Cognitive Development in Infancy
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April LanuzaCognitive Development in Infancy
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Cognitive Development IN Infancy
Psychology (Far Eastern University)
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Cognitive Development in Infancy
Cognitive Changes
Piaget’s view of the first 2 years
Sensorimotor stage
Piaget’s first stage of development, in which infants use information from their senses and motor actions to learn about
the world
Primary circular reactions
Piaget’s phrase to describe a baby’s simple repetitive actions in substage 2 of the sensorimotor stage,
organized around the baby’s own body
For example, the baby may accidentally suck his thumb one day, and find it pleasurable, and repeat the action.
Secondary circular reactions
Repetitive actions in substage 3 of the sensorimotor period, oriented around external objects
The baby coos and Mom smiles, so the baby coos again to get Mom to smile again.
Means-end behavior
Purposeful behavior carried out in pursuit of a specific goal
Babies show this kind of behavior when they move one toy out of the way to gain access to another.
The end is the toy they want; the means to the end is moving the other toy.
Tertiary circular reactions
The deliberate experimentation with variations of previous actions that occurs in substage 5 of the sensorimotor
period
The baby try out many sounds or facial expressions to see if they will trigger Mom’s smile.
Object permanence
The understanding that objects continue to exist when they can’t be seen
Suppose you show a toy to a child of 2 months of age and then put a screen in front of the toy.
When you remove the screen, the baby will show some indication of surprise, as if he knows that something should still be
there.
A-not-B error
Substage 4 infants’ tendency to look for an object to look for an object in the place where it was seen (position A) rather
than in the place which they have seen a researcher move it (position B)
Deferred imitation
Imitation that occu7rs in the absence of the model who first demonstrated it.
Substages of Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage
Substages of Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage
Substages of Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage
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Alternative approaches
Object concept
An infant’s understanding of the nature of objects and how they behave
Elizabeth Spelke believes that babies are born with certain built-in assumptions that guide their interactions with objects.
Connected surface principle
The assumption that when two surfaces are connected to each other, they belong to the same object
For instance, you know that all sides of your textbook are connected together in a single, solid object.
Violation of expectations method
A research strategy in which researchers move an object in one way after having taught an infant to expect it to move in another
Learning, Categorizing, and Remembering
Conditioning and modeling
Learning of emotional responses through classical conditioning processes may begin as early as the first week of life.
For example, in classic research, pediatrician Marvis Gunther found that inexperienced mothers often held nursing newborns in
ways that caused the babies’ nostrils to be blocked by the breast.
Newborns also clearly learn by operant conditioning.
Both the sucking response and head turning have been successfully increased by the use of reinforcements such as
sweet liquids or the sound of the mother’s voice or heartbeat.
Infant5s can also learn by watching models, especially in the second year.
Schematic learning
Organization of experiences into expectancies, called schemas, which enable infants to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar
stimuli
For example, a 7-month-old is likely to habituate to a sequence of ten animal pictures and, if the next picture is of another animal,
will not show surprise or look at it any longer than the first ten.
If, however, researchers show the baby a picture of a human after ten animal pictures, the baby will look surprised and gaze at the
picture longer.
Memory
Newborns do appear to be able to remember auditory stimuli to which they are exposed while sleeping.
An ingenious series of studies by Carolyn Rovee-Collier and her colleagues has shown that babies as young as 3 months of age
can remember specific objects and their own actions with those over periods as long as a week.
The Beginnings of Language
Theoretical perspectives
The behaviorist view
B.F. Skinner suggested a behaviorist explanation of language development.
He claimed that language development begins with babbling.
At first glance, Skinner’s theory might appear to make sense.
However, systematic examination of the interactions between infants and parents reveals that adults do not
reinforce babies’ vocalizations in this manner.
Instead, parents and others respond to all of baby’s vocalizations, and even sometimes imitate them, a
consequence that according to operant conditioning theory, should prolong babbling rather than lead to the
development of grammatical language.
The nativist view
Linguist Noam Chomsky used examples such as “I breaked it” instead of “I broke it” to refute Skinner’s theory.
He argued that the only possible explanation for such errors was that children acquire grammar rules before they master
the exceptions to them.
Further, Chomsky proposed a nativist explanation for language development: children’s comprehension and production
of language are guided by an innate language processor.
Language acquisition device (LAD)
An innate language processor that contains the basic grammatical structure of all human language.
The LAD tells infants what characteristics of language to look for in the stream of speech to which they are
exposed.
The interactionist view
Interactionists
Theorists who argue that language is a subprocess of general cognitive development and is influenced by both
internal and external factors.
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Infants are born with some kind of biological preparedness to pay more attention to language than to other
kinds of information.
The infant’s brain has a generalized set of tools that it employs across all of the sub-domains of cognitive
development.
Influences on language development
Infant-directed speech
The simplified, higher-pitched speech that adults use with infants and young children
Moreover, adults speaking to infants and young children also repeat a lot, introducing variations.
Example: “where is the ball? Can you see the ball? Where is the ball?”
First sounds ad gestures
Cooing
Making repetitive vowel sounds, particularly the uuu sond
Babbling
The repetitive vocalizing of consonant-vowel combinations by an infant such as bababababa
Word recognition
Receptive language
Comprehension of spoken language
The first words
Expressive language
The ability to use sounds, signs or symbols to communicate meaning.
A child who uses ba consistently to refer to her bottle is using a word, even though it isn’t considered a word in English.
Holophrases
Combinations of gestures and single words that convey more meaning than just the word alone
For example, a child may point to his father’s shoe and say “daddy,” as if to convey “daddy’s shoe”
Naming explosions
The period when toddlers experience rapid vocabulary growth, typically beginning between 16 and 24 months
The first sentences
Telegraphic speech
Simple two-word sentences that usually include a noun and a verb
Inflections
Additions to words that change their meaning
E.g., the s in toys, the ed in waited.
Individual differences in language development
Mean length of utterance (MLU)
The average number of meaningful units in a sentence
Some children begin using individual words at 8 months, others not until 18 months, some do not use two-word sentences until 3
years or even later.
Differences in style
Expressive style
A style of word learning characterized by low rates of noun like terms and high use of personal-social words and phrases
They often learn pronouns (you, me) early. And such as no, yes, want or please.
Referential style
A style of word learning characterized by emphasis on things and people and their naming and description
Early vocabulary is made up predominantly of names for things or people.
Measuring intelligence in infancy
Intelligence
The ability to take in information and use it to adapt to the environment
Bayley scales of infant development
The best known and most widely used test of infant intelligence
Primarily measure sensory and motor skills.
Infant intelligence tests are not strongly related to later measures of intelligence.
Measures of basic information processing skills in infancy, such as rate of habituation at 4 months, may be
better correlated with later intelligence test scores.
NLEE/NLEE
