Cognitive Development

1. Cognitive Development PSY 421 – Fall 2004

2. Overview • Milestones of Development • Studying cognition in infants and elderly adults • Theorists in Cognitive Development • Brain Development • Perceptual Development • Motor Development • Attention Development • Memory Development • Other Cognitive Abilities • Language Development • Reading

3. Developmental Milestones • Infants and Toddlers • Vision prior to 6 months = 20/600 at birth (very poor visual acuity), improves to almost 20/20 at 6 months • Hold up head = 3 months • Sitting up = 6 months • Babbling = 6 months • Roll over = 7 months • Crawling = 9 months • Walking = 12 months • Talking = 12 to 18 months • One-two word sentences = 18 months • Full sentences = 2 to 3 years http://www.med.umich.edu/1libr/yourchild/devmile.htm

4. Developmental Milestones, continued • Early Childhood • Begin to master skills like math, reading, and writing • Six- to 8-year-olds can rarely sit for longer than 15-20 minutes for an activity. Attention span gets longer with age. • They can develop a plan to meet a goal. • Children begin to read and write early in middle childhood and should be skillful in reading and writing by the end of this stage.

5. Methodologies Used to Study Cognition • Infants • Non-nutritive sucking on a pacifier • Kicking (Rovee-Collier and colleagues) • Imitation with props (Bauer and colleagues) • Habituation • Preferential looking • Elderly Adults • Same research methods used for non-elderly adults • Interviews • Indirect or implicit tests of cognition

6. Theorists in Cognitive Development • Piaget – stages of cognitive development; observed his own kids; methodologies not consistent across different kids; severely underestimated the abilities of children at particular ages; definitions of stages not supported • Vygotsky – “the speech structures mastered by the child become the basic structures of his thinking.”; problem solving with the help of others (Zone of Proximal Development)

7. Brain Development • Constantly changing between infancy and adulthood • Neurons – almost all present before birth; number changes across lifespan; neurons die at different rates and in different parts of the brain • Synaptic connections are made before birth and throughout life; connections are not permanent • Plasticity in the brain

8. Perceptual Development • Infants • Acuity is poor at birth • Saccades, focus, and fixations improve as the infant gets older • Contrast sensitivity in young infants is poor • Depth perception changes with age (looming, visual cliff studies, and heart-rate studies) • Perception of faces – high contrast is important • Elderly adults • Acuity and contrast sensitivity start to decline • Nearsighted adults can become farsighted in their late years

10. Motor Development • Holding head up, sitting up, rolling over, and crawling are all very important for exploring the environment and important for cognitive development • Reaching is also very important • What is the earliest age that infants show controlled, coordinated movements? • Motor development is very dynamic

11. Attention Development • Infants and younger children have very short attention spans (average for a 5-year-old = 15 to 20 minutes) • Selective attention is difficult for younger children – this changes the ease with which they can complete cognitive tasks compared to older children • Young children tend to respond to things impulsively (Kogan, 1983) • Young children tend to make fewer discriminations between similar objects than do older children (Gibson & Spelke, 1983) • ADD/ADHD • 4-5% of adults; 3-5% of children (approx. 2 million) • 6 million prescriptions for stimulants to treat children (1995) • Data summarized by NIMH, leading source for ADHD research funding: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/helpchild.cfm

12. Memory Development • Question: if infants appear to have poor memory abilities, what is this attributed to? • Infantile amnesia = the inability of children-elderly adults to remember the first few years of their life (typically 4 years and prior) • Memory span/capacity – improves with age but declines in elderly adults • Speed of processing – faster with age until late in adolescence (then gets slower) • Spontaneous memory strategy use (e.g.,) is difficult for young children and elderly adults • Metamemory and metacognition • Knowledge representation – dinosaurs (Chi & Koeske, 1983)

13. Other Cognitive Abilities • Object Naming/Categorization • Begins to occur around 6 months (evidenced by pointing) • Colors, animals, everyday objects, letters, people, toys • Naming and categorization becomes more elaborate with speech • Counting (3 years and up) • One to one principle = assign only one number to each object • Stable order principle = assign numbers in same order • Cardinality principle = last number assigned indicates that is the number in the set • Abstraction principle = the other principles apply to any set of objects • Order irrelevance principle = order in which objects are counted is irrelevant • Problem-Solving • Infancy – imitation • Means-end analysis – 9 months and up • Board games – younger kids do not like to move backwards

14. Language Development - Infancy • First word = 10 to 13 mos or longer • Babbling starts 3 to 6 mos (due to biological maturation – deaf babies babble; motivation will not help) • Dada, kitty, car, ball, milk, eye, hat, clock, bye • Holophrases – one word utterances that contain an entire sentences worth of meaning • Overextension = misuse words by extending one word’s meaning to include objects that are not related to the word’s meaning (dada pertains to all men) • Underextension = failure to use a noun or name relevant to an event or object (doggie is their dog but no other dogs in the neighborhood)

15. Language Development - 18 to 24 months • Two-word utterances are culturally similar • Telegraphic speech = short, precise words to communicate (no articles or unnecessary words) • Brown’s (1973) MLU (mean length of utterance) – indicator of language development based on number of morphemes per sentence that a child produces in a sample of about 50 to 100 sentences • 5 stages: 1 (1+ to 2.0), 2 (2.5), 3 (3.0), 4 (3.5), 5 (4.0) • Important because child who differ in chronological age by as much as .5 to .75 years still have similar speech patterns • Better indicator of language development than chronological age

16. Language Development – Early Childhood • Understanding is usually far ahead of word choice in speech • Some sounds (r, s, sp) are still difficult • Start to use endings, like –s and –ed, although they tend to overgeneralize (goed instead of went) • Children can abstract grammar rules to novel situations • Use wh- questions (especially WHY?) • Use social language (please, thank you) • Jokes – 3 years and up • Learn 5 to 8 words a day from ages 1 to 6; after 5 or 6, it may be 22 new words a day

17. Reading • Approaches • Basic skills and phonetics approach (Hooked on Phonics) = reading instruction should emphasize phonetics and basic rules for translating written symbols into sounds. Use simplified reading materials • Whole-language = reading instruction should parallel natural language learning; reading materials should be whole and meaningful • I-P approach (Spear-Swerling & Sternberg) = combo of 2 approaches above • visual cue recognition (preschool, kindergarten) - use colors, symbols, signs to recognize words • phonetic cue recognition (kindergarten, first grade) – alphabetic insight (associating sounds to letters) • automatic word recognition (1st and 2nd grades) – sound out and recognize (after this stage, they can deal with meaning rather than just recognition) • strategic reading (middle-late elem. school years) • proficient adult reading (adolescence & adulthood)