Piaget’s Preoperational Stage (Ages 2-7)

The preoperational period is divided into two stages:

Symbolic Function Substage 

Typically occurring between the ages of 2 and 4, this period is characterized by the emergence of a child’s ability to use symbols to represent objects, people, and events that are not physically present in their immediate environment.

Children in this stage can use symbols to represent objects and ideas, such as language, drawings, and pretend play. This allows for more complex thought processes and understanding of abstract concepts.

1. Symbolic Representation

The early preoperational period (ages 2-3) is marked by a dramatic increase in children’s use of the symbolic function.

This is the ability to make one thing – a word or an object – stand for something other than itself.

Symbolic representation allows children to think about objects, people, or events that are not physically present.

This ability lays the foundation for language development, imaginative play, and later academic skills like reading and mathematics.

Early in this stage, children might use objects that closely resemble what they’re representing (e.g., a toy phone for a real phone).

As they progress, they become more flexible, using objects that are less similar to what they’re representing (e.g., a banana as a phone).

By the end of this stage, children can use purely mental symbols without physical props.

Manifestations of symbolic representation:

• Language use: Words become symbols for objects, actions, or ideas. For example, the word “dog” represents the concept of a dog, even when no dog is present.
• Object substitution: Children use objects to represent other things in play. A block might become a phone, or a stick might become a magic wand.
• Drawing: Children begin to create marks on paper that represent people, objects, or ideas, even if these aren’t recognizable to adults.
• Gestures: Children use movements to represent actions or objects, like pretending to drink from an imaginary cup.

However, Piaget (1951) argues that language does not facilitate cognitive development, but merely reflects what the child already knows and contributes little to new knowledge.

He believed cognitive development promotes language development, not vice versa.

2. Early Forms of Animism

Animism refers to the tendency of young children to attribute life-like qualities, consciousness, or intentions to inanimate objects.

As children begin to use symbols and engage in pretend play, they often start attributing life-like qualities to their toys and other objects.

For example, inanimate objects such as toys and teddy bears have human feelings and intentions. A child might believe their stuffed animal has feelings and needs to be comforted. They might talk to toys as if they can hear and understand

Animistic thinking often enhances pretend play, as children can more easily imagine their toys as living characters.

This, in turn, can make pretend play more complex and engaging for the child. It allows children to practice perspective-taking and empathy, even if applied to inanimate objects.

Characteristics of early animism:

• Broad application: At this stage, children might consider almost anything to be alive, especially if it moves or seems to have a purpose.
• Emotional connection: Objects that are important to the child (like favorite toys) are more likely to be perceived as having feelings or intentions.
• Lack of consistent criteria: The child’s judgments about what is “alive” are often inconsistent and based on immediate perceptions.

3. Pretend (or symbolic) Play

Pretend play involves children using their imagination to create scenarios, roles, and environments that differ from their immediate reality.

It’s a clear manifestation of the child’s growing ability to use mental representations and symbols.

Toddlers often pretend to be people they are not (e.g. superheroes, policeman), and may play these roles with props that symbolize real-life objects. Children may also invent an imaginary playmate.

“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” (Bornstein, 1996, p. 293).

Characteristics of pretend play:

• Object substitution: Children use objects to represent other things (e.g., a cardboard box becomes a spaceship).
• Role-playing: Children take on different personas, often mimicking adult roles or fantasy characters.
• Imaginary scenarios: They create and act out fictional situations.
• Symbolic actions: Children perform actions that represent more complex activities (e.g., moving a toy car along the floor to represent driving).

Role in overcoming egocentrism:

While children in this stage are still largely egocentric, pretend play provides opportunities to begin seeing things from other viewpoints.

As play becomes more social, children must negotiate roles and scenarios with peers, gradually developing a more nuanced understanding of others’ perspectives.

4. Parallel Play

Parallel play refers to a stage of play where children play alongside each other, but not directly with each other.

They may be in close proximity and even engaged in similar activities, but there’s little to no interaction between them.

Parallel play is typically observed in toddlers, around 2-3 years old, though it can extend into the early preschool years.

It allows children to observe and learn from peers without the pressure of direct social interaction.

Each child is absorbed in their own private world, and speech is egocentric. That is to say the main function of speech at this stage is to externalize the child’s thinking rather than to communicate with others.

During parallel play, children often engage in self-talk or narrate their own activities. This self-directed speech helps develop language skills and internalize thought processes.

As yet, the child has not grasped the social function of either language or rules.

Characteristics of parallel play:

• Children play independently, even when in a group setting.
• They may use similar toys or engage in similar activities.
• There’s minimal social interaction, though they may occasionally glance at or imitate each other.
• Children are more focused on their own play than on what others are doing.

Intuitive Thought substage

The intuitive thought substage, occurring between ages 4-7, is part of Piaget’s preoperational stage of cognitive development.

During this period, children rely heavily on intuition and perception to understand their world. They exhibit characteristics such as egocentrism, centration, and animism.

While their thinking becomes more symbolic and language use expands, they still struggle with logical reasoning, conservation, and reversibility of actions.

1. Centration

Centration refers to the tendency of young children to focus on only one aspect of a situation or object while ignoring other potentially relevant features. It’s the inability to consider multiple aspects simultaneously.

When a child can focus on more than one aspect of a situation, at the same time, they have the ability to decenter.

For example, children might categorize objects based on a single feature (e.g., color) while ignoring other relevant attributes (e.g., shape or size).

Alternatively, a child might judge the fairness of a situation based on a single factor, overlooking other important considerations.

The inability to mentally reverse actions (irreversibility) is often a result of centration on the end state of a process.

During this stage, children have difficulties thinking about more than one aspect of any situation at the same time; and they have trouble decentering in social situations just as they do in non-social contexts.

Key characteristics of centration:

• Single-focus attention: Children concentrate on one salient feature while neglecting others.
• Lack of reversibility: Difficulty in mentally reversing actions or considering alternative perspectives.
• Perceptual dominance: Judgments are often based on how things appear rather than logical reasoning.

As children move towards the concrete operational stage (around age 7), they gradually develop the ability to decenter – consider multiple aspects simultaneously.

2. Egocentrism

Egocentrism refers to the child’s inability to see a situation from another person’s point of view. The egocentric child assumes that other people see, hear, and feel exactly the same as the child does.

It’s not selfishness, but rather a cognitive limitation in perspective-taking.

In the developmental theory of Jean Piaget, this is a feature of the preoperational child. Children’s thoughts and communications are typically egocentric (i.e., about themselves).

For example, egocentric children have difficulty understanding why others might be upset or happy when they are not. They experience challenges in empathy as they struggle to put themselves in others’ shoes.

In tasks like Piaget’s Three Mountains experiment, children struggle to describe how a scene looks from a different vantage point.

While it’s a limitation, egocentrism also serves a purpose in cognitive development. It allows children to solidify their own understanding of the world before considering multiple perspectives.

Key characteristics of egocentrism:

• Difficulty distinguishing between their own and others’ perspectives.
• Assumption that others see, think, and feel exactly as they do.
• Challenges in understanding that others might have different information or beliefs.

The development of “theory of mind” (understanding that others have different thoughts and beliefs) is a key factor in overcoming egocentrism.

3. More Developed Forms of Animism

In the symbolic function substage (ages 2-4), animism is broad and undifferentiated. The child believes that almost everything is alive and has a purpose.

During the intuitive thought substage (ages 4-7), animistic thinking becomes more nuanced and selective. Only objects that move have a purpose.

Children at this stage often use “if-then” logic: “If it moves, then it must be alive.”

Their judgments are based primarily on observable features rather than underlying biological principles.

For example, a car might be considered alive because it moves. A toy robot that moves might be considered alive, while a stationary doll is not.

This may lead to misconceptions about natural phenomena (e.g., thinking wind is alive because it moves things).

Stationary living things (like sleeping animals) might be mistakenly classified as non-living.

As children approach 7-8 years old, they begin to refine their criteria further, leading to the next stage where only things that move on their own are considered alive.

4. Artificialism

Artificialism is the belief that natural phenomena and objects are created by human beings or a human-like entity for a specific purpose.

Children at this stage tend to view the world as centered around human needs and experiences, leading them to attribute human-like intentions and creations to natural phenomena.

For instance, a child might believe that the sun exists solely to provide light for people, unable to conceive of a world not designed with humans in mind.

Characteristics of artificialism:

• Attribution of human creation to natural phenomena.
• Belief in purposeful design of natural objects and events.
• Tendency to see the world as existing to serve human needs.

Children’s egocentricity, coupled with their inherent finalism (the belief that everything has a purpose), leads them to view nature as serving human needs. They reason that if the sun provides warmth and the moon illuminates the night, they must have been created for those purposes by humans.

Another crucial factor of artificialism is children’s limited understanding of causality. At this stage, their grasp of cause-and-effect relationships is still developing, which leads them to create simplified, often human-centered explanations for complex natural processes.

Without a mature understanding of scientific principles, children fill in the gaps with explanations that make sense to them based on their limited experience.

This might result in beliefs such as rain falling because someone in the sky is watering the earth, or mountains existing because giants piled up rocks.

The decline of artificialism coincides with children’s progression toward the concrete operational stage, where they begin to grasp concepts like conservation, reversibility, and logical reasoning.

This newfound cognitive flexibility allows them to decenter their perspective, consider multiple viewpoints, and develop more objective and scientific explanations for the natural world.

5. Irreversibility

Irreversibility refers to the inability of children to mentally reverse a sequence of events or operations.

This is the inability to mentally reverse the direction of a sequence of events to their starting point.

In other words, they struggle to understand that actions can be undone or that objects can return to their original state after undergoing a change.

For instance, children might struggle to understand that if a ball of clay is rolled into a snake, it can be rolled back into a ball.

Examples of Irreversibility:

Conservation tasks: a child might believe that when water is poured from a short, wide glass into a tall, narrow one, there is more water in the taller glass.

They struggle to mentally reverse the pouring action and understand that the amount of water remains the same.

Spatial reasoning: A child might have difficulty understanding that a route taken from point A to point B can be reversed to get back from B to A.

Logical operations: If a child sees a row of coins spread out, they might think there are more coins than when the same coins are grouped closely together.

They can’t mentally reverse the spreading action to recognize the quantity remains unchanged.

Key Characteristics of Irreversibility:

• Difficulty in mentally reversing actions or transformations
• Inability to recognize the conservation of quantity, mass, or volume
• Challenges in understanding that processes can be bidirectional

As children move towards the concrete operational stage (around age 7), they gradually develop the ability to mentally reverse operations

This development is crucial for more advanced logical thinking and problem-solving skills.

6. Social Play

During the intuitive thought substage, which typically spans ages 4-7, children’s social play undergoes significant development.

This period marks a transition from the more solitary and parallel play of earlier years to increasingly interactive and complex social play. 

Children begin to engage in cooperative play, where they work together towards common goals or shared imaginative scenarios. This is a significant shift from the parallel play of earlier years.

Imaginative (pretend) play becomes more elaborate. Children take on specific roles (e.g., doctor, teacher, parent) and create complex scenarios. This type of play helps develop social understanding and perspective-taking skills.

Simple games with basic rules start to emerge. While understanding and following rules can be challenging due to egocentrism, children begin to grasp the concept of structured play.

Children start negotiating roles, rules, and scenarios in their play. This process, while often fraught with disagreements, is crucial for developing social skills and understanding others’ perspectives.

Play becomes an important context for learning to manage emotions, especially when dealing with winning, losing, or not getting a desired role in pretend play.

The Three Mountains Task

Jean Piaget used the three mountains task (see picture below) to test whether children were egocentric. Egocentric children assume that other people will see the same view of the three mountains as they do.

According to Piaget, at age 7, thinking is no longer egocentric, as the child can see more than their own point of view.

Aim: Piaget and Inhelder (1956) wanted to find out at what age children decenter – i.e. become no longer egocentric.

Method: A child is shown a display of three mountains; the tallest mountain is covered with snow. On top of another are some trees, and on top of the third is a church. The child stands on one side of the display, and there is a doll on the other side of it.

The child was allowed to walk round the model, to look at it, then sit down at one side. A doll is then placed at various positions on the table.

The child is shown pictures of the scene from different viewpoints and asked to select the view that best matched what the doll can “see”.

The child is then shown 10 photographs of the mountains taken from different positions, and asked to indicate which showed the doll’s view.

Piaget assumed that if the child correctly picked out the card showing the doll’s view, s/he was not egocentric. Egocentrism would be shown by the child who picked out the card showing the view s/he saw.

Findings – Typically a four years old child reports what can be seen from her perspective and not what can be seen from the doll’s perspective.

Six years old were more aware of other viewpoints but still tended to choose the wrong one. This shows egocentrism as the child assumed that the doll “saw” the mountains as he did

Four year-olds almost always chose a picture that represented what they could see and showed no awareness that the doll’s view would be different from this.

Six year-olds frequently chose a picture different from their own view but rarely chose the correct picture for the doll’s point of view. Only seven- and eight-year-olds consistently chose the correct picture.

Conclusion – At age 7, thinking is no longer egocentric as the child can see more than their own point of view.

Evaluation – It has been suggested that Piaget’s tasks at this stage may have underestimated the child’s abilities due to a number of factors, including complicated language, unfamiliar materials, lack of context, and children misinterpreting the experimenter’s intention.

More recent studies have attempted to ask questions more clearly and to present situations to which children can relate
more easily.

Critical Evaluation

Policeman Doll Study

Martin Hughes (1975) argued that the three mountains task did not make sense to children and was made more difficult because the children had to match the doll’s view with a photograph.

Hughes devised a task which made sense to the child. He showed children a model comprising two intersecting walls, a “boy” doll and a “policeman” doll. He then placed the policeman doll in various positions and asked the child to hide the boy doll from the policeman.

Hughes did this to make sure that the child understood what was being asked of him, so if s/he made mistakes they were explained and the child tried again. Interestingly, very few mistakes were made.

The experiment then began. Hughes brought in a second policeman doll, and placed both dolls at the end of two walls, as shown in the illustration above.

The child was asked to hide the boy from both policemen, in other words, he had to take account of two different points of view.

Hughes” sample comprised children between three and a half and five years of age, of whom 90 percent gave correct answers. Even when he devised a more complex situation, with more walls and a third policeman, 90 percent of four-year-olds were successful.

This shows that children have largely lost their egocentric thinking by four years of age, because they are able to take the view of another.

Hughes” experiment allowed them to demonstrate this because the task made sense to the child, whereas Piaget’s did not. Suggesting that differences in “meaning” children ascribe to a situation might cause them to pass or fail a task.

The ‘Turntable’ Task

In Borke’s (1975) test of egocentrism, the child is given two identical models of a three-dimensional scene (several different scenes were used including different arrangements of toy people and animals and a mountain model similar to Piaget and Inhelder’s).

One of the models is mounted on a turntable so
it can easily be turned by the child.

After a practice session where the child is familiarized with the materials and the idea of looking at things from another person’s point of view, a doll is introduced (in Borke’s study it was the character Grover from ‘Sesame Street’, a program the children were familiar with).

The Grover doll was placed so it was ‘looking’ at the model from a particular vantage point and the child was invited to turn the other model around until its view of the model matched what Grover would be able to see.

Borke (1975) found, using the ‘mountains’ model three-year-olds selected a correct view 42% of the time and four-year-olds selected the right view 67% of the time. With other displays, the three-years-old accuracy increased to 80% and the four-year-olds’ to 93%.

Limitations in the Child’s Thinking

Piaget focused most of the description of this stage on limitations in the child’s thinking, identifying a number of mental tasks which children seem unable to do.

These include the inability to decenter, conserve, understand seriation (the inability to understand that objects can be organized into a logical series or order) and to carry out inclusion tasks.

Children in the preoperational stage are able to focus on only one aspect or dimension of problems (i.e. centration). For example, suppose you arrange two rows of blocks in such a way that a row of 5 blocks is longer than a row of 7 blocks.

Preoperational children can generally count the blocks in each row and tell you the number contained in each. However, if you ask which row has more, they will likely say that it is the one that makes the longer line, because they cannot simultaneously focus on both the length and the number. This inability to decenter contributes to the preoperational child’s egocentrism.

Conservation is the understanding that something stays the same in quantity even though its appearance changes. To be more technical, conservation is the ability to understand that redistributing material does not affect its mass, number or volume.

The ability to solve this and other “conservation” problems signals the transition to the next stage.

So, what do these tasks tell us about the limitations of preoperational thought in general?

Piaget drew a number of related conclusions:

1. Understanding of these situations is “perception bound”. The child is drawn by changes in the appearance of the materials to conclude that a change has occurred.
2. Thinking is “centered” on one aspect of the situation. Children notice changes in the level of water or in the length of clay without noticing that other aspects of the situation have changed simultaneously.
3. Thinking is focused on states rather than on transformations. Children fail to track what has happened to materials and simply make an intuitive judgment based on how they appear “now”.
4. Thinking is “irreversible” in that the child cannot appreciate that a reverse transformation would return the material to its original state. Reversibility is a crucial aspect of the logical (operational) thought of later stages.

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