Early Infancy: Cognition Piaget

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Early Infancy CognitionPiaget

• Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
• Swiss Psychologist
• Trained in Biology
• Influenced by James Mark Baldwin, who visited E.
  Claparede while Piaget worked with him in France

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Piaget, contd

• What is development?
• A self-regulating interaction between the child
  and the physical and social environment
• What develops?
• Mental structures and schemes,which amount to new
  forms of knowledge
• How does change occur?
• Adaptation assimilation and accomodation
• Disequilibrium and equilibration
• Internal organization

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Piaget, contd

• The Stages of Knowing in Infancy
• 1. Reflexive Schemes exercised and refined (B)
  (e.g., grasping, sucking, eye movements)
• 2. Primary Circular Reactions (1.5 mos) Schemes
  centered about the body become coordinated and
  repeated for sensory pleasure (e.g., kicking
  feet, blowing bubbles)
• 3. Secondary Circular Reactions (4 mos) Schemes
  that have an effect on the world out there
  repeated for joy of exploration (e.g., dropping
  toy off highchair, shaking rattle)

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Piaget, contd

• The Stages of Knowing in Infancy contd
• 4. Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions
  (8 mos) Now multiple schemes are coordinated and
  directed at objects in a goal directed way (e.g.,
  push aside cloth to retrieve toy)
• 5. Tertiary Circular Reactions (12 mos) Active,
  purposeful exploration of the properties of
  objects and events, discovery of new means to old
  ends (e.g., pulling rug that toy is on in order
  to obtain it)
• 6. Mental Representation (18 mos) Ability to
  represent objects in their absence and invent new
  means of acting on objects through mental
  activity (e.g., deferred imitation, symbolic
  play, producing first drawing or first word)

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Piaget, contd

• Object Permanence
• Capacity to represent object or event in absence
  of sensorimotor contact with it
• First evidence comes around 8 mos when infant
  will pull away a cloth covering an object hidden
  within view
• Infant still commits AnotB error - looks for
  object in previous place (A), even when she sees
  it hidden in a new place (B) -until 18 mos

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Recent Research on Infant Cognition

• Object Permanence What do infants know about the
  world of objects?
• Spelke
• Continuous movement implies single object moving
  across the field, discontinuous implies two
  objects
• 3-month-olds dishabituate to single rod when
  habituated to discontinuous movement, and to two
  rods when habituated to continuous movement
• Conclude infant considers continuous movement to
  signal 1 object moving through space

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Recent Research on Infant Cognition

• Object Permanence, contd
• Baillargeon
• Infants view possible or impossible events
• 3 mo olds habituated to a rotating screen, then
  box placed behind screen and infant tested with
  possible (screen stops when it hits the box) or
  impossible (screen continues to rotate as if
  going through the box)
• Another version with tall, short carrots that
  appear or not in a gap in the screen
• Finds 3 mo olds dishabituate to the impossible
  event indicating they have knowledge of
  permanence of properties of an object
• Conclude infant may have knowledge before they
  can act on that knowledge

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Recent Research on Infant Cognition

• Imitation
• Meltzoff
• At issue is whether the imitation of a behavior
  requires representation, if so is Piaget
  underestimating the abilities of the infant?
• Imitation of basic body movements (tongue
  protrusion) at Birth (Meltzoff Moore, 84) and
  after a 24 hr delay at 6 wks (Meltzoff Moore,
  94)
• Imitation of actions on novel toys after 24 hr
  delay at 9 mos (Meltzoff, 88)
• Imitation of intended actions at 2 years
  (Meltzoff, 95)

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Intermodal Perception
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Understanding Physics of Objects Solidity
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Understanding Physics of Objects Gravity
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Understanding Quantity
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Implications of Recent Research for Piagets
Theory

• Important cognitive abilities emerge in precursor
  form very early, even at Birth
• This competence may not be revealed in everyday
  behavior
• Full competence appears as suggested by Piaget
• Knowledge construction is facilitated by motor
  action but may also occur outside of that (as in
  perceptual learning and categorization)

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Memory in Early Infancy

• Fagen reports gradual improvement in efficiency
  of habituation up to 5 mos
• Martin reports infants habituate more rapidly
  second day (3 mo-24 hr, 1 yr -1 wk)
• Rovee-Collier shows better recall in familiar
  environment, at 3 mo recall up to 2wk of
  contingency (e.g., kick for letters not numbers,
  or kick with left foot)
• Memory implies representation, but not full
  representation

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Categorization in Early Infancy

• Rovee-Colliers memory experiment indicates
  infants group together items with similar form
• Starkey, Spelke Gelman habituated 1 mo olds to
  slides with 3 items, spatial arrangement and
  particular items varied, find dishabituate to
  change in number
• Ludemann shows categorization of pos/neg facial
  expressions from slides
• Quinn Eimas show categorization of animal
  categories at 3-4 mos

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Role of perceptual similarity in categorization
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Understanding Intentional Action
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Early Infant Cognition Conclusions

• Infants are well equipped at Birth to construct a
  knowledge of the physical world as in imitation,
  perceptual categorization, intentional
  understanding and memory abilities
• A debate exists as to whether there exists innate
  knowledge as the Nativists suggest (Spelke), or
  whether this is constructed through action on the
  physical world as Piaget suggests.
• While there is considerable ability at B, there
  is also considerable refinement of ability
  through infancy

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Social Bases of Cognition in Early Infancy

• Vygotsky
• Social interaction the arena for cognitive
  development
• Others scaffold the development of infants
• Scaffolding within reach (zone of proximal
  development)

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Social Bases of Early Cognition Language

• Traditional Debate Between Behaviorists (Skinner)
  and Nativists (Chomsky)
• Behaviorism claims
• Language acquired through reinforcement
• Problem in explaining creative utterances
• Nativism claims
• Universal, innate grammatical structure, LAD
• Problem no empirical evidence for universals

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Social Bases Language, contd

• Social Interactionists (Bruner)
• Children learn about language in everyday
  routines
• learn the pragmatics of conversation,
  turning-taking
• They already categorize and group the world
• Associating words with these categories is then
  easy
• Learning how to use language consists of learning
  how to express communicatively about a world that
  is already organized in a non-linguistic way

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Evidence for a Social Basis to Language
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Contingency

• Trevarthan
• Primary intersubjectivity (2 mos)
• Secondary intersubjectivity (9 mos),
• Bigelow
• Infants sensitive to contingency of live
  interactions and respond negatively to delayed
  video interactions with mothers around 4 mos.

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Social Bases of Language, Contd

• Tomasello
• Joint Attention
• Attending to something outside of the dyad
• Tomasello Farrar (83)
• moms who had more joint attention with infants
  had infants with higher vocabularies, follow-in
  better than directed conditions
• Baldwin (91) shows that the infant uses eye gaze
  to determine when to associate label with object
• Callaghan (99) show that joint attention episodes
  also facilitate the comprehension of visual
  symbols

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Precursors to Verbal Communication

• Growth of intentionality
• Both members of the dyad interact with the
  intention to influence the other
• Greater flexibility of attentional capacity
• Moving from dyadic to triadic interactions
• Ability to use symbols
• Crossing the divide between the perceptual world
  to the conceptual world

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Precursors to Verbal Communication

• Topic Sharing
• First communications occur in dyad (primary
  intersubjectivity)
• At 5-6 mos infant develops the manual skills to
  explore objects and directs attention to objects
  more than people attn to mom at 6 wks is 70, at
  26 wks is 30 (Fogel)
• At 9-10 mos infant begins to be able to
  coordinate attention to objects with a
  communicative partner (secondary
  intersubjectivity or joint attention)

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Precursors to Verbal Communication

• Intentionality - beginning to understand that
  others have intentions toward you in
  communication and responding with your own
  intentions to influence the other
• Evidence for intentional understanding
• Gaze alternation
• Repair of failed messages
• Ritualization of gestures

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Precursors to Verbal Communication

• Gestures
• Eg of pointing
• Prior to 8 mos pointing occurs and is indicative
  of interest in an object, an extension of
  reaching for the object, not yet communicative
  (Pointing-for-self)
• Pointing while gaze alternates between object and
  other (Pointing-for-others)
• By 2 yrs nonverbal gestures now used to
  symbolically represent objects, make requests,
  use of gestures deceases as verbal language
  increases to the language spurt of 18 mos

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Scaffolding by Adults

• Werker McLeod show that
• infants prefer motherese or infant-directed
  speech, also occurs for deaf infants
• Nelson argues that
• facilitative speech style of moms helps language
  acquisition, directive style hinders it
• Tomasello shows that
• labeling within joint attention episodes
  facilitates vocabulary acquisition
• Bruner suggests that
• language learning is eased by the continuity
  between preverbal rule-based activities and the
  demands of verbal communication
• All suggest that
• language is greatly facilitated by social
  interaction and supports from others