Windmills of the Young Mind: Towards a Sustainable Model for Analyzing Preschool Children’s Perception of the World

The aspects of preschool education curriculum (re)design have recently been emphasized both in various international and national legal documents and in the professional mainstream literature with the aim to support children’s holistic development. The maturity and advancement of a child across cognitive, physical, social-emotional, and behavioral dimensions of learning are interconnected and covered by the integrative framework of education for sustainable development (ESD). The authors of the given paper desire to highlight the important correlation of the innate cognitive processes, which are fundamental to a child’s understanding of the world, and the acquired cognitive flexibility, which is being formed as a child grows, learns to explore, and establishes their own behavioral settings and learning habits. The topicality to explore the conceptual system and lexical framework pliancy for perceptual data processing exhibited by preschool children is conditioned by the fact that a growing volume and complexity of multimodal information significantly influence the ability of preschool children 5 to 7 years old to perceive their surrounding environment, comprehend the contextual framework, and communicate efficiently. The given research introduces the conceptual framework and methodology of a one-year project “Sustainable Model Design for Conceptual System and Lexical Framework Pliancy Analysis for Perceptual Data Processing of the Preschool Age Actors”, which aims to design a sustainable model suitable for analyzing preschool children’s perception of designated concepts within individual and language conceptual systems investigating lexical framework pliancy principles and employing methods of multimodal data processing. Preschool children from three preschool educational institutions in three different counties of Latvia have been engaged in the experimental study conducted from March to April 2025. Storytelling with drawings has been used as a method of data collection. Five concepts – dream, future, freedom, homeland, and security – have been chosen for the experimental study. For the present research, visual and emotional perception, spatial logic, social context, and vocabulary have been selected as the primary indicators for analyzing children’s perceptual development.