Cognitive Development in Infancy

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• Chapter 6
• Cognitive Development in Infancy

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• Piagets Theoryof Infant Development

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• Piaget proposed that
• Physical bodies can adapt to the world.
• Humans build mental structures to aid adaptation.
• Humans interactive with their environment.
• Children think differently at various points in
  their development.

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• Schemes are patterns of actions and thoughts that
  organize knowledge.
• Actions are behavioral schemes. Their development
  characterizes infancy, such as that of simple
  actions and reflexes.
• Thoughts are cognitive activities or mental
  schemes, which develop in childhood, such as
  classifying objects by size, color, or shape.

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• Assimilation incorporates new information into
  existing knowledge.
• Accommodation adjusts existing knowledge to fit
  new information.
• Organization is Piagets concept of grouping
  isolated behaviors into a higher-order system.
• The child becomes skilled at using tools over
  time, one at a time until experiences become
  skills.

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• Equilibration
• Piagets mechanism to explain how children shift
  from one stage of thought to another.
• It is lost when children have cognitive
  conflicts.
• Achieved when assimilation and accommodation are
  used together to resolve a conflict.
• Piagets 6 substages of the sensorimotor stage of
  infant development last from birth to 2 years of
  age.

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Piagets 6 Substages of Sensorimotor Development
Figure 6.1
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• At the end of sensorimotor stage
• Child achieves object permanencethe
  understanding that objects continue to exist even
  when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched.
• Infant understands a differentiation between self
  and world.
• At around 5.5 and 6.5 months of age, an infant
  can understand simple causal factors .
• Piagets work is criticized as
• Being too vague
• Underestimating infant ability
• Being based mostly on his childrens infancy

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Object Permanence
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• Learning and Remembering

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• Attention
• Infants can scan and fixate on objects.
• 4-month-olds show selective attention .
• Infant attention governed by novelty and
  habituation, respond to changed stimuli.

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• Meltzoff imitation abilities are biological
  because infants can imitate facial expressions
  within a few days after birth.
• Piaget deferred imitation occurs at about 18
  months but Meltzoff showed that it occurred at 9
  months.

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• Memory retention of information over time
• Implicit memory is performed automatically
  without conscious recollection.
• Explicit memory is conscious memory of facts and
  experiences occurs in infants after 6 months.
• Infantile or childhood amnesia
• Inability to recall memories of events that
  occurred before 3 years of age.
• May be caused by immaturity of prefrontal lobes
  of the brain.

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• Concepts and categories
• By 7 to 9 months, infants form conceptual
  categories that are global in nature, such as
  classifying birds as animals and airplanes as
  vehicles.
• Gradually, by age two, the concepts become more
  differentiated.

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• Individual
• Differences in
• Intelligence

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• Individual differences in infant cognitive
  development are important
• Development testing emphasizes norms
• Infants assessed mostly based on assessment
  scales and intelligence tests
• Identifying an infants development as slow,
  normal, or advanced has advantages
• If slow provide more enrichment
• If advanced provide more stimulating toys

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• Types of infant cognitive assessment
• Gesells developmental quotient (DQ) has 4
  categories of behavior motor, language,
  adaptive, and personalsocial
• Bayley Scales of Infant Development have three
  components to predict later development mental
  scale, motor scale, and infant behavior profile
• Infant intelligence tests are valuable in
  assessing effects of maternal deprivation and
  environmental stimulation but not highly
  correlated with later childhood IQ scores.

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• Language
• Development

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• Language develops in infants throughout the world
  along a similar path and sequence
• Infants ability to recognize native language,
  for English speakers this includes
  distinguishing r from t
• On average, a child
• Understands about 50 words at age 13 months
• Speaks first word at 1015 months of age
• Can speak about 50 words at 18 months of age

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• Average 2-year-old can speak about 200 words.
• Vocabulary spurt begins at approximately 18
  months of age.
• Two-word utterances occur at about 1824 months.
  
• Overextension and underextension of words are
  common.
• Telegraphic speech is use of short and precise
  words.

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Some Language Milestones in Infancy
Age
Language Milestones
Figure 6.9
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• There is evidence that
• Specific regions of the brain Language has a
  biological basis.
• Everyone knows its rules and has ability to
  create infinite numbers of words and sentences.
• are predisposed to be used for language
• Brocas Area (word production)
• Wernickes Area (word comprehension)
• Damage to either of these areas produces types of
  aphasia, a loss or impairment of language
  processing.

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Brocas Area and Wernickes Area
Brocas Area
Wernickes Area
Figure 6.10
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• Behaviorists claim language is a complex learned
  skill acquired through responses and
  reinforcements.
• Studies found link between size of childs
  vocabulary and mothers talkativeness.
• Young childrens vocabularies are linked to
  family socioeconomic status.

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Language Input in Professional and Welfare
Families, and Young Childrens Vocabulary
Development
800
Parent utterances to child per hour
Professional
600
400
Welfare
200
0
18
22
26
30
34
38
10
14
Age of children (months)
Figure 6.1a (a)
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Language Input in Professional and Welfare
Families, and Young Childrens Vocabulary
Development
1200
1000
Professional
800
600
400
Welfare
Childrens cumulative vocabulary (words)
200
0
18
22
26
30
34
38
10
14
Age of children (months)
Figure 6.11 (b)
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• Three strategies to enhance childs acquisition
  of language other than child-directed speech
• Recasting rephrasing something the child has
  said
• Expanding state repeating what the child has
  said but in correct structure
• Labeling identifying the names of objects
• Children vary in their ability to acquire
  language