Mind and Memory

Mind and Memory do take an important in the preoperational stage.

*Theory of Mind*
The theory of mind usually occurs at 4 years of age. It concludes the idea of the ability to correctly infer the contents of someone elses mind. The reason why it is called as a theory is because the contents of this idea are not directly observable.
As an example the Sally-Anne Test or  in other words the false belief test shows the idea of the theroy of mind.Let's take a look at a video on the false belief test

These children did not developed the theory of mind yet.


On the other hand these child developed the theory of mind.


Important to mention is that autistic children have deficits with this theory, this may be also the reason for their difficulties for understanding and interactions with other. Here is a video of the Sally-Anne Test with an autistic child..



*Memory*
About the memory is to say that the memory of infants, in the preoperational stage, improve their memory dramatically. There are different steps to do so:
1)Recall/Recognition-> remembering with retrieval cues
   -> that means remembering something without cues!
2)Autobiographical memories emerge
3)memories best for familiar items/events
4) Short-term memory and Working memory develop
5)Attention improves

Preoperational Stage

The preoperational stage, is the second stage of cognitive development. Usually it is present between the 2nd and 7th age of an infant. In this stage the child is yet not ready to make reversivle mental actions or any operations. There are different characteristics of the preoperational stage, which I'm gonna explain you know :))

Characteristics of the Preoperational Stage.

1)Inability to fully distinguish between appearance/reality
This characteristic means that children in this stage are not able to differentiate whether the imaginated things and ideas are reality or not.
For example: a little child believes that a creepy monster is living in its wardrobe and because of this it is afraid to sleep in this room.

2)Transductive logic
Children in a preoperational stage make associations between 2 unrelated actions when they occured randomly together. As an example the mother makes a phonecall afterwards she leaves the house to buy for groceries. The child thinks that its mother leaves the house because of the phone call although both aspects are not related to each other.

3)Animism
To animate means to make sth.alive
The idea of animism is that children give an inanimated object animate characteristics of living objects. As an example the sun is smiling, or the door is mean it hurt me let's hit him so he gets hurt too.

4)Conservation
-centration: This concept means that children only focus on 1 aspect. to give this idea an example I put a video for you..

-furthermore children can not comprehend reversible actions, like the video example when the mother tries to show its son that the amount of water is the same...



5)Artificialism
Thıs means that children think that natural occurances are human made. As an example the child think that clouds, the sun, the mountains are all made by human.

6)Egocentrism
In the preoperational stage the child is not able to see from another person's perspective.
For instance the three mountain test

Here is a video to comprehend the idea more efficiently:

Self-Concept

Did you know that children do not have a Self-Concept until they are about 18 months old? The idea of Self-Concept is that shortly knowing who you are, later on what you belief, which gender you have etc., in other words to be able to identify your self. The development of Sef-concept is very important for a child, because it is the beginning of individuation, the child becomes seperate from others and is a single human being.                     Whether children became a self-concept or not can be simply checked, when they identify their selves in a mirror. Parents or researches try this out by putting red rouge on the nose of the child and put it in front of a mirror...Here are some videos to show the difference between a child you get Self-concept and who didn't get it yet...By the way I tried this experiment too and the little babygirl thought it was another girl who has red rouge on the nose, that was really cute, but unfortunately I didn't take that moment on cam....


1) This little girl is still younger than 18 months old, because of this she does not realize that it her in front of the mirror, that's why she doesn't try to wipe off the rouge from her face, or touch her own face.



2) This little boy has developed Self-Concept, because as he sees the make-up in his face in the mirror, he touches his reals face and knows that the rouge is on his face.

End of the semester

Hey guys,

wow I can't believe that one semester is done right now and now I'm preparing for the finals, or let's say I should be learning for the finals =D

Actually I feel a little guilty, because I didn't do my work, like I had planned in the beginning of the semester, but I decides that I'll be still writing on this blog, even when I don't have lectures anymore, there are a lot of things I didn't posted yet and I'm sure there will be a lot of more things that I'll find around and but them later on in my blog. In the second semester we will have adolescence development, I don't know whether our prof. is going to ask us to create a blog there too, but anyhow I think that it might be possible that I share again those info. with you. Now I have to turn back to write my essay, but I think that I'll be back very soon, because sharing info. with you here is also a way to keep these things in my mind, so in other words a way to learn for the finals :P