Infancy: Cognitive Development

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InfancyCognitive Development

• Chapter 5

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Jean Piaget

• Believed that knowledge is the product of direct
  motor behavior in infants
• Learn by doing, experiencing
• Both quantity and quality of knowledge increase
• Believed that cognitive development occurs in an
  orderly and gradual fashion
• His theory is thus based on a stage approach to
  development

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Transitions
Infants do not suddenly shift between stages of
cognitive development. Instead Piaget argues that
there is a transition period in which some
behaviors reflect one stage, some the next stage
(GRADUAL change!)
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Piaget believed that

• All children pass through a series of universal
  stages in a fixed order.
• Sensorimotor (Birth to 2)
• Preoperational (2 to 7)
• Concrete operations (7 to 11)
• Formal operations (12 thru Adulthood)

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During these stages..

• Both quantity and quality of knowledge increase.
• Focus is on the change in understanding that
  occurs as child moves through stages.
• Movement through stages occurs with physical
  maturation and experience

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Piagets View of How Infants Learn and Think

• Schemes Organized pattern of functioning
• Basic unit of interacting with world
• If this happens, I do that
• Reflexes (sucking rooting)
• Schemes become more sophisticated as motor
  capabilities advance

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Assimilation

• Understanding an experience in terms of your
  current way of thinking
• Sucking on every toy the same way
• Calling all animals dogs
• Taking in and organizing new info based on what
  you already know
• Assimilating it into current schemes

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Accommodation

• Changing your old ways of thinking based on new
  experiences
• Some things hurt to suck on, so Ill suck on
  pointy things different than round things
• Mom said animals that fly are not dogs. She
  called them birds. Everything that flies must
  also be a bird.
• Accommodating, or making room for, a new
  explanation of how the world works based on new
  knowledge

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Sensorimotor Period

• Piagets first stage of development
• However, this stage is broken down into
  substages
• Simple Reflexes
• First Habits and Primary Circular Reactions
• Secondary Circular Reactions
• Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions
• Tertiary Circular Reactions
• Beginnings of Thought

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Substage 1Simple Reflexes

• Birth to 1 month
• Reflexes (e.g. sucking and rooting) determine the
  infants interaction with the world
• Learning occurs through utilizing reflexes and
  the processes of assimilation and accommodation
• Breast vs. Bottle

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Substage 2First Habits Primary Circular
Reactions

• 1 to 4 months
• Circular Reactionrepeating behaviors that help
  the infant expand and create new schemes
• Primary Circular Reactions repeated behaviors
  focused on own body
• Thumb-sucking
• Coordinates individual behaviors into integrated
  actions

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Substage 3Secondary Circular Reactions

• 4 to 8 months
• Begin to interact with outside world
• Secondary Circular Reactions repeated behaviors
  that bring about a desired consequence in the
  outside world
• Shaking a rattle
• Vocalization increases substantially
• Language development
• Conditioning
• Imitation Begins

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Substage 4Coordination of Secondary Circular
Reactions

• 8 to 12 months
• Goal-Directed Behavior
• Several schemes are combined and coordinated to
  generate a single act to solve a problem
• Object Permanence Realization that objects still
  exist even if they cannot be seen
• At Substage 4 object permanence is very basic and
  overgeneralized

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Substage 5Tertiary Circular Reactions

• 12 to 18 months
• Tertiary Circular Reactions Mini-experiments
  repeating behaviors but varying what you do just
  a little to see if anything different happens
• Dropping the rattle

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Substage 6Beginnings of Thought

• 18 months to 2 years
• Development of the capacity for symbolic thought
• Object permanence has matured to the point were a
  child can have a Mental Representation - an
  internal image of a past event or object
• Pretend Play
• Deferred Imitation Child can imitate a person
  later after that person has left

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Developmentalists Thoughts on Piagets Ideas

• Most developmentalists agree that Piaget's
  descriptions of how cognitive development
  proceeds during infancy are accurate
• Piaget considered a master observer
• Studies show that children do learn about the
  world by acting on objects in their environment

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Criticism of Piaget

• Stages vs. Continuous development
• Underestimating Infants
• Piaget's notion that development is grounded in
  motor activity ignores the importance of infant's
  sensory and perceptual abilities.
• Imitation and object permanence may occur earlier
  than Piaget suggested
• Some development is universal, and some appears
  to be subject to cultural variations.

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Information Processing

• Seeks to identify how kids take in, use, and
  store information
• Computer analogy of cognitive dev.
• 3 basic aspects
• Encoding
• Storage
• Retrieval

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Information Processing Contd

• Automatization
• Processes that require little attention are
  automatic.
• Processes that require large amounts of attention
  are controlled.
• Automatization processes help children in their
  initial encounters with the world by
  "automatically priming them to process
  information in particular ways
• (affects encoding, storage, and retrieval of
  info!)

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Memory from Info Processing Perspective

• Memory
• Memory improves with age
• Research suggests that memory during infancy is
  dependent upon the hippocampus and that at a
  later age involves additional structures of the
  brain

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More about Memory

• Infantile Amnesia
• Prior to age 3
• May not be entirely accurate
• Whether memories are retained into adulthood is
  controversial
• Evidence suggests that we create memory more than
  pulling out actual memory files like a computer
• Implicit vs. Explicit memory

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Intelligence in Infancy

• Measuring intelligence
• Developmental specialists have devised several
  approaches
• The Developmental Quotient
• Bayley Scales of Infant Development
• Visual Recognition Memory Measurement
• Cross-Modal Transference

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Developmental Quotient

• Formulated by Arnold Gesell (1946)
• An overall developmental score that relates to
  performance in four domains
• Motor Skills
• Language Use
• Adaptive Behavior
• Personal-Social

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Bayley Scales

• Nancy Bayley
• 2 to 42 months
• Focuses on 2 areas
• Mental Scale senses, perception, memory,
  learning, problem solving, language
• Social smile, using words
• Motor Scale fine and gross motor skills
• Lifts head, sits w/support, walks alone, etc.
• Yields a DQ (M100, SD15)

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Visual Recognition Memory

• How fast a infant can recognize a stimulus that
  has been previously seen
• Scores on visual recognition is related to later
  IQ
• Quicker infants are presumably more efficient at
  processing information

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Cross-Modal Transference

• Theorized from the multimodal perception (Ch. 4)
• Cross-modal transference
• The ability to identify a stimulus that has
  previously only been experienced through one
  sense using another sense.

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Evaluating Ideas about Infant Intelligence

• Bayley Scales and DQ are helpful in identifying
  children who are well below average on
  developmental tasks
• Does this info really help us?
• Visual Recognition and Cross-Modal Transference
  correlate only moderately with later IQ scores
• Other factors are clearly involved in
  intelligence
• IQ is a controversial idea
• Ignores culture

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Language Development

• Language has several characteristics that must be
  mastered
• PHONEMES Basic unit of sound in a given language
  (e.g. a in mat vs. mate)
• MORPHEMES Basic unit of meaning in a given
  language (e.g. prefixes and suffixes)
• SEMANTICS Rules that govern the meaning of words
  and sentences
• Grammar, mechanics, tone

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Language Development Contd

• As infants age, language becomes closely tied
  with how they think
• Infant Amnesia again
• Comprehension comes before production
• Prelinguistic Communication
• Communication thru sounds, facial expressions,
  gestures, imitation, etc.
• Babbling making speech like but meaningless
  sounds (easy sounds to make)
• Universal

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Language Development Contd

• First words are generally spoken between 10-14
  months
• Holophrases one-word utterances that stand for
  complete phrases
• Culture influences first words
• By 15 mo, the average child has a vocab of 10
  words
• 16-24 months there is a growth spurt of vocab
  up to around 100 words

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Language Development Contd

• By 18 months, kids start to use word combinations
  to form simple sentences
• Telegraphic Speech
• Words not critical are left out of the phrase
• I show book
• Underextension only one blankie
• Overextension all animals are doggie
• Referential vs. Expressive expression

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Origins of Language

• Learning Theory Approach posits that language
  acquisition follows the basic laws of
  reinforcement and conditioning
• Through the process of shaping, language becomes
  more and more similar to adult speech.
• This theory does not explain how children learn
  grammar.
• It does not explain how children produce novel
  phrases, sentences, and constructions, such as
  nonsense words using correct grammar

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Origins of Language Contd

• Noam Chompsky (Linguist, scientist, philosopher)
• Nativist Approach
• theory that we have a genetically determined
  innate mechanism that controls language
  development
• Universal Grammar
• Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
• Hard-wired system of brain hypothesized to permit
  language development

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Origins of Language Contd

• Interactionist Perspective language depends on
  genes and environment
• Incorporates Chomskys view of role of
  environment and genes
• Also incorporates the learning theory approach
• Window for learning a language fluently is from
  birth to about 8 years

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Speaking to Children

• INFANT-DIRECTED SPEECH, a type of speech directed
  towards infants, characterized by short, simple
  sentences.
• This type was previously called motherese.
• Pitch of voice becomes higher.
• Intonation may be singsong.
• Typically only used during first year.
• Infants seem more receptive to this type of
  speech.
• Conflicting evidence
• Cultural differences

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Is Infant-Directed Speech Similar Across Cultures?

• Although the words differ across languages, the
  way the words are spoken are similar!
• Cross-cultural similarities are so great,
  patterns can be realized.
• Pitch rises when a mother is attempting to gain
  an infants attention
• Vowel sounds exaggerated
• Deaf mothers use a form of infant-directed speech
  too! Use slower tempo and repeat signs more often.

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Gender Differences

• Research shows that parents use different
  language for boys than for girls!
• They use diminutives more with girls (kitty/dolly
  vs. cat/doll)
• Warmer phrases and more emotional referents with
  girls
• Tend to use firmer, clearer language with boys

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Gender Differences Contd

• Do the differences in language directed at boys
  and girls during infancy affect their behavior as
  adults???
• No direct research evidence
• Men and women do tend to use different language
  as adults
• Women tend to be more tentative and use less
  assertive language as adults
• Intriguing possibility that altering the language
  we direct at young women could change this!