Preoperational Stage

In the beginning of the lecture on Friday, we talked about self concept and self esteem. Then we started discussing the preoperational stage. We said that the stage is between ages 2-7. We talked about pretend play and how it is important for imaginaton. One thing I now from my own self is that since I am a single-child, I used to play by myself most of the time since I was the only kid in the house. And I can also say that I used to have a very huge imagination. So in class when we said that usually single children and first born children have more pretend play since they have to play with themselves more than others, I saw a reflection from my own life.



Then we discussed the characteristics of this stage. We said that there is difficulty seperating fantasy and reality. We also said that there is egocentrism. I learned that adolescents think of themeselves as unique and they usually say things like “Nothing will happen to me if I do this”. This is called personal fable. There is overdiferentiation of self and others. I also learned a thing called imaginary audience in which adolsecents think that everybody is watching them. When I think of my high school years, I remember that I used to think everyone was watching me too.
Then we talked about animism which means giving inanimate objects feelings, thoughts, intentions. Another term I learned was transductive which means seeing a casual relationship between seperate events. Afterwards, we talked about transductive logic. We said that there is lack of conservation. We talked about two aspects: centration, lack of reversibilty. In centration, we said that the child focuses on one aspect of a problem. The video of the conservation task was a very good example. In the video, the girl was only focusing on the shape of the container but she couldn’t focus on the amount. In lack of reversibilty, we said that since children don’t have this, they don’t have operations.
The last characteristic we talked about was artificialism. We gave examples like “The sky is so blue because someone painted it blue”.
Lastly, we talked about Theory of Mind. We said that the child has a theoryof the content another’s mind. 3 year olds don’t have a theory of mind and otistic children also have a lack of it. We said that there are 2 ways of testing it:
1)False-Belief test - Sally-Anne test:

2)Appereance-Reality Distinction: ex:changing the marker caps
Probably the best part of the lesson was at the end when we watched the video of the Marshmallow Test. I really enjoyed watching it although I still believe that it was very cruel what they did to those children.