Infancy: Cognitive Development

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Chapter 5

• Infancy Cognitive Development

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What is Cognitive Development?

• The development of childrens ways of perceiving
  and mentally representing the world.
• Huh?
• Another way of saying A focus on the developing
  thought processes of infants and children

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Question

• Who was the first theorist to focus on a childs
  cognitive development?
• ? Piaget!

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Piaget

• Studied childrens cognitive development as it
  progresses through 4 stages.
• He believed children were naturally curious. They
  want to make sense of their experiences, and in
  the process learn how to understand the world.
• He believed children were like scientists who
  create theories on how the world works. (and this
  makes life a little more predicable!)

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Piagets Basic Principals

• Childrens cognitive development progresses in an
  orderly sequence of stages (which are invariant).
  
• Childrens concepts of the world are called
  Schemes.
• Schemes are mental categories of related events,
  objects or knowledge.

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Schemes, cont.

• Schemes are organized ways of making sense of
  experience that change with age.
• Schemes at first are action based, sensorimotor
  patterns repeated over and over then later move
  to thinking before acting pattern which is more
  deliberate.
• Schemes change constantly, adapting to the
  childrens experiences.
• Children build schemes through direct interaction
  with the environment, called Adaptation

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How Is This Adaptation (or change) Done?

• Children attempt to Assimilate new events or
  experiences into existing schemes.
• When assimilation does not allow the child to
  make sense of novel events, they will Accommodate
  by modifying their existing schemes.
• Accommodation is when schemes are modified based
  on experience.

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Adaptation, cont.

• When schemes are modified, the child organizes
  them.
• This organization creates an internal
  rearrangement and linking of schemes to create an
  interconnected system.

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Review

• We know that Piaget identified 4 stages of
  cognitive development.
• (remember them?)
• In this chapter we will only focus on the first
  one, the Sensorimotor Stage.

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Sensorimotor Stage of Development

• From birth to 2 years
• Involves learning through sensory and motor
  activities.
• Infants progress from responding to events with
  reflexes, to responding with goal-directed,
  intentional behavior that involves an awareness
  of past events.

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What Characterizes Sensorimotor Thinking?

• 1. Adapting to, and exploring the environment
• 2. Understanding objects
• 3. Using symbols

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1. Adapting to and Exploring the Environment

• At first newborns respond reflexively to their
  environment.
• At about 8 months there is the onset of goal
  directed behavior there is a means to an end.
  In this stage the infant gains the capacity to
  imitate/copy and action not originally in their
  repertoires.
• At 12 months infants become active experimenters,
  Behavior takes on a new experimental quality
  Infants repeat actions over and over to see how
  they work like a little scientist.

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Trial and Error Learning

• The Little Scientist

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2. Understanding Objects

• Infants in the sensorimotor stage are beginning
  to understand objects.
• Objects things which exist regardless of our
  actions and thoughts towards them.
• Early on for the infant it is out of sight, out
  of mind.

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What is Object Permanence?

• The recognition that an object or person
  continues to exist when out of sight.
• Emerges over the 1st yr.
• The development of object permanence is tied to
  the infants tendency to form mental
  representations (images) of an object and reason
  about them

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3. Using Symbols

• By 18 months infants have begun to talk and
  gesture, which is evidence of the use of symbols.
• Symbols represent objects and the relationships
  among them.
• Remember Words and gestures are symbols that
  stand for something else.

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3. Using Symbols, cont.

• Wave bye-bye same as saying bye-bye
• Apple word represents the object
• Once infants begin using symbols they can begin
  to anticipate the consequences of actions
  mentally instead of having to perform them.

Bye-Bye!
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What is Information Processing?

• A focus on how children manipulate or process
  information coming in from the environment.
• What are the 2 tools that aid an infant in
  information processing?
• a. Memory
• b. Imitation

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a. Memory

• Memory improves dramatically between 2-6 mo, then
  again by 12 mo.
• Memory improves as children age, which can be
  attributed to development in the parts of the
  brain responsible for memory.

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b. Imitation

• Neonates have been found to imitate adults who
  open their mouth or stick out their tongue.

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Imitation is Even Evident in.

• Infant Primates!

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How Does Language Develop in Infants?

• It develops according to an invariant sequence of
  stages.
• At first infants vocalize using no words, called
  Prelinguistic Vocalizations.
• Prelinguistic vocalizations are sounds which do
  not represent objects or events.
• They are the steps to speech.

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What are the Steps of Prelinguistic Vocalizations?

• 1. Crying (Birth-1mo)
• 2. Cooing (2mo) Use of tongue to make noises of
  pleasure or excitement. Vowel like. oooooh and
  ahhhh
• 3. Babbling (6-9mo) First vocalizations that
  sound like human speech but have no meaning.
  dah bah mah

Not screaming, babbling!
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Steps in Prelinguistic Vocalizations, cont.

• 4. Echolalia (10-12mo) repetition of syllables
  over and over (babababababa, dadadadadada, pause
  then another combination. (sounds like
  conversation)
• 5. Intonation (end of 12 mo) Using the rising and
  falling melody of adult speech. Is sounding more
  like real speech because the infant stresses some
  syllables and varies their pitch.

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What is Vocabulary Development?

• It refers to the childs learning the meanings
  of words.
• Generally speaking, childrens receptive
  vocabulary develops faster than their expressive
  vocabulary. (this means that at any given time,
  they can understand more words than they can use)

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What is Vocabulary Development?, cont.

• Receptive vocabulary The ability to understand
  language. To make the link between speech sounds
  and particular objects.
• Expressive vocabulary Ability to speak language.

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A Childs First Words

• Typically spoken between 11-13 mo (range is from
  8mo-18mo) tend to be 1-2 syllables (mama, dada),
  animals, food, toys, and objects that move.
• 3-4 mo after 1st words, they develop 10-30 words.
• By 18mo, produce up to 50 words

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A Childs First Words, cont.

• At 18-22 mo there is a rapid burst in vocabulary.
  Increase from 50 to 300 words in a few months,
  mostly just nouns (called a naming explosion)
• This language growth continues until preschool.
  Children gain an average of 9 new words a day!
• By 2 ½ children have 275-650 words.

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Know

• The first words that children produce tend to be
  words their parents use frequently when they talk
  to them. This means..
• ? talk to you children!

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Two Styles of Language Development

• 1. Referential Language Style Use of language to
  label objects in the environment.
• 2. Expressive Language Style Use of language
  primarily as a means for engaging in social
  interactions. (this is more common)

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Question

• What can a parent do (besides talking and reading
  to their child) to encourage their language
  development?

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Need a Clue?

• ? Watch Sesame Street!
• Sesame Street, probably the most studied
  television program of all time, has been shown to
  have a variety of benefits for preschool
  children, including increases in vocabulary,
  ability to count, and general school readiness.
  Garrison, M., Christakis, D. (2005).