The First Two Years Cognitive development

1. Chapter 6 The First Two YearsCognitive development

2. Sensorimotor Intelligence • Sensorimotor intelligence: Piaget’s term for the way infants think during the first period of cognitive development • Using their senses and motor skills • Birth - 24 months

3. Winn, 1992, 2000

4. Stages One and Two: Primary Circular Reactions • Primary circular reactions: infant senses and tries to understand • Motion • Sucking • Noise • Other stimuli

5. Stage one: reflexes • Lasts only a month • Stage two: first acquired adaptations • “Stage of first habits” • Adaptation = intelligence

6. Secondary circular reactions: babies respond to • Other people • Toys • Any other object they can touch or move Stages Three and Four: Secondary Circular Reaction

7. Stages Three and Four: Secondary Circular Reaction • Stage three: (age 4 to 8 months) • Infants attempt to produce exciting experiences, making interesting events last • Rattles make noise, shaking the rattle more makes the noise last

8. Stages Three and Four: Secondary Circular Reaction • Stage four (8 months to 1 year): new adaptation and anticipation; babies think about a goal and how to reach it • Goal-directed behavior: purposeful action • Enhanced awareness of cause and effect • Memory for actions already completed • Understanding of other people’s intentions

9. Object permanence: realization that objects (including people) still exist when they can no longer be seen, touched, or heard • 8 months of age Object Permanence

10. Tertiary circular reaction–third type of feedback loops in sensorimotor intelligence • Active exploration • Experimentation Stages Five and Six: Tertiary Circular Reactions

11. Stages Five and Six: Tertiary Circular Reactions • Stage five: new means through active experimentation • “Little scientist”: Piaget’s term for the stage-five toddler who experiments using trial and error in active and creative exploration 11

12. Stage six: toddlers begin to anticipate and solve simple problems by using mental combinations • 18 to 24 months • Deferred imitation: stage six accomplishment in which an infant first perceives something that someone else does and then performs the same action a few hours or even days later Stages Five and Six: Tertiary Circular Reactions

13. Habituation: process of getting used to (aka bored with) object or event through repeated exposure Using habituation as a research strategy involves repeating one stimulus until babies lose interest, and then presenting another, slightly different stimulus. Boredom as a Research Method 13

14. Techniques to measure brain activity have demonstrated that babies are thinking long before they talk fMRI: functional magnetic resonance imaging, a measuring technique in which the brain’s electrical excitement indicates activation anywhere in the brain Measuring the Brain 14

15. Information Processing • Information-processing theory: perspective that compares human thinking processes to computer analysis of data, including • Sensory input • Connections • Stored memories • Output

16. Perception: mental processing of information that arrives at the brain from the sensory organs • Affordance: opportunity for perception and interaction offered by a person, place, or object in the environment

17. Affordances • Selective perception: a person’s age affects what affordance he or she sees • Research on early affordances: As information processing improves over the first year, infants become quicker to recognize affordances

18. Visual cliff: experimental apparatus that gives an illusion of a sudden dropoff between one horizontal surface and another • Depth perception: once thought that a visual deficit prevented young babies from seeing the drop

19. Movement & People Dynamic perception: perception that is primed to focus on movement and change • People preference: universal principle of infant perception, consisting of an innate attraction to other humans

20. Memory • Processing and remembering events requires a certain amount of experience and brain maturation. • Memories are particularly evident when: • experimental conditions similar to real life. • motivation is high. • retrieval strengthened by reminders and repetition.

21. Memory • Rovee-Collier experiment demonstrated that 3-month-old infants could remember after two-weeks if they had a brief reminder session before being retested • Reminder session: perceptual experience intended to help a person recollect an idea, a thing, or an experience, without testing

22. The Universal Sequence Timing of language acquisition varies. Most advanced 10% of 2-year-olds speak more than 550 words. Least advanced 10% speak fewer than 100 words Although timing varies, sequence is the same worldwide 22

23. Listening and Responding • Infants begin learning language before birth. • Newborns look closely at facial expressions and prefer to hear speech over other sounds.

24. Adults talk to babies with: higher pitches simpler words repetition exaggerated tone varied speed Baby talk Motherese Scientific term: child-directed speech Listening and Responding 24

25. Babbling • At between 6 and 9 months, babies begin to repeat certain syllables. • Babbling: extended repetition of certain syllables • ba-ba-ba, da-da-da

26. First Words • Holophrase: single word that expresses a complete, meaningful thought • Naming explosion: sudden increase in an infant’s vocabulary

27. Culture and families vary a great deal in how much child-directed speech children hear The idea that children should be “seen and not heard” is contrary to the emphasis on communication in many U.S. families Cultural Differences 27

28. Children can master two languages, but the crucial variable is how much speech in both languages the child hears Sometimes hearing two languages slows down grammar Takes longer to understand how words should be combined Learning Multiple Languages 28

29. Theories of Language Learning • Worldwide, people younger than 2 already use language well • Three schools of thought: • behaviorism • epigenetic theory • sociocultural theory

30. Theory One: Language Needs to Be Taught • Behaviorism or Learning Theory. • Skinner saw that spontaneous babbling usually reinforced by mother: • repeating. • praising. • giving attention to the infant. • Parents are expert teachers • other caregivers help • Well-taught infants become well-spoken children.

31. Theory Two: Infants Teach Themselves • Epigenetic Theory - Noam Chomsky • Language too complex to be mastered merely through step-by-step conditioning. • Universal grammar: • all young children master basic language at about the same age • Language acquisition device (LAD): term used for a hypothesized mental structure that enables humans to learn language. • Includes basic aspects of grammar, vocabulary, and intonation

32. Theory Three: Social Impulses Foster Infant Language • Sociocultural theory • Social-pragmatic: • neither vocabulary reinforcement (behaviorism) • nor innate connection (epigenetic) • Social reason for language: communication