Browsing by Subject "Child psychology"

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    Animistic thinking in children
    (1966) Stern, Harris Weil
    The objectives of the study were based on constructs which were originally described and studied by Piaget and some of which were studied subsequently by other authors with contradictory results. The four major objectives of the study were: 1. to reexamine the development of children's concepts of life, and, in particular to systematically investigate the relationship between children's errors in classifying items as alive or not alive and their use of different justifications for those classifications , 2. to attempt to elicit precausal explanations from children in response to demonstration items (Piaget ; originally studied precausality in terms of natural objects and events and subsequent experimenters failed to find the precausal forms for demonstrations). 3. to test the hypothesis that children who give pre- causal explanations will have difficulty in learning a causal relationship, even in the face of repeated experience. 4. to test the hypothesis that children who classify inanimate objects as alive (and are hence, animistic) will be the children who also give the greatest number of precausal explanations for demonstrations. 5. to attempt to relate systematic animism and pre- causality to a standardized measure of cognitive development.' In order to study these constructs and the relationships in between them, 96 children between the ages of four and ten years were individually administered a test battery consisting of (1) an animistic questionnaire, consisting of 21 plant, object, and animal items to be classified as alive or not alive; (2) eight demonstrations about which the children were questioned in order to obtain their explanations for what took place; (3) a causal learning task, requiring the children to isolate a particular cause for the outcome of an event, given a number of trials and some directly relevant, extra experience and (4) the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. The major findings were: 1. that reduction of animism in children is associated with the identification of life with animals' and their characteristics. This association leads children to classify plants as well as objects as not alive, since plants have none of the more obvious characteristics of animals (locomotion, sensation, vocalization), and, it is only at some later stage, when life is identified with more general characteristics (need for air, water, food; death, birth, reproduction), that plants are again classified as alive. 2. Young children do indeed give precausal, non-mechanical explanations for demonstrations. The study suggests that Piaget's particular categories of precausal thought may not have universal validity for all kinds of events or for all children, but that the general characteristics of these explanations which he described (lack of attention to details of how things happen, lack of understanding of temporal sequences of events, and the lack of understanding of the need for spatial contact for the transfer of energy and motion) are found in the explanations of many young children, even for demonstration and mechanical events. 3. Children who gave precausal explanations for the causal learning task did fail to learn the correct cause-effect relationship. 4. There was no support for Piaget's theory that animism, or the attribution of life to objects, has a direct relationship to precausal explanations. In the present study, animistic children were not more likely to use precausal explanations than were non-animistic children.
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    Perceptual and verbal mediation in the concept learning of children
    (1963) McConnell, Owen Link, 1933-
    Some investigators have proposed that concept learning in humans can best be explained in terms of internalized processes mediating between the external stimulus and overt response. This approach contrasts with "single-unit" theory, emphasizing direct association between stimulus and response. Some psychologists advocate the developmental hypothesis that single-unit theory applies to lower organisms but that mediational theory holds for advanced organisms. Comparative psychological studies have yielded inconclusive findings with respect to this hypothesis. Some investigators have tried to experimentally influence the hypothesized mediating process by teaching subjects verbalizations which could serve as mediating responses. In general, findings suggest that older children utilize verbal mediators more readily than younger children. The current investigation stems from interest in whether young children have a specific inability to mediate verbally or a more general deficiency in mediation. Are mediating processes in young children possible on a “sensori-motor” level? The purpose of the present research is to compare younger and older children in their use of perceptual cues as a basis for mediation and in their preferences for perceptual versus verbal cues when these are in conflict. Fifty nursery-school children and seventy-five second-grade children learned two successive discriminations. The stimuli, cylinders varying in size (large-small) and brightness (black-white), were arranged on a tray before a vertical clown's face. The child put one of two stimuli taken from the tray into the clown's mouth and was rewarded, when correct, by the clown's nose blinking, an edible item, and praise. In the first discrimination a large, black cylinder was positive; in the second task the "small" object was rewarded, regardless of brightness. Since the first discrimination was solvable on the basis of either size or brightness (or both), the experimenter could attempt to influence the subject to make a mediating response to a particular dimension. The major experimental variables manipulated for this purpose during the initial discrimination were (1) kind of object arrangement on the tray, and (2) kind of verbal label children applied to the stimuli. The size arrangement, for example, had same-sized objects in proximity; but brightness was randomly distributed. In the size verbalization condition the child was instructed to precede his choices with the appropriate size label, i.e., "big" or "little." Independent groups received the following treatments at each age level: (1) size arrangement, (2) brightness arrangement, (3) size arrangement and brightness verbalization, simultaneously,(4) brightness arrangement and size verbalization, simultaneously, and (5) random arrangement, no verbalization (control). The major dependent variable was the mean number of trials to criterion on the second task, as it was assumed that ease of learning the "small" concept was an index of availability of the size dimension relative to the brightness dimension. The results indicated that both younger and older children responded in a mediational manner to the perceptual arrangements, suggesting that previous findings regarding lack of verbal mediation in young children should not be generalized to include other modes of mediation. The interfering effect of perceptually emphasizing an irrelevant dimension was stronger for younger children than for older children. Older children were more influenced than the younger children by relevant verbal cues. When relevant verbal cues were pitted against irrelevant perceptual cues, the former dominated with older children, but the latter with younger children. Younger children, however, were not influenced as predicted by relevant perceptual cues nor older children by irrelevant verbal cues . These discrepancies were discussed in terms of the nature of the experimental manipulations. It was tentatively concluded, subject to further verification, that younger children favor perceptual mediation and older children verbal mediation.