Suspension of school classes does not stop learning. On 3 April 2020, Dr Bonnie CHOW, Associate Professor of Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, was invited by City University’s Office of the Provost to conduct an online lecture titled “Psychology of Children - Understanding How Children Think” for local secondary students.
There are different specialities in psychology, such as clinical psychology, social psychology, and the subject of the lecture was developmental psychology, which studies the cognitive development of people over the course of their life. The lecture concerned with infants and children only, though this field can be expanded to adolescents, adults and the elderly.
Dr Chow started by introducing the Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, which describes the four stages of the development of human intelligence: sensorimotor (from birth to age 2), preoperational (from ages 2 to 7), concrete operational (from ages 7 to 11), and formal operational (from age 11 onwards). She particularly explained the preoperational stage, in which children can do things mentally rather than physically. Children acquire the ability to mentally represent an object that is not present in reality. They can pretend objects from the real world with less realistic toys or objects, like using a banana as a phone, in make-believe play. Later, they can even imagine objects and events without any support from the real world.
However, children in this stage still have a limitation of thought. They believe that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities (animism) and cannot distinguish their own perspectives from someone else’s perspectives (egocentrism). They also lack the concept of conservation, meaning they are not aware that altering a substance’s appearance does not change its basic properties. This theory was illustrated with a video clip of three classic experiments. In one of them, a child is shown two identical glasses A and B with the same amount of water. Then, water in glass B is poured into a wider but shorter glass C. The child cannot tell glass A and C now have the same amount of water as he focuses on one of the changed dimensions (the height or the width, but not both) only.
Dr Chow also mentioned the Vygotsky’s theory, which states that children think and understand the world primarily through social interaction. According to the theory, language plays an important role in children development as it is used for social communication.
The lecture session ended with an overview of the theory of mind. It concerns with the ability to acknowledge the different beliefs of people, which children start to develop at around three years old. Children younger than seven years old usually think there is only one right answer to a question and cannot accept different opinions. Children will have a better theory of mind if they interact with parents and siblings more frequently, engage in pretend play, have better executive function and better language skills.
Then it came to the Q&A session. Students raised questions regarding the new knowledge they learnt in the lecture, as well as the study path and career prospects of psychology graduates. In addition to answering the queries, Dr Chow also stressed that having high language proficiency is as important as being good at mathematics for psychology students, as this subject involves reading a lot of journal publications and also a substantial amount of statistical works.
Cover photo: Engaging in make-believe or pretend play helps children build essential social skills and promote their cognitive development.
