How to Cite

Galotti, Kathleen M.: Development of Human Thought, in Sternberg, Robert J. and Funke, Joachim (Eds.): The Psychology of Human Thought: An Introduction, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2019, p. 327–340. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.470.c6680

License (Chapter)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Identifiers (Book)

ISBN 978-3-947732-33-3 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-947732-34-0 (Softcover)
ISBN 978-3-947732-35-7 (Hardcover)

Published

07/31/2019

Authors

Kathleen M. Galotti

Development of Human Thought

  1. The term, thinking, covers a number of cognitive processes that processes information. Examples include problem solving, reasoning, decision making, goal setting, and planning.
  2. Thinking often makes use of two other cognitive realms: language, and the knowledge base.
  3. Although Piagetian theory holds that before the age of about two, infants lack capacity for mental representation and therefore, thought, recent work poses a strong challenge to this tenet. Psychologist Renee Baillageron and her colleagues have shown that even three- to six-month-old infants have expectations about the way objects behave, indicating they already have some knowledge and some rudimentary reasoning abilities
  4. Preschoolers show an ability to draw deductive inferences under certain conditions. These abilities are fragile, but present.
  5. Preschoolers develop an elaborate theory of mind during the ages from two to five, learning to understand and predict what beliefs, expectations, emotions, and preferences another person might hold.
  6. Children’s inferential reasoning begins to look very similar to that of adults when the inferences involve concrete examples.
  7. Adolescents are much more capable than younger children of thinking hypothetically, about the future, and abstractly. This enriched ability is critical to another task of adolescence, developing an identity, a mature sense of who you are and what your goals, values, and principles are.