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Piaget's Approach to Cognitive Development
Information Processing Approaches to Cognitive
Development
The Roots of Language
Key Elements of
Piaget's Theory
• Action = Knowledge
• Four universal
stages in fixed order
• Development =
physical maturation
and exposure to
relevant experiences
• Schemes adapt and
change
Swiss psychologist
Jean Piaget
What principles underlie this cognitive growth?
Assimilation
Accommodation
Earliest Stage of Cognitive Growth
Sensorimotor Period
– Invariant order of stages
– Individual differences in rate
– Transitions include characteristics of both
stages
A Closer Look
Substage 1: Simple Reflexes
– First month of life
– Various various inborn reflexes
• At center of a baby's physical and cognitive life
• Determine nature of infant's interactions with world
– At the same time, some reflexes begin to
accommodate the infant's experiences
A Closer Look
Substage 2: First Habits and Primary Circular
Reactions
1 to 4 months of age
Beginning of coordination of what were separate
actions into single, integrated activities.
Activities that engage baby's interests are repeated
simply for sake of continuing to experience it
– Circular reaction
– Primary circular reaction
TRANSITIONS
Infants do not suddenly shift from one stage of cognitive development to the
next. Instead, Piaget argues that there is a period of transition in which some
behaviorreflects one stage, while other behavior reflects the more advanced
stage Does this gradualism argue against Piaget's interpretation of stages?
A Closer Look
Substage 3: Secondary Circular
Reactions
4 to 8 months of age
Child begins to act upon outside world
Infants now seek to repeat enjoyable events
in their environments that are produced
through chance activities
Secondary circular reactions
A Closer Look
Substage 4: Coordination of Secondary Circular
Reactions
8 months to 12 months
Beginning of goal-directed behavior
– Several schemes are combined and coordinated to
generate single act to solve problem
– Means to attain particular ends and skill in
anticipating future circumstances due in part to
object permanence
Object Permanence
Why is the concept of object permanence important?
A Closer Look
Substage 5: Tertiary Circular Reactions
12 to 18 months
Development of schemes regarding deliberate variation of
actions that bring desirable consequences
Carrying out miniature experiments to observe
consequences
A Closer Look
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With the attainment of the cognitive skill
of deferred imitation, children are able
to imitate people and scenes they have
witnessed in the past.
Substage 6:
Beginnings of
Thought
18 months to 2 years
Capacity for mental
representation or symbolic
thought
– Mental representation
– Understanding
causality
– Ability to pretend
– Deferred imitation
Assessing Piagetian Theory
STRENGTHS: Descriptions of child
WEAKNESSES: Substantial
cognitive development accurate in many
disagreement over validity of theory and
ways
many of its specific predictions
• Piaget was pioneering figure in field of
development
• Children learn by acting on
environment
• Broad outlines of sequence of
cognitive development and increasing
cognitive accomplishments are
generally accurate
• Stage conception questioned
• Connection between motor
development and cognitive
development exaggerated
• Object permanence can occur earlier
under certain conditions
• Onset of age of imitation questioned
• Cultural variations not considered
Piaget's theory of human cognitive
development involves a succession of stages
through which children progress from birth to
adolescence.
As infants move from one stage to another,
the way they understand the world changes.
The sensorimotor stage, from birth to about 2
years, involves a gradual progression through
simple reflexes, single coordinated activities,
interest in the outside world, purposeful
combinations of activities, manipulation of
actions to produce desired outcomes, and
symbolic thought. The sensorimotor stage
has six substages.
According to Piaget, children can move from
one cognitive stage to another only when a child
______________ and is exposed to relative
experiences.
a. is adequately nourished
b. is born with an adequate genetic predisposition
for learning
c. has remembered his or her goal of learning
d. reaches an appropriate level of physical
maturation
Infants' schemes for understanding the world
usually involve their physical or sensorimotor
activities.
• True
• False
In general, when it comes to infant cognitive
development, it appears that Piaget_________.
a. overestimated infants and what they could do
b. underestimated infants and what they could do
c. was more accurate about adolescent cognitive
development
d. overestimated the role of culture
Think of a common young children's toy with
which you are familiar. How might its use be
affected by the principles of assimilation and
accommodation?
Information-Processing Approaches
to Child Development
What is information-processing?
Identifies the way that individuals take in,
store, and use information
Involves quantitative changes in ability to
organize and manipulate information
Increases sophistication, speed, and
capacity in information processing
characterizes cognitive growth
Focuses on types of “mental programs” used
when seeking to solve problems
Infants learn from adults, not videos.
• Infants learn vocabulary best in an interactive
setting where adults are responding to the
sounds the infant is making and when babies
choose the object to be labeled.
• Parents who liked educational DVDs best
believed that it improved their child's vocabulary
significantly, even though that is not supported
by research findings.
Why might parents acquire this false belief?
What are the foundations of the IP
approach?
Encoding—storage—retrieval
How does cognition compute?
Retrieval
Storage
Encoding
What automatic processes are being
engaged as you listen to this lecture?
Automatization
• Degree to which activity requires
attention
• Helps with initial encounters with stimuli
through easy and automatic information
processing
What do you think?
Infants cannot remember.
Memory Capabilities in Infancy
Getting a kick out of that!
• Kicking research demonstrates increase
with age in memory capacities
Does your family have a special story about
your early childhood?
How long do memories last?
Researchers disagree on the age from
which memories can be retrieved
– Early studies  infantile amnesia
– Myers  clear evidence of early memory
Physical trace of a memory in brain
appears to be relatively permanent
– Memories may not be easily, or accurately, retrieved
Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory
• Advances in brain scan technology and
studies of adults with brain damage suggest
two separate long-term memory systems.
•
•
Explicit memory
Implicit memory
• Explicit and implicit memories emerge at
different rates and involve different parts of
the brain.
So…do infants remember?
Individual Differences in Intelligence
Information-Processing Approaches
Infant information-processing speed may
correlate most strongly with later intelligence
What is infant intelligence?
Do, Re,
Me…..Intelligence!
Developmental Scales
Gesell:
– Developmental quotient
– Performance compared
at different ages for
significant variation from
norms of given age
– Four domains: motor
skills, language use,
adaptive behavior,
personal-social
Do, Re, Me…..Intelligence!
Developmental Scales
Bayley:
– Bayley Scales of Infant Development
– Developmental Quotient
– 2 to 42 months
– Two areas
– (See Table 3-7)
Do, Re, Me…..Intelligence!
Visual-recognition memory measurement
• This approach measures of visualrecognition memory, the memory of and
recognition of a stimulus that has been
previously seen, also relate to intelligence.
• The more quickly an infant can retrieve a
representation of a stimulus from memory,
themore efficient, presumably, is that infant's
information processing.
Are developmental scales useful?
YES
Provide a good
snapshot of current
developmental level
Provide objective
assessment of
behavior relative to
norms
NO
Do not provide good
prediction for future
development
What characterizes a “fast” baby?
And so…what does IP research reveal?
Relationship between information processing
efficiency and cognitive abilities
– Correlate moderately well with later measures of
intelligence
– More efficient information processing during the 6
months following birth is related to higher intelligence
scores between 2 and 12 years of age and other
measures of cognitive competence
Assessing the IP Approach
PROS
CONS
Often uses more
precise measures of
cognitive ability
Critical in providing
information about
infant cognition
Precision makes it more
difficult to get overall
sense of cognitive
development
Information processing approaches consider
quantitative changes in children's abilities to
organize and use information. Cognitive growth is
regarded as the increasing sophistication of
encoding, storage, and retrieval.
Infants clearly have memory capabilities from a very
early age, although the duration and accuracy of
such memories are unresolved questions.
Traditional measures of infant intelligence focus on
behavioral attainments, which can help identify
developmental delays or advances.
The information processing approach to
cognitive development emphasizes the
increased sophistication, speed, and
______________ associated with cognitive
growth.
a. capacity
b. circular reactions
c. categorization
d. analysis
What information from this module could you
use to refute the claims of books or
educational programs that promise to help
parents increase their babies' intelligence or
instill advanced intellectual skills in infants?
Based on valid research, what approaches
would you use for intellectual development of
infants?
The Roots of Language
From Sounds to Symbols
Fundamentals of Language
Phonology
Morphemes
Semantics
Comprehension
and production
Another Look – Comprehension Precedes
Production
Early Sounds and
Communication
Prelinguistic
Communication
Babbling
– Universal
– Repetition of sounds
Although we tend to think of language in terms of the production
of words and then groups of words, infants can begin to
communicate linguistically well before they sayeir first word.
See what I say…
What comes after “ba-ba-ba-ba”?
• Progression from simple to complex
• Exposure to speech sounds of particular
language initially do not influence babbling
– At 6 months babbling reflects of language of
culture
– Distinguishable from other language babbling
• Combinations of sounds and gestures used to
communicate
First Words
Increase at rapid rate
– 10 to 14 months = first
word
– 15 months = 10 words
– 18 months = one-word
stage ends
– 16 to 24 months =
language explosion from
50 to 400 words
By the age of 2, most children
use two-word phrases, such as
“ball play.”
First Sentences
• First sentences created around 8 to 12
months after first words
• Indicate understanding of labels and
relationships between these
• Often observations rather than demands
• Use order similar to adult speech with
missing words
– Telegraphic speech (See table 3-8)
Other Early Language Characteristics
• Underextensions
• Overextensions
Speaking in style and stylish speaking
Referential style
Expressive style
Can you think of an example of each?
How does proficiency in language occur?
Origins of Language Development
Learning Theory Approaches: Language
as a Learned Skill
Language acquisition follows the basic
laws of reinforcement and conditioning
Through the process of shaping,
language becomes more and more
similar to adult speech
Counter-Arguments to Learning Theory
Approach
• Does not adequately explain how children
readily learn rules of language
• Does not account for how children move beyond
specific heard utterances to produce novel
phrases, sentences and constructions
• Does not explain how young children can apply
linguistic rules to nonsense words
Origins of Language Development
Nativist Approaches: Language as an
Innate Skill
Genetically determined, innate mechanism
that directs the development of language
Children are born with innate capacity to
use language, which emerges, more or less
automatically, due to maturation.
– Chomsky's universal grammar and LAD
Assessing Chomsky's Approach
STRENGTHS
Specific gene related to speech production identified
Language processing in infant brain structures similar
to those in adult speech processing
WEAKNESSES
Uniqueness of speech countered by primate
researchers
Even with genetic priming, language use still requires
significant social experience to be used effectively
Origins of Language Development
Interactionist Approaches: Language as
Social Device
Specific course of language development
is determined by the language to which
children are exposed and reinforcement
they receive for using language in
particular ways
Social factors are key to development
Infant-Directed Speech
• Style of verbal communication directed
toward infants
• Short, simple sentences
• Higher pitch, increased range, varied
intonation
• Repetition of words and restricted topics
• Sometimes amusing sounds that are not
even words,
• Little formal structure, similar to
telegraphic speech
Infant-directed speech, which is common across cultures, includes the
use of short, simple sentences and is spoken in a pitch that is higher
than that used with older children and adults.
Let's Pretend
Turn to a classmate. One of you is a
8-month-old infant; the other is a
parent.
As the parent, ask your “infant”
classmate:
“Would you like a cookie?”
How does this speech change?
Infant-directed speech changes as
children become older
– Around the end of the first year, takes on more adult-like
qualities
– Sentences become longer and more complex, although
individual words are still spoken slowly and deliberately
– Pitch used to focus attention on important words
Does Cootsy-Coo Work?
Infant-directed speech plays an important
role in infants' acquisition of language
– Occurs all over the world, though there are cultural
variations
– Preferred by newborns
– Babies who are exposed to a infant-directed speech
early in life seem to begin to use words and exhibit other
forms of linguistic competence earlier
Do people everywhere say “ba-ba-boo” to
their infants?
Words differ but ways spoken are similar
Basic similarities across cultures and in some
facets of language specific to particular types of
interactions
Quantity of speech differ by cultures
What, then, do these similarities in infantdirected speech mean?
Based upon findings of developmental
researchers, infant cognitive development may
be promoted by:
• Providing infants the opportunity to explore the
world
• Being responsive to infants on both a verbal
and a nonverbal level
• Asking questions, listening to their responses,
and providing further communication
• Reading to infants
• Keeping in mind that you don't have to be with
an infant 24 hours a day
• Not pushing infants and not expecting too much
too soon
Before they speak, infants understand many
adult utterances and engage in several forms
of prelinguistic communication.
Children typically produce their first words
between 10 and 14 months, and rapidly
increase their vocabularies from that point on,
especially during a spurt at about 18 months.
Learning theorists believe that basic learning
processes account for language
development, whereas nativists like Noam
Chomsky and his followers argue that
humans have an innate language capacity.
The interactionists suggest that language is a
consequence of both environmental and
innate factors.
Like other 2-year-olds, Mason can say
“Doggie bye, bye” and “Milk gone.” These twoword phrases are examples of
______________ speech.
a. holophrastic
b. telegraphic
c. interpretive
d. active
One theory, the ______________ approach,
suggests that a genetically determined, innate
mechanism directs language development.
a. nativist
b. universal
c. learning theory
d. evolutionary
Whenever 9-month-old Ana's mother talks to
her, she uses short, simple sentences, repetitive
words, and higher pitches. This shift in language
is consistent with the use of ______________
speech.
a. infant-directed
b. telegraphic
c. nativist
d. interactionist
What are some ways in which children's
linguistic development reflects their acquisition
of new ways of interpreting and dealing with
their world?