Piaget's Preoperational Stage
Age 2-7 Children become more sophisticated in their use of symbolic thought but are not yet able to use logic Advances: -Symbolic function (ability to use symbols or mental representations such as words, numbers, or images, to which a person has attached meaning) (deferred imitation, pretend play, language) -Symbolic development and spatial thinking (reliably grasp the relationship between pictures, maps or scale models and the objects they represent) (however, as per dual representation hypothesis, children under the age of 3 have difficulty grasping spatial relationships because of the need to keep more than one mental representation in mind at the same time which they cannot do yet) -Causality (understand cause and effect but achieve this reasoning through transduction or mentally linking phenomena (regardless of logic). Ability to use psychological, social-conventional, biological reasoning and logic but only in in familiar situations that they understand already) -Understan...