0:07 today we're going to talk about the development of cognitive and executive function skills across the ages of three and eight we'll talk about themes like pretend or symbolic play how that helps development theory of mind or understanding the motivations and beliefs of others as separate from your own executive function skills and numeracy skills if you remember the children in the solomon islands in the video who built blocks into trucks it turns out that's an example of a phenomenon called pretend play the giants of developmental psychology jean piaget and led vygotsky felt that the ability to engage and pretend play was extremely important to development this is the kind of play where one thing
0:54 stands in for another that's not actually physically present they viewed pretend or symbolic play which is another word for the same idea as separating ideas or things from the words that refer to them and so this is the beginnings of representational thought by preschool age play acting can actually get pretty complex so children can play at for example a market by shopping buying selling negotiating a price and giving change they can resolve a conflict that comes up in everyday life and so they can start doing this by integrating social and cognitive development learning about how to negotiate between different people with
1:41 different kinds of thoughts beliefs and motivations play it turns out is something that can be facilitated and is an important part of supports like pre-primary education early education of course play at home and in communities so can teachers facilitate learning through elaborated play and the answer is yes it turns out that this form of play can be supported when teachers do things like ask kids what they might be feeling when they're engaged for example together playing with blocks or with a game ask them what they're trying to do what they're trying to achieve what their goals are ask children how they might resolve a conflict get multiple points of view
2:26 teachers can ask children for suggestions and feedback they can encourage creativity in alternate ways that children could be working with particular kinds of toys with symbols or with meanings pretend play is a step on the way to abstract representation of ideas which was piaget's next stage of cognitive development this understanding that one thing can represent another is really the basis for a lot of human experience for example in language the role of metaphor in art the role of representational and non-representational imagery in poetry the creative use of language and imagery in movement and dance complex communication about things that aren't again
3:12 physically present all of these are skills that are built in early childhood another fundamental social skill that develops during these years that's related to cognition is understanding that others have thoughts and beliefs that are coming from a different perspective than yours and this is called theory of mind and without theory of mind children actually can't learn how to manage the increasingly complex social interactions of early childhood so as adults we know that others can hold a belief that is technically false because they may be lacking some information so you yourself may have a piece of information that someone else lacks for example and that someone might therefore have what's called a false belief so when do children learn this not
3:58 surprisingly in early childhood simon baron cohen who was a famous developmental psychologist did a very well-known experiment in 1985 showing exactly what age children can learn that others can have these false beliefs so he did an experiment the child was brought into a room with an experimenter a doll named sally and the experimenter showed the preschool-aged child that sally has a marble in a basket in front of her and there's also a box to the side of the basket but sally has put her marble in the basket then the doll sally leaves the room or is taken out of the room and while sally is gone the experimenter moves the marble from the basket to inside the box and when the doll sally comes back the child is asked where will sally look
4:44 for the marble it turns out by age four but not age three most children understand that sally may have a belief that's false that the marble is where she left it not where the child knows it is so understanding that others have different beliefs than yours is key and it seems to develop at least in that sample between the ages of three or four and so it's primarily during this kind of preschool age period of early childhood having the theory of mind to understand that people's beliefs come from a different set of information than yours is key to later social interactions at this period in development we do sometimes also see deficits in theory of mind and autism for example
5:31 is a set of disorders where children have a hard time understanding that others have a different set of perspectives and beliefs than they do turning to another area of cognitive skills executive function skills which sound like something out of business management but they're actually related to some very basic things that children learn how to do at this age how for example do children learn to follow directions how do they learn to pay attention to what a parent or teacher is saying when there's a lot of other stuff going on how do they switch languages depending on who they're talking to there's been a very exciting area of recent research in executive function which is at the intersection of neuroscience and developmental psychology and it
6:17 turns out that executive function is key to both cognitive and socio-emotional development as we'll see in this video from harvard's center on the developing child science tells us that brains minds are built not born and at the center of this dynamic architecture are a set of skills called executive function and self-regulation children's self-regulation and executive function are key ingredients in their lifetime performance it's not just about learning language or learning numbers or learning colors we have to be able to work effectively
7:04 with others with distractions with multiple demands these actually are skills that contribute to the productivity of the american workforce what should you've done next educators i think are looking for just this sort of thing and when we describe what we mean by executive function they say yes that's it that's exactly you know the problem these kids they can tell me these rules but they can't actually use them what's this a toolbox a tool what is executive function safety goggles probably the best way to think about it is sort of like an air traffic control system in the brain
7:54 just like an air traffic control system has to manage lots of airplanes going on lots of runways and really exquisite timing and so on a child has to manage a lot of information and avoid distractions we really think of it as involving working memory and inhibitory control and mental flexibility [Music] take a situation where a child is having to take turns so first of all the child has to have inhibitory control the child has to be able to stop whatever he or she is doing and let the other child take a turn but when it's your turn again you also have to remember
8:39 what it is you're supposed to be doing so that pulls on working memory if the children who are taking the turns after you do something unpredictable you have to be able to adjust what you're going to do next and that requires mental flexibility so we see from this video that executive function can build another area of cognitive development and that is quantitative reasoning or numeracy an important idea to understand young children can learn much more than simply counting and memorizing numbers and quantitative reasoning for example includes concepts of order
9:24 of magnitude learning about shapes but also learning about how shapes can interact and combine in space and the kinds of simpler arithmetic that are the foundation for later math skills just as an example what can children learn with shapes they can compare magnitude of course on big small smaller shapes they can understand the names and properties of shapes they can combine them into composites they could take two triangles and put them together into a square or a trapezoid they can create even more complex combinations so they could take two shapes and turn them into a part of an animal take some other shapes and make a complete animal then these kinds of approaches to spatial skills it turns
10:10 out are related to later skills even language skills in primary school now we've learned a little bit about how children learn how to think about others how to pay attention understand quantity and shapes and space but how does the process of learning these skills vary in different cultures and for example do young children really only learn in preschools or do they also learn in community contexts a developmental psychologist barbara rogoff has spent years observing how children learn in indigenous communities and probably has become most well known for her work in rural mayan communities for example in guatemala some view these communities as being at
10:55 risk so to speak because of low levels of formal education among parents for example but she saw strengths and she in fact saw another way of learning an approach to cognitive development that was based in communities this idea is encompassed in a phrase called intent participation what intent participation means according to rogoff is that children learn through participation in community and household activities rather than in activities that are only intended for their own learning like preschool education for example by helping with chores we could see that the girl on the left learns about ideas of volume and size and weight the boy on the right walking with his
11:42 father from the fields might be learning about counting both the girl and the boy might be learning about calculating time and distance what can a child learn from an older sibling who is washing dishes she could be learning about counting about the order of actions about spatial skills about balance hygiene and following directions one simple daily household routine might be building numeracy and quantitative reasoning physical development executive function and all in the context of a single set of actions so we see here that culture can have a profound influence on learning that a great deal of learning happens outside of formal programs like center-based preschool
12:27 and that learning is really the work of early childhood and happens every moment the child is awake in community contexts and family contexts and networks in the community interacting with objects with foods utensils bottle caps local materials and in interacting with siblings cousins adults and community members and so sometimes we talk about this distinction as the one between formal learning that might happen in settings that are all about the child's learning like preschools but also non-formal learning which happens in the routines of everyday life and community livelihoods i hope you come away from this with some idea that non-formal learning can be very powerful in cultural contexts
