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CHAPTER 5
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN
INFANCY
Learning Objectives
PIAGET’S APPROACH TO COGNITIVE
DEVELOPMENT
Key Elements of Piaget's Theory
Action = Knowledge
• Four universal stages in fixed order
• Development = movement from one stage to the next
• Stages based on based on physical maturation and
exposure to relevant experiences
• Basic building blocks of understanding are mental
constructs called schemes
• Schemes are organized patterns of functioning, that
adapt and change with mental development.
Stages of Piaget's Theory
• All children pass through a series of four stages
• Fixed order from birth through adolescence:
–
–
–
–
This Chapter
Sensorimotor
Preoperational
Concrete Operational
Formal Operational.
Principles that underlie cognitive growth
• Assimilation
• process by which people understand an experience in
terms of their current stage of cognitive development and
way of thinking.
• Accommodation
• when child changes existing ways of thinking,
understanding, or behaving in response to encounters
with new stimuli or events.
• Schemes
• Organized patterns of functioning, that adapt and change
with mental development.
Piaget's Six Substages of the
Sensorimotor Stage
Earliest Stage of Cognitive Growth
Sensorimotor Period
• Initial of four stages
• Contains six substages
• Individual differences in rate
• Transitions include characteristics of both stages
Cognitive Transitions
A Closer Look
Substage 1: Simple Reflexes
• First month of life
• Various inborn reflexes
• At center of a baby's physical & cognitive life
• Determine nature of infant's interactions with
world
• At the same time, some of 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
• This repetition of a chance motor event
• Process that starts building cognitive schemes
• Primary circular reaction – next slide
A Closer Look - two
Substage 2: First Habits and Primary Circular
Reactions
• 1 to 4 months of age
• Primary circular reaction
• schemes reflecting an infant's repetition of
• interesting actions or
• enjoyable actions
• just for the enjoyment of doing them
• focus on the infant's own body
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
• Infant activity involves actions relating to
the world outside
A Closer Look - again
Substage 3: Secondary Circular Reactions
• 4 to 8 months of age
• secondary circular reactions
• schemes regarding repeated actions that
bring about a desirable consequence
• Small variations on an activity theme
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
A Closer Look
Substage 4: Coordination of
Secondary Circular Reactions
• 8 months to 12 months
• Object permanence
• Realization that people and
objects exist even when they
cannot be seen
Figure 5-2
Object Permanence
Before an infant has understood the idea of object permanence, he will not search
for an object that has been hidden right before his eyes. But several months later,
he will search for it, illustrating that he has attained 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
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
A Closer Look
Substage 6: Beginnings of Thought
• 18 months to 2 years
• Mental representation
• An internal image of a past event or object
• They can even plot in their heads unseen
trajectories of objects, so if a ball rolls under a
piece of furniture, they can figure out where it
is likely to emerge on the other side.
A Closer Look
Substage 6: Beginnings of Thought
• 18 months to 2 years
• Deferred imitation
• a person who is no longer present
is imitated later
• Evidence for mental representation
Assessing Piagetian Theory
PROS
• Descriptions of child cognitive
development accurate in many
ways
– 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
CONS
• Substantial disagreement over
validity of theory and many of
its specific predictions
– 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
Assessing Piagetian Theory
• Developmental improvement has gradual increments
growing step-by-step in skill-by-skill manner.
• Apparent inability of young infants to comprehend object
permanence may reflect more about their memory
deficits than their lack of understanding of the concept:
– The memories of young infants may be poor enough
that they simply do not recall the earlier concealment
of the toy.
– In fact, when more age-appropriate tasks were
employed, some researchers found indications of
object permanence in children as young as 3 1/2
months.
• Facial imitation suggests that humans are born with a
basic, innate capability for imitating others’ actions
– a capability that depends on certain kinds of
environmental experiences
– but one that Piaget believed develops later in infancy.
INFORMATION-PROCESSING APPROACHES
TO COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Often seen as “more modern” and therefore “better”.
Information-Processing
• According to this approach, the quantitative changes in
infants’ abilities to organize and manipulate information
represent the hallmarks of cognitive 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
Information Processing
Encoding—storage—retrieval
The process by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved.
Information processing is the change (processing) of information in any manner
detectable by an observer.
conversion of latent information into manifest information (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2
Latent and manifest information is defined through the terms of equivocation (remai
dissipation (uncertainty of the sender what the receiver has actually received), and
Information Processing
The process by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved.
Note that by this def. Information can not be manipulated or created.
It is inadequate
Better:
Information processing is the change (processing) of
information in any manner detectable by an observer.
Conversion of latent information into manifest information
(Shannon).
How do you compute?
Take a few minutes to write down an example of how
you do each of the following:
• Encoding
• the process by which information is initially recorded
in a form usable to memory.
• Storage
• the placement of material into memory.
• Retrieval
• the process by which material in memory storage is
located, brought into awareness, and used.
Unexpected Expertise
• Infants have the ability to learn
subtle statistical patterns and
relationships
• These results are consistent
with a growing body of research
showing that the mathematical
skills of infants are surprisingly
good
• Infants as young as five months
are able to calculate the
outcome of simple addition and
subtraction problems
Figure 5-4 Mickey Mouse Math
Researcher Dr. Karen Wynn found that
five-month-olds like Michelle
Follet, pictured here, reacted differently
according to whether the number of
Mickey Mouse statuettes they saw
represented correct or incorrect addition.
Automatization
• Degree to which activity requires attention
• processes that require relatively large amounts of
attention are controlled
• Helps with initial encounters with stimuli through easy
and automatic information processing
• Frequency of encounters differentiates familiar from
unfamiliar;
• frequency of stimuli pairing permits understanding of
concepts
• Concepts, categorizations of objects, events, or people
that share common properties.
Gosh, I hope we get to revisit this in the chapters on Seniors…
Memory Capabilities in Infancy
Getting a kick out of that!
• Kicking research demonstrates increase with age in
memory capacities
• Infants who have learned the association between a
moving mobile and kicking showed surprising recall
ability when they were exposed to a reminder
• It took only a few days for 2-month-old infants to forget
their training, but 6-month-old infants still remembered
for as long as 3 weeks.
• When the babies saw a reminder—a moving mobile—
their memories were apparently reactivated.
Is infant memory qualitatively different from
that in older children and adults?
• Information is processed similarly throughout life span
• Kind of information being processed changes and
different parts of brain may be used
• processes that underlie memory retention and recall
seem similar throughout the lifespan
• but the quantity of information stored and recalled does
differ markedly as infants develop.
Does your family have a special story about
your early childhood?
The more times a memory is retrieved,
the more enduring the memory becomes.
How long do memories last?
• Researchers disagree on the age from which
memories can be retrieved
– Early studies lead to belief in “infantile amnesia”
– the lack of memory for experiences prior to age 3
– recent research shows infants do retain memories.
– Older infants can retrieve information more rapidly
and they can remember it longer.
– Myers research finds 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
So…do infants remember?
• Theoretical possibility for interfered memories to remain
intact from a very young
• Most cases memories of personal experiences in infancy
do not last into adulthood
• Memories of personal experience seem not to become
accurate before age 18 to 24 months
Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory
Explicit
• Advances in brain scan technology, as well as studies of
adults with brain damage, suggest that there are two
separate systems involved with long-term memory:
explicit and implicit memory
• Explicit memory is memory that is conscious and can be
recalled intentionally.
• Explicit and implicit memories emerge at different rates
and involve different parts of the brain
What we ordinarily think of as a “memory”.
Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory
Implicit
• Advances in brain scan technology, as well as studies of
adults with brain damage, suggest that there are two
separate systems involved with long-term memory:
explicit and implicit memory
• Implicit memory consists of motor skills, habits, and
activities that can be remembered without conscious
cognitive effort – motor cortex wiring
• The earliest memories seem to be implicit, and they
involve the cerebellum and brain stem
What we ordinarily think of as “skill”.
Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory
(continued)
• The forerunner of explicit memory involves the hippocampus.
• True explicit memory doesn't't emerge until the second half of the
first year
• When explicit memory does emerge, it involves an increasing
number of areas of the cortex of the brain
What Is Infant Intelligence?
Developmental specialists have devised several
approaches to illuminate the nature of individual differences
in intelligence during infancy
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 in next slide)
Sample Items from the Bayley Scales of
Infant Development
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
Maybe?
Information Processing Approaches to
Individual Differences in Intelligence
• Using IP approach suggests relationship between
information processing efficiency and cognitive abilities
• Moderately strong correlation between early information
processing capabilities and later IQ measures
• Predicting child may do well on IQ tests later in life is not
same as predicting child will be “successful”
• More recent information processing approaches
continuous manner from infancy to the later stages of life
Thinking about goals
• How important is it for parents to predict infant “success”?
• Why do people care about IQ? Either theirs or their kids?
• What the heck is “success” anyway?
– After getting to know some high IQ people I came to
believe that success is getting to do what you want to do.
– If that requires money then success is measured in $$.
– If that requires mobility then it might be measured by
stamps in your passport.
– It depends on what YOU want out of life.
– You have no idea what your infant child will want.
And so…what does IP research reveal?
Relationship between information processing
efficiency and cognitive abilities
• Correlate moderately well with later measures of
intelligence
• Measures:
• how quickly infants lose interest in stimuli that they
have previously seen
• responsiveness to new stimuli
• 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
What about the multimodal approach?
Cross-modal transference
• Ability to identify a stimulus previously experienced
through only one sense by using another sense is
associated with intelligence
Association between early IP capabilities and
later measures of IQ must be qualified
•
•
•
•
The correlation is only moderate in strength.
Other factors important like environmental stimulation
Do not assume intelligence is permanently fixed in infancy.
Intelligence measured by traditional IQ tests relates to a
particular type of intelligence that emphasizes abilities
leading to academic, and certainly not artistic or
professional, success
• Predicting a child may do well on IQ tests later in life is not
same as predicting the child will be successful later in life.
Assessing the IP Approach
PROS
• Often uses more
precise measures of
cognitive ability
• Critical in providing
information about
infant cognition
CONS
• Precision makes it
more difficult to get
overall sense of
cognitive
development
More Assessing the IP Approach
• Piagetian and information-processing approaches are
critical in providing an account of cognitive development
in infancy.
• Coupled with advances in the biochemistry of the brain
and theories that consider the effects of social factors on
learning and cognition, the two help to paint a full picture
of cognitive development.
Taking the Einstein Out of Baby Einstein
• Author has a strong negative bias against commercial
endeavors.
• While there is controversy over “educational” materials
sold by various companies it is unclear whether such
materials are of no real value, of value to certain
children, or are generally helpful.
• What IS clear is that ANYTHING that encourages
parents to interact with their children is ultimately
beneficial.
• So, just skip author’s opinions. Decide for yourself.
THE ROOTS OF LANGUAGE
The Fundamentals of Language
From sounds to symbols
Phonology
Morphemes
Semantics
Comprehension
and production
Term Definitions
• Language, the systematic, meaningful arrangement of
symbols, provides the basis for communication.
• Phonology basic sounds of language
– Phonemes smallest unit
– combined to produce words and sentences.
– English has 40 phonemes
– Language range 15 to 85
• Morphemes smallest language unit that has meaning.
– Some morphemes are complete words,
– others add information necessary for interpreting a
word, such as endings “-s” and “-ed”
Comprehension Precedes Production
Early Sounds and Communication
• Prelinguislic communication
communication through sounds, facial expressions,
gestures, imitation, and other nonlinguistic means.
• Babbling
Speech like but meaningless sounds starts 2/3 mos – 1 yr
Starts w/ vowels adds consonants around 5 mos
– Universal
– Repetition of sounds
–
and best of all…spit bubbles!
Broca's Area
Areas of the brain that are activated during speech, left, are similar to areas
activated during the production of hand gestures, right.
See what I say…
Infants with hearing impairments
• Babble with hands instead of voices
• IF exposed to sign language
• Gestural and verbal babbling activate same neural
centers
• Implication is that spoken language evolved from
gestural language
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 equally 50 to 400
words
• Disagreement over definition of “first word”
• Clear consistent name person/event/object (effete def)
• Sound close to adult word (the normal def)
The Top 50:The First Words Children
Understand
%
Percentage refers to percentage of children who include this
type of word among their first 50 words.
First Words
• First words in children's early vocabularies
objects and things, both animate and inanimate.
• Most often refer to:
– people or objects who constantly appear and
disappear (“Mama”)
– to animals (“kitty”)
– or to temporary states (“wet”)
First Sentences
First sentences
• Created around 8 to 12 months after first words
• Indicate understanding of labels and relationships
between them
• Often observations rather than demands
• Comments
• Observations
• Labeling
• Use order similar to adult speech with missing words
Children's Imitation of Sentences Showing
Decline of Telegraphic Speech
Other Early Language Characteristics
• Underextensions
• using words too restrictively,
• common among children just mastering spoken
language
• think word refers to a specific instance of a concept,
instead of to all examples of the concept
•
•
•
•
Overextensions
using words too broadly
Comes after underextension
beginning to develop general categories & concepts.
Speaking in style and stylish speaking
Referential
style
primarily to label objects
Americans
Expressive
style
primarily to express feelings and needs
Japanese
Cultural differences appear:
US moms label objects more frequently
Japanese moms talk about social interactions
THE 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
Possibly affects later stages and older children
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
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 hypothesized universal grammar and
Language Acquisition Device
Earlier stages and younger children
Assessing Chomsky's Approach
PRO
• Specific gene related
to speech production
identified
• Language processing
in infant brain
structures similar to
those in adult speech
processing
CON
• Uniqueness of
speech countered by
primate researchers
• Even with genetic
priming, language use
still requires
significant social
experience to be used
effectively
Interactionist Approaches:
Language as a Social Device
• language development produced through combination of
– genetically-determined predispositions
– environmental circumstances
• Specific course of language development determined by
– the language to which children are exposed
– reinforcement they receive for using language in
particular ways
• Social factors are key to development
“Baby talk”
Infant-Directed Speech
“Dog talk”
How does this speech change?
• Infant-directed speech changes as children become
older
– Around the end of the first year, takes on more adultlike 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
Developmental Diversity
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
Infant Directed Speech - Culture
6 of 10 most frequent major characteristics common to both
English and Spanish:
• exaggerated intonation
• high pitch
• lengthened vowels
• Repetition
• lower volume
• heavy stress on certain key words
Infant Directed Speech – Culture cont.
• Mothers in United States, Sweden, and Russia
– all exaggerate and elongate the pronunciation of the
three vowel sounds of “ee,” “ah,” and “oh”
– despite differences in the languages
• Even deaf mothers use a form of infant-directed speech:
When communicating with their infants
– use sign language at a significantly slower tempo
– they frequently repeat the signs.
What then do these similarities in infantdirected speech mean?
More Infant Directed Speech
• Characteristics of infant-directed speech activate innate
responses in infants.
• Infants seem to prefer infant-directed speech over adultdirected speech
– suggesting that their perceptual systems may be
more responsive to such characteristics.
• infant-directed speech facilitates language development
– provides cues as to the meaning of speech
– before infants have developed the capacity to
understand the meaning of words.
Boys will be boys and girls will
be…sweethearts?
Gender differences:
Parental language varies by child gender
Boys
Girls
• More firm, clear, and
direct responses
• More diminutives
• More warm phrases
• More diversionary
responses
Do you think men and women use different
sorts of language?
How many of you guys think so?
How many of you women think so?
It is not known if these differences are a reflection of early
linguistic experiences, such findings are certainly intriguing
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
• Not pushing infants and don't expect too much too soon
• Keeping in mind that you don't have to be with an infant
24 hours a day