As babies are developing intentions of their own, what do they understand about the intentions of others? Researchers make a distinction between a child’s under- standing of human agency and of human intention. Agency refers to the ability to act without an external trigger. People and animals have agency because they can act without being pushed or “launched” by some other force, whereas objects require launching. Intention is an internal mental state, such as a plan or a desire, that is the source of an action. Infants begin to understand agency by the end of the 1st year. Just trying to get other people to do things for her, like the baby described in the last paragraph, suggests that a baby has some sense that others are agents. Understanding that other people have intentions, desires, feelings, and so on, and inferring what those intentions might be, appear to be much more difficult achieve- ments. As you will see in the discussion of the preoperational stage, understanding intentions is part of developing a theory of mind, and it is a complex and long- term process (e.g., Sodian, 2011).
Yet, as with other cognitive skills, there appear to be preliminary developments in the understanding of intentions by the end of the 1st year. Using a habituation task, Woodward (1998) found some apparent awareness of the goal-directedness (intentionality) of human action even in babies as young as 6 months. In her study, babies saw an actor’s arm reach for one of two toys that were side-by-side on a platform. Say, for example, that the arm reached for the toy on the left. The sequence was repeated until the babies habituated. Then, the position of the toys was switched, so that the toy that had been on the left was now on the right. The babies now witnessed one of two events. In the first event, the actor reached for the same toy as before, but the actor’s arm had to reach in a different direction (to the right in our example) because the toys had been switched. In other words, the actor’s goal remained the same—to pick up the same toy. In the second event, the actor reached for a new toy that was now in the original location (on the left in our example). Babies dishabituated more to the second event, as though they were surprised by the change in goal. The change in the direction of movement in the
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Publishing ServicesSuppose you see this word: Green. And suppose I ask you to tell me what the word says. Your response would be immediate: You would automatically read the word. Now suppose that I ask you to tell me the color of the ink the word is printed in. Your response in this case would probably be a little slower and would require more effort. Most people feel that they have to inhibit the automatic tendency to read the color named by the word in order to name the color of the ink. This kind of voluntary inhibition of a dominant response is an example of executive functions (EFs) at work. EFs are “. . . a set of abilities required to effortfully guide behavior toward a goal, espe- cially in nonroutine situations” (Banich, 2009, p. 89). In other words, they are the cognitive skills that allow us to control and regulate our attention and behavior, making cognitive tasks such as planning and problem solving possible (see Zelazo, Muller, Frye, & Marcovitch, 2003; Fuhs & Day, 2011).
The three fundamental skills most often described as EFs are working memory, self-regulation (or inhibitory control), and cognitive flexibility. The color naming task above, which is a version of the widely used “Stroop Task,” requires all of these skills. First, in order to name the color of the ink, you must hold in mind the goal. Working memory is the part of our cognitive system that holds information that we are actively thinking about at the mo- ment. You can also think of it as “short-term memory.” Consider Piaget’s claim that a preschooler’s thinking is initially “centered,” tending to focus on one thought at a time. A modern version of this idea re-interprets centering as a working memory limitation: A preschooler’s working memory has a very limited capacity (e.g., Case, 1985). A simple way to test working memory capacity is to use a digit span test: Present a series of digits and ask a child to say the digits back in the correct order. Four-year-olds can gener- ally recall 2 to 3 digits correctly, 12-year-olds about 6 digits, and average adults about 7 digits. Estimates for younger children are harder to validate, but 2-year-olds seem to be able to hold in mind only about 1 digit (e.g., Cowan, 2001; Gathercole, 1998). Infants and toddlers do seem to be somewhat handicapped by the limitations of their working memories.
The Stroop Test clearly requires self–regulation or inhibitory con- trol: the ability to prevent yourself from making a dominant or au- tomatic response and/or to make yourself perform a nondominant response (Cameron Ponitz et al., 2008; Rueda et al., 2005). Choosing to pay attention to the color of the ink requires you to deliberately ignore distractions and inhibit the tendency to read the word. Finally, the Stroop Test makes you purposefully shift your goals or attention from what you are accustomed to, those dominant expectations and responses, to different ones, which is the hallmark of cognitive flex-
ibility (e.g., McClelland & Cameron, 2012).
The three aspects of executive functioning we have described are difficult to separate (see Zhou, Chen, & Main, 2012). Taking charge of your own behavior in a goal directed way seems to require all three at once. As a result, tasks that researchers use to test any one of these skills in children typically involve the others to some degree, just like the Stroop Test. For example, do you remember the game “Simon Says?” To play, one person acts as a guide, and everyone else is supposed to do what the guide says (e.g., “touch your elbow”) but ONLY if the instruction is preceded by “Simon says.” More complex versions of this game are often used to assess self-regulation, but they also tap work- ing memory and cognitive flexibility. In one version, “Head, Shoulders, Knees, Toes” (Cameron Ponitz et al., 2008) children follow the directions of the guide as in Simon Says, but the rules require that children do the opposite of what the guide says. When the guide says touch your head, the rule is to touch your toes and vice versa. When the guide says touch your shoulders, the rule is to touch your knees and vice versa. For children to be successful, their working memories must keep the rules available; children must inhibit their dominant responses (to do what the words actually say to do) in order to follow the rules; and they must be cognitively flexible just to pay attention to the directions while following the rules (McClelland & Cameron, 2012).
Executive functions typically improve substantially from ages 2 to 5, and studies in several countries, including the United States, T aiwan, China, and South Korea, find that preschoolers’ performance on tests of executive functioning predicts their later academic progress (see McClelland & Cameron, 2012). The improvement of executive func- tions during the preschool years seems to be important for the development of many other social and cognitive skills, such as theory of mind skills (e.g., Carlson, Moses, & Claxton, 2004). But the causal in- fluences seem to work both ways: Other developments in these years help improve executive functioning. For example, as children gain skill at using language, their self-regulation skills also advance. Vygotsky and others have argued that language in the form of private speech is especially important for the development of self-control (Vygotsky & Luria, 1930; see Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory, this chapter).
Remember that influences on development are often bidirec- tional. Inter-relationships among causal processes make develop- ment very complex, but they can also provide a special benefit to helping professionals. It is often possible to make improvements in multiple skill areas by focusing on one or two areas that are inti- mately tied to all of the rest. So, for example, in the Applications section of this chapter, you will read about an intervention called “Tools of the Mind” that uses teacher-guided role play (focusing on theory of mind skills and language practice) to improve children’s executive functions. This intervention helps children make gains in self-regulation, cognitive flexibility, and problem solving in general.
Box 3.3: the Development of executive Functions: the Mind in Charge
first event did not seem to be experienced as particularly new or important. Rather, it was the change in goal that the babies noticed. The same study done with an inanimate rod “reaching” toward the toys did not produce the same results. The babies seemed to expect goal-directedness from humans, but they did not expect it from an inanimate rod. The results of Woodward’s study suggest that although full
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Publishing Servicesunderstanding of human intentions may take a long time, babies appear to have a rudimentary sense that there are significant differences between humans and other objects as early as 6 months.
PresChoolers’ Cognition:
the PreoPerational stage
By the age of 2, children have moved beyond the limits of sensorimotor activity to become thinkers. Instead of responding to the world primarily by connecting sen- sation to action, constantly exercising and adapting reflexive patterns of behavior, children can engage the world on the plane of thought. They understand that objects exist apart from their own perceptions and actions. They can call to mind previously experienced events. They can plan and execute complex behaviors, even behaviors they have not tried before, and they know that humans, unlike objects, are agents of action whose behavior is goal directed. Whereas there are precursors to most or all of these skills even in early infancy, and scientists argue about when the earliest representations actually occur (e.g., Cohen & Cashon, 2006), the flowering of think- ing in the 2nd year of life is indisputable. Among the abilities that toddlers’ thinking permits is the use of symbols (Piaget, 1962). Symbols are stand-ins for other things. Words are symbols; so are the props used in pretend play when they stand for some- thing else, the way a broom stands for a horse when a child gallops around “riding” the broom. To use and understand such symbols, children must be able to mentally represent the things being symbolized. As babies’ representational skills grow, espe- cially over the 2nd year, language skill and pretend play begin to blossom.
In this section, we will highlight some of the cognitive developments of the pre- school years that are launched as the infancy period ends. You will find that Piaget, although celebrating the accomplishments of what he called the “preoperational” or prelogical years, also identified many limitations of children’s early thought. You will also learn that in recent years developmental scientists have focused heavily on exploring the limitations that Piaget identified. Sometimes, the newer data suggest that preschoolers possess greater skill than Piaget may have realized, and some of the newer findings have helped us to specify step-by-step changes in some of the abilities that Piaget first described. You will also see that many significant changes in cognitive functioning through the preschool years are conceptualized by modern researchers as grounded in the development of executive functions (see Box 3.3).