Читать книгу Lifespan Development - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 363

Simple tasks demonstrate that young children are less egocentric than Piaget posited. When a 3-year-old child is shown a card that depicts a dog on one side and a cat on another, and the card is held up between the researcher who can see the cat and the child who can see the dog, the child correctly responds that the researcher can see the cat (Flavell, Everett, Croft, & Flavell, 1981). When the task is relevant to children’s everyday lives (i.e., hiding), their performance suggests that they are not as egocentric as Piaget posited (Newcombe & Huttenlocher, 1992). Other research suggests that 3- to 5-year-old children can learn perspective-taking skills through training and retain their perspective-taking abilities 6 months later (Mori & Cigala, 2016).

Likewise, 3-year-old children do not tend to describe inanimate objects with lifelike qualities, even when the object is a robot that can move (Jipson, Gülgöz, & Gelman, 2016). Most 4-year-old children understand that animals grow, and even plants grow, but objects do not (Backschneider, Shatz, & Gelman, 1993). Sometimes, however, young children provide animistic responses. Gjersoe, Hall, and Hood (2015) suggest an emotional component to animistic beliefs. They found that 3-year-olds attribute mental states to toys to which they are emotionally attached but not to other favorite toys, even those with which they frequently engage in imaginary play. Finally, children show individual differences in their expressions of animism and reasoning about living things, and these differences are linked with aspects of cognitive development such as memory, working memory, and inhibition (Zaitchik, Iqbal, & Carey, 2014).