see another person’s viewpoint.
I wish I had a pointer to the Scientific American article.
(They also had one on autism, where they showed that some kids – autistic kids – don’t learn “another person’s point of view” at the age that other kids do. Very haunting article.)