Three Mountains Task

4 Key excerpts on "Three Mountains Task"

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  eBook - ePub

  Working with Piaget

  Essays in Honour of Barbel Inhelder

  • Anastasia Tryphon, Jacques Voneche(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  The child’s conception of space quickly divided into two streams. The discussion of the larger of these, the one that came to concern itself with the broad topics of “conceptual”, “social”, and “affective” perspective taking, will be the subject of a later section. For the moment, I mean to restrict attention to the smaller of these separate currents of research, by first considering only those studies that had as their narrow purpose somehow “replicating” or otherwise extending Piaget and Inhelder’s original work dealing with “visual” or “spatial” perspective taking in general, and the Three Mountains Task in particular.

  “Replications” of the Three Mountains Task

  Both early and all along the way, there have been a surprisingly large number (something in the order of 100) of attempts to directly “replicate”, or otherwise “extend”, Piaget and Inhelder’s classic findings with respect to the Three Mountains Task. Before going on to examine some of the details of this work, it seems useful to reflect on the often dim prospects held out for such replication efforts and why, given the general absence of professional incentives for ever doing anything twice, there are any such studies to be found at all. The problem, of course, is that whatever else we may have heard about the virtues of “replication” as a mainstay of the scientific method, the hard reality is typically something quite otherwise: In a professional world where only novelty really sells, any optimistic attempt to replicate anyone’s work, including one’s own, is likely to prove a poor investment. Consequently, when they do appear, what end up being billed as “replications” are rarely the work of one’s “friends” (who wisely suspect that their efforts will be treated dismissively), and are instead much more likely to be the work of one’s professional “enemies” (who often see some profit in gainsaying claims that differ from their own). Given this, much of what tends to be listed under the broad banner of replication studies often ends up looking more like some form of “bear baiting”, better suited to further inciting already committed nay-sayers than actually helping to adjudicate anything. That. I am sorry to report, is not only how things are generally, but also in the present instance, where the bulk of writing about the Three Mountains Task both begins and ends with the premise that the whole of Piaget and Inhelder’s project is so cumbersome and fundamentally flawed that nothing short of beginning again with some other less unruly, or more “minimally complex”, assessment strategy could possibly do.

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  Psychology

  • Ronald Comer, Elizabeth Gould, Adrian Furnham(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  This demonstrates that they could correctly take the perspective of another individual. Why do younger children pass this task but not the Three Mountains Task? One possibility is that the con- text makes more sense to them: they are used to the game of hide and seek, and are therefore able to appropriately engage in the problem. The other is that the Three Mountains Task may also entail an imaginal rotation of viewpoint (i.e. imag- ining your viewpoint gradually changing, or rotating around the scene, until it matches that of another person). This may be much harder for younger children to achieve and there- fore confounds our investigation of their perspective-taking abilities. Tasks such as this one, and McGarrigle and Donaldson’s (1975) Naughty Teddy task, again make the important demonstration that the nature of the task itself may be responsible for the manner in which children respond. Piaget’s Concrete Operational Stage During the stage of concrete operations , children demonstrate the abil- ity to think about ideas. They start to talk authoritatively about complex rela- tionships, such as cause and effect and categorization. They can take others ’ per- spectives and reverse operations. By now, they consider the notion that a cat can mysteriously become a dog ridiculous. They know dogs and cats fit into particu- lar categories, and they can now extend those categories to other organisms that share the same features. Children at this stage show a mastery of real-world rela- tionships. This mastery is limited, however, to ideas that concrete operations Piagetian stage during which children are able to talk about complex relationships, such as categorization and cause and effect, but are still limited to understanding ideas in terms of real-world relationships. EARLY AND MIDDLE CHILDHOOD 63 have real-world counterparts, such as family members, plants and animals, or weather conditions.

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  Cognitive Development

  • Lisa Oakley(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  think was in the bank. Younger children showed egocentricity by answering ‘marbles’. Older children were able to answer ‘money’. They were able to see the piggy bank from another perspective – although they knew it contained marbles, they understood that other people would have a different point of view and assume that, as it was a piggy bank, it contained money.

  In opposition to Piaget

  Bell et al. (1975) found that children were able to complete the Three Mountains Task at an earlier age than Piaget stated if the characters used were a doll and a policeman and the doll was hiding from the policeman. This may be because this scenario is more natural for children and they are able to identify with it as a game. This suggests that Piaget’s idea about egocentrism in young children may be flawed and his results may have been due to his own test design (see later for a discussion of Piaget’s design).

  Brewer (2001) observed 3-year-old children engaging in pretend play. She stated that this illustrated their lack of egocentrism, as they were able to act as another individual and therefore must be able to use more than one perspective. Role play frequently observed in pre-school children would contradict Piaget’s notions of egocentrism.

  McDonald and Stuart-Hamilton (2003) conducted a repeat of the Three Mountains Task with adults and found that even adults, whom Piaget would consider non-egocentric participants, made mistakes. They argue that the task is too difficult even for some adults. Therefore children’s inability to complete the task may be more to do with the design than with their ability.

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  The Child's Reality

  Three Developmental Themes

  • D. Elkind(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Egocentrism 3 The Problem of Egocentrism

  Mental development can be described in different ways and from different perspectives. In the discussion of religious development, we focused primarily upon the content changes and demonstrated how children’s conceptions of their religious denomination and of prayer progressively approximated that of adults. The discussion of perceptual development, in contrast, was much more concerned with mental processes and tried to show how the perceptual regulations of young children develop into those of older children and adults.

  In this chapter we look at mental development from still a third perspective, namely, that of egocentrism. Egocentrism, in general, has to do with the limitations of children’s developing cognitive abilities rather than with their accomplishments. Constructing and reconstructing the world is a complex endeavor that takes time and effort and that does not happen all at once. When we deal with egocentrism, then, we emphasize the differences rather than the similarities between child and adult thinking.

  In discussing egocentrism, we can look at cognitive development as involving several cognitive tasks. These tasks include: (1) the differentiation between transient and abiding facets of reality; (2) the differentiation between objective and subjective aspects of reality; and (3) the differentiation between universal and particular facets of reality. At each stage of development, these tasks have a different content and structure, but the same types of differentiation must be made. A child’s failure at any given level of development to make one or all of these differentiations is evidence of egocentrism.

  It should be clear, therefore, that egocentrism as it is used here is not a pejorative term but rather a developmental one. It suggests that the child has not yet made some differentiations that he or she will in fact eventually make. Perhaps an illustration will help. One of the cognitive tasks of the infant is to distinguish between transient sights and sounds and abiding objects. Young infants often behave as if an object no longer existed when it is out of sight and attend to a transient sight (such as a pattern of light) as if it were an abiding part of their world. To call such behavior egocentric is merely to indicate that the infant shows a particular lack of differentiation between self and world.

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