Download Ch. 5

Cognitive Development in
Infancy and Toddlerhood
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
2
Piaget’s CognitiveDevelopmental Perspective
• In order to understand children, we must
understand how they think because thinking
influences all of behavior.
• Children and adults are active explorers who
learn by interacting with the world, building
their own understanding of everyday
phenomena, and applying it to adapt to the
world around them.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
3
Cognitive-Developmental Concepts
– Schemas
• Concepts, ideas, and ways of interacting on the
world
– Cognitive development is the result of:
• Assimilation
– Integrating a new experience into a preexisting schema
• Accommodation
– Changing a schema by adapting and modifying it in light of
the new information
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
4
Cognitive Equilibrium
• A balance between the processes of
assimilation and accommodation
• When assimilation and accommodation are
balanced, individuals are neither incorporating
new information into their schemas nor
changing their schemas in light of new
information.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
5
Cognitive Disequilibrium
• A mismatch between schemas and the world
• Occurs more frequently than cognitive
equilibrium
• Leads to cognitive growth
– The mismatch leads to confusion and discomfort,
which in turn motivate children to modify their
cognitive schemas so that their view of the world
matches reality
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
6
Substages of Sensorimotor Reasoning
• Infants learn about the world through their senses
and motor skills.
• Six substages in which cognition develops from
reflexes to intentional action to symbolic
representation.
–
–
–
–
–
–
Reflexes (Birth -1 month)
Primary circular reactions (1-4 months)
Secondary circular reactions (4-8 months)
Coordination of secondary schemas (8-12 months)
Tertiary circular reactions (12-18 months)
Mental representation (18-24 months)
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
7
Substage 1: Reflexes
• Birth – 1 month
• Newborns use their reflexes to react to stimuli
they experience
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
8
Substage 2: Primary Circular Reactions
• 1 – 4 months
• Infants begin to make accidental discoveries.
• Circular reactions are the repetition of an
action and its response.
• Primary circular reactions consist of repeating
actions that begin by chance or by accident
involving the parts of the body that produce
pleasurable or interesting results.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
9
Substage 3: Secondary Circular Reactions
• 4 – 8 months
• Repetitions of actions that trigger responses
in the external environment, outside of the
baby’s body
– The patterns of repetition include objects and
are oriented toward making interesting events
occur in the infant’s environment.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
10
Substage 4: Coordination of Secondary Schemas
• 8 – 12 months
• Represents true means-end behaviors and signifies
the beginning of intentional behavior
• Infants purposefully coordinate two secondary
circular reactions and apply them in new situations
to achieve a goal.
• Object permanence, the understanding that objects
continue to exist outside of sensory awareness,
occurs in substage 4.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
11
Substage 5: Tertiary Circular Reactions
• 12-18 months
• Infants engage in active, purposeful trial-anderror exploration to search for new discoveries;
they vary their actions to see how the changes
affect the outcomes.
• Piaget described infants as “little scientists”
during this period because they move from
intentional behavior to systematic exploration.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
12
Substage 6: Mental Representation
• 18-24 months
• Infants develop representational thought, the
ability to use symbols such as words and mental
pictures to represent objects and actions in
memory.
– For example, infants can engage in deferred imitation,
imitating actions of an absent model.
• A transition between the sensorimotor and
preoperational reasoning stages.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
13
VIDEO CASE
Object Permanence
7-month-old Nicho and 10-month-old Damian illustrate developmental
changes in infants’ understanding of object permanence. At 7 months of
age, Nicho does not search for the hidden horse. However, Damian
successfully locates the horse, even when presented with the A-not-B
search task.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
14
Table 5.1: Substages of Sensorimotor Reasoning
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
15
Research on Object Permanence:
Violation-of-Expectation Method
• A task in which a stimulus appears to violate
physical laws
• If the infant looks longer at the unexpected
event, it suggest that he or she is surprised by
it, is aware of physical properties of objects,
and can mentally represent them.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
16
Research on Object Permanence: A-Not-B Error
• The A-not-B error occurs when infants are
able to uncover a toy hidden behind a barrier,
yet when they observe the toy moved from
behind one barrier (Place A) to another (Place
B), they look for the toy in the first place it was
hidden.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
17
Figure 5.3: A-Not-B Error
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
18
Research on Imitation: Deferred
Imitation Tasks
• The ability to repeat an act performed some
time ago
• Piaget believed that, because infants lack
mental representation abilities, infants under
18 months cannot engage in deferred
imitation.
– Laboratory research on facial imitation has found
that 6-week-old infants are capable of deferred
imitation.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
19
Core Knowledge Perspective
• Infants are born with several innate
knowledge systems or core domains of
thought that enable early rapid learning and
adaptation.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
20
Information Processing
• Cognition is a set of interrelated components
that permit people to process information.
– To notice, take in, manipulate, store, and retrieve
it
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
21
Mental Stores in Information
Processing: Sensory Memory
• Holds incoming sensory information in its
original form
• Information fades from sensory memory
quickly if it is not processed (even as quick as
fractions of a second).
• Newborn sensory memory is much shorter in
duration than adults’ memory.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
22
Mental Stores in Information
Processing: Working Memory
• Working memory is also called short-term
memory.
• Holds and processes information that is being
“worked on” in some way
– Manipulating, encoding, or retrieving information
• Responsible for maintaining and processing
information used in many complex cognitive
tasks
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
23
Important Part of Working Memory
• Central executive
– A control processor that directs the flow of
information and regulates cognitive activities such
as attention, action, and problem solving
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
24
Mental Stores in Information
Processing: Long-Term Memory
• An unlimited store that holds information
indefinitely
• Information is not manipulated or processed
in long-term memory; it is simply stored until
it is retrieved to manipulate in working
memory.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
25
Figure 5.4: Information Processing System
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
26
Information Processing Skill: Attention
– The ability to direct one’s awareness
– Infant attention is often studied using:
• Preferential looking procedures
– Measuring the length of time infants look at two stimuli
• Habituation procedures
– Measuring the length of time it takes infants to habituate to
looking at a nonchanging stimulus
– By about 10 weeks of age, infants show gains in
attention
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
27
Information Processing Skill: Memory
• The ability to focus and switch attention is
critical for selecting information to process in
working memory.
• Infants have basic memory capacities common
to children and adults, but they are most likely
to remember events when they take place in
familiar contexts and when the infants are
actively engaged; emotional engagement also
enhances infants’ memory.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
28
Information Processing Skill:
Categorization
• Grouping different stimuli from a common
class
• An adaptive mental process that allows for:
– Organizing storage of information in memory
– Efficient retrieval of that information
– Capacity to respond with familiarity to new stimuli
from a common class
• Infants naturally categorize information.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
29
Table 5.2: Summary of Changes in
Information Processing Skills During Infancy
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
30
Testing Approach to Intelligence
• The most often used standardized measure of
infant intelligence is the Bayley Scales of Infant
Development III (BSID-III)
• Appropriate for infants from 1 month through
42 months of age
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
31
Figure 5.6: Bayley-III Scales (BSID-III)
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
32
The Bayley Scales of Infant
Development III
• Five scales
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Motor scale (Infant response)
Cognitive scale (infant response)
Language scale (infant response)
Social-emotional scale (parent response)
Adaptive behavior (parent response)
• The BSID-III provides a comprehensive profile
of an infant’s current functioning.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
33
Information Processing
Approach to Intelligence
• Infants who process information more
efficiently are thought to acquire knowledge
more quickly.
• Information processing capacities – such as
attention, memory, and processing speed – in
infancy predict cognitive ability and
intelligence through late adolescence.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
34
Language Development
• Gaining the ability to use words to represent
objects, experience, thoughts, and feelings
permits children to think and to communicate
with others in increasingly flexible and adaptive
ways.
• Receptive language
– What babies can understand
– Exceeds their productive language
• Productive language
– What babies can produce themselves
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
35
Language Development:
Prelinguistic Communication
• Crying
• Cooing (between 2 and 3 months)
– Deliberate vowel sounds
– For example: Ahhhh, ohhhh, eeeeeeee
• Babbling (6 months of age)
– Repeating strings of consonants and vowels
– For example: Ba-ba-ba-ba and ma-ma-ma
– Universal
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
36
Language Development: First Words
• About one year of age
• Holophrases
– One-word expressions to express a complete
thought
• A first word might be a complete word or a
syllable.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
37
Language Development: Learning Words
• Fast mapping
– A process of quickly acquiring and retaining a
word after hearing it applied a few times
– Improves with age
– Accounts for the naming explosion (vocabulary
spurt)
• A period of rapid vocabulary learning that occurs
between 16 and 24 months of age
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
38
Language Development: Two Kinds
of Mistakes in Learning Words
• Underextension
– Applying a word more narrowly than it is usually
applied so that the word’s use is restricted to a
single object
– For example, ball might refer only to footballs but
not to the general class of balls
• Overextension
– Applying a word too broadly
– For example, cow might refer to all farm animals
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
39
Language Development: Two-Word
Utterances
• Begins around 21 months of age
• Telegraphic speech
– Speaking like a telegram, only including a few
essential words
– Universal among toddlers
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
40
Table 5.3: Language Milestones
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
41
Theories of Language Development
• Learning theory and language acquisition
– Language is learned through operant conditioning:
reinforcement and punishment.
• Nativist theory and language acquisition
– The human brain has an innate capacity to learn
language.
– Language acquisition device (LAD) – an innate
facilitator of language and storehouse of rules that
apply to all human languages (universal grammar).
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
42
Theories of Language Development
(Continued)
• Interactionist perspective on language
acquisition
– Language development is a complex process that
is influenced by both maturation and context.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
43
Biological Contributions to Language
Acquisition
• Brain (left hemisphere)
– Broca’s area – controls the ability to use language
for expression
– Wernicke’s area – responsible for language
comprehension
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
44
Contextual Contributions
to Language Acquisition
• Canonical babbling
– A type of babbling with well-formed syllables that
sounds like language
– Parents tune in and treat the vocalizations in a new
way.
• Parent responsiveness to infants’ vocalizations
predicts:
– The size of infants’ vocabularies
– The diversity of infants’ communications
– The timing of language milestones
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
45
Contextual Contributions (Continued)
• Infant-directed speech
–
–
–
–
–
–
Also known as “motherese”
The use of shorter words and sentences
Higher an more varied pitch
Repetitions
A slower rate
Longer pauses
• Expansions – Parents enrich versions of the child’s
statement.
• Recast – Children’s sentences are restated into new
grammatical forms.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
46
VIDEO CASE
Developmental Milestones: Parent Views
Milestones of development are important not just for children, but for
parents. Lara describes milestones in her 2-year-old’s development.
Parents’ joy in their children influences their children’s development.
Kuther, Lifespan Development. © 2017, SAGE Publications.
47