Chapter 6: Cognitive Development in Infancy

1. Chapter 6: Cognitive Development in Infancy

2. Piaget’s Theoryof Infant Development

4. 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.

5. Schemes are patterns of actions and thoughts that organize knowledge. The basic unit for an organized pattern of sensorimotor functioning. • 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.

6. Assimilation incorporates new information into existing knowledge. • Accommodation adjusts existing knowledge to fit new information. • Organization is Piaget’s 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.

7. Equilibration: • Piaget’s 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. • Piaget’s 6 substages of the sensorimotor stage of infant development last from birth to 2 years of age.

8. Piaget’s 6 Substages of Sensorimotor Development Figure 6.1

9. At the end of sensorimotor stage: • Child achieves object permanence—the 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 . • Piaget’s work is criticized as • Being too vague • Underestimating infant ability • Being based mostly on his children’s infancy

10. Object Permanence

11. Critique of Piaget • Theory based on observation of his own kids • Better measurement techniques suggest cognitive abilities are developing earlier then Piaget suggested • Stable and differentiated perceptual world takes place earlier • Memory and other symbolic activity occur by 2nd half of 1st year

12. Information-Processing Perspective • Not concerned about stages but instead about cognitive processes such as attention, memory, encoding, retrieval, etc. • Habituation: repeated presentation causes reduced attention • Dishabituation: renewed interest in stimulus

13. Learning and Remembering

14. Conditioning: • Consequences following a behavior affects whether behavior is repeated. • Rovee-Collier showed infants have memory of conditioned experiences. • 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.

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. Individual Differences in Intelligence

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

20. Types of infant cognitive assessment: • Gesell’s developmental quotient (DQ) has 4 categories of behavior: motor, language, adaptive, and personal–social • Bayley Scales of Infant Development have three components to predict later development: mental scale, motor scale, and infant behavior profile

21. Fagan Test of Infant Intelligence focuses on infant’s ability to process information • Estimates a baby’s intelligence by comparing amount of time spent looking at an object with amount of time spent looking at familiar object. • Infant intelligence tests are valuable in assessing effects of maternal deprivation and environmental stimulation; but not highly correlated with later childhood IQ scores.

22. Language Development

23. Wild or feral children are raised in isolation and unable to recapture normal language development despite intensive intervention later. • For example: • Victor, Wild Boy of Aveyron • Genie: 13-year-old found in 1970 in Los Angeles • Both cases raise questions about biological and environmental determinants of language. • Language is a system of words, symbols, and gestures that create shared communication that transcends time (future, present, and past).

24. Language’s five systems of rules: • Phonology: sound system of language, with phoneme being smallest unit of sound with meaning • Morphology: units of meaning in word formation, with morpheme being the smallest unit of meaning • Syntax: how words are combined • Semantics: the meanings of sentences and words • Pragmatics: use of appropriate language in different contexts

25. The Rule Systems of Language

26. Language develops in infants throughout the world along a similar path and sequence • Infant’s 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 10–15 months of age • Can speak about 50 words at 18 months of age

27. Variation in Language Milestones 27 24 21 18 15 12 Age in months 9 First words Vocabulary spurt Language Milestone Figure 6.8

28. Average 2-year-old can speak about 200 words. • Vocabulary spurt begins at approximately 18 months of age. • Two-word utterances occur at about 18–24 months. • Overextension and underextension of words are common. • Telegraphic speech is use of short and precise words.

29. Some Language Milestones in Infancy Age Language Milestones Figure 6.9

30. There is evidence that • Language has a biological basis. • Everyone “knows” its rules and has ability to create infinite numbers of words and sentences. • Specific regions of the brain are predisposed to be used for language • Broca’s Area (word production) • Wernicke’s Area (word comprehension) • Damage to either of these areas produces types of aphasia, a loss or impairment of language processing.

31. Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area Broca’s Area Wernicke’s Area Figure 6.10

32. Noam Chomsky: Children are prewired for language • Chomsky’s language acquisition device (LAD) is a theoretical construct only. • Behaviorists claim language is a complex learned skill acquired through responses and reinforcements. • Studies found link between size of child’s vocabulary and mother’s talkativeness. • Young children’s vocabularies are linked to family socioeconomic status.

33. Language Input in Professional and Welfare Families, and Young Children’s Vocabulary Development 800 Professional 600 400 Parent utterances to child per hour Welfare 200 0 10 14 18 22 26 30 34 38 Age of children (months) Figure 6.1a (a)

34. Language Input in Professional and Welfare Families, and Young Children’s Vocabulary Development 1200 1000 Professional 800 600 400 Welfare Children’s cumulative vocabulary (words) 200 0 10 14 18 22 26 30 34 38 Age of children (months) Figure 6.11 (b)

35. Receptive vocabulary: key here is children understand much of what’s being said before they can express it • Holophrase: one word implies a complete sentence (thought) e.g. drink • Telegraphic speech: use of short and precise words to communicate

36. Three strategies to enhance child’s 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