Early childhood thinking is quite underdeveloped compared to that of an adult brain. Pre-operational intelligence, the second part of cognitive development, includes play and learning to manipulate symbols, language and imagination, but also logical and operational thinking (Berger, 2014). During this symbolic phase, however, one develops the ability to use symbols to represent things and animism, the belief that inanimate objects and magical characters are alive, but as the mind matures animism will slowly but surely fade away. During this period the logical and the realistic are not present due to the centering of Piaget's four factors, attention to appearance, static reasoning and irreversibility. Piaget demonstrates that children are irrational, they focus on one idea, they ignore attributes that are not evident, they live in a world where they believe that nothing changes making death a non-permanent act and finally they tend to reject what they don't even like if it has changed to please them again (Berger, 2014). To help understand how children reject logic at this age is conservation defined as the observation that notable quantities do not vary whenever their shapes change. An example of this is when the same amount of liquid is added to different sized glasses, allowing all four characteristics of pre-operational intelligence to fail in this
tags