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Essay / The Importance of Child Development - 706
Early childhood thinking is quite underdeveloped compared to that of an adult brain. Preoperational intelligence, the second part of cognitive development, includes play and learning to manipulate symbols, language and imagination as well as logical and operational thinking (Berger, 2014). Throughout this symbolic stage, the ability to use symbols to represent things and animism develops, the belief that inanimate objects and magical figures are alive, but as the mind matures, the animism will disappear slowly but surely. During this period, logic and realism are not present due to Piaget's four factors: concentration, emphasis on appearance, static reasoning, and irreversibility. Piaget demonstrates that children are irrational, they concentrate on an idea, they ignore attributes that are not apparent, they live in a world where they believe that nothing changes, making death a non-permanent act and finally they have tendency to reject what they don't like. even if it changed to please them again (Berger, 2014). To help understand how children reject logic at this age, conservation is defined as the observation that notable quantities do not vary when their shapes are changed. An example of this is when you add the same amount of liquid into different sized glasses, allowing all four characteristics of pre-operational intelligence to fail in this task.