COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN INFANCY

Chapter 5

Learning Objectives

PIAGET’S APPROACH TO COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Key Elements of Piaget's Theory

• Action = Knowledge• Four universal stages in fixed order• Development = physical maturation and exposure to

relevant experiences• Schemes adapt and change

What principles underlie this cognitive growth?

• Assimilation• Accommodation• Schemes

Will you do better on the next test if you assimilate or accommodate the material?

Piaget's Six Substages of the Sensorimotor Stage

Earliest Stage of Cognitive Growth

Sensorimotor Period•Invariant order of stages and six substages•Individual differences in rate•Transitions include characteristics of both stages

Cognitive Transitions

A Closer Look

A Closer Look

A Closer Look

A Closer Look

Figure 5-2Object Permanence

Before an infant has understood the idea of object permanence, he will not search for an object that has been hidden right before his eyes. But several months later, he will search for it, illustrating that he has attained object permanence. Why is the concept of object permanence important?

A Closer Look

A Closer Look

Assessing Piagetian Theory

PROS•Descriptions of child cognitive development accurate in many ways

– Piaget was pioneering figure in field of development

– Children learn by acting on environment

– Broad outlines of sequence of cognitive development and increasing cognitive accomplishments are generally accurate

CONS•Substantial disagreement over validity of theory and many of its specific predictions

– Stage conception questioned– Connection between motor

development and cognitive development exaggerated

– Object permanence can occur earlier under certain conditions

– Onset of age of imitation questioned

– Cultural variations not considered

Review and Apply

Review and Apply

Review and Apply

INFORMATION-PROCESSING APPROACHES TO COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

What is information-processing?

• Identifies the way that individuals take in, store, and use information

• Involves quantitative changes in ability to organize and manipulate information

• Increases sophistication, speed, and capacity in information processing characterizes cognitive growth

• Focuses on types of “mental programs” used when seeking to solve problems

Information Processing

Encoding—storage—retrieval

The process by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved.

How do you compute?

Take a few minutes to write down an example of how you do each of the following:•Encoding•Storage•Retrieval

Unexpected Expertise

• Infants have the ability to learn subtle statistical patterns and relationships

• These results are consistent with a growing body of research showing that the mathematical skills of infants are surprisingly good

• Infants as young as five months are able to calculate the outcome of simple addition and subtraction problems

Figure 5-4 Mickey Mouse MathResearcher Dr. Karen Wynn found that five-month-olds like MichelleFollet, pictured here, reacted differently according to whether the number of Mickey Mouse statuettes they saw represented correct or incorrect addition. Do you think this ability is unique to humans? How would you find out?

Automatization

• Degree to which activity requires attention

• Helps with initial encounters with stimuli through easy and automatic information processing

What automatic processes are being engaged as you listen to this lecture?

(Remember…sleep is NOT an automatic process!)

What do you think?

Infants cannot remember…anything?

Memory Capabilities in Infancy

Getting a kick out of that!•Kicking research demonstrates increase with age in memory capacities•Infants who have learned the association•between a moving mobile and kicking•showed surprising recall ability when they•were exposed to a reminder (Bearce & Rovee-Collier, 2006; DeFrancisco & Rovee-•Collier, 2008; Moher, Tuerk & Feigenson, 2012)..

Is infant memory qualitatively different from that in older children and adults?

• Information is processed similarly throughout life span

• Kind of information being processed changes and different parts of brain may be used

Does your family have a special story about your early childhood?

How long do memories last?

• Researchers disagree on the age from which memories can be retrieved – Early studies infantile amnesia– Myers clear evidence of early memory

• Physical trace of a memory in brain appears to be relatively permanent– Memories may not be easily, or accurately, retrieved

So…do infants remember?

• Theoretical possibility for interfered memories to remain intact from a very young

• Most cases memories of personal experiences in infancy do not last into adulthood

• Memories of personal experience seem not to become accurate before age 18 to 24 months

Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory

• Advances in brain scan technology, as well as studies of adults with brain damage, suggest that there are two separate systems involved with long-term memory: explicit and implicit memory

• Explicit and implicit memories emerge at different rates and involve different parts of the brain

• The earliest memories seem to be implicit, and they involve the cerebellum and brain stem

Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory(continued)

• The forerunner of explicit memory involves the hippocampus, but true explicit memory doesn't emerge until the second half of the first year

• When explicit memory does emerge, it involves an increasing number of areas of the cortex of the brain

What Is Infant Intelligence?

Developmental specialists have devised several approaches to illuminate the nature of individual differences in intelligence during infancy

Do, Re, Me…..Intelligence!

Do, Re, Me…..Intelligence!

Sample Items from the Bayley Scales of Infant Development

Are developmental scales useful?

YES•Provide a good snapshot of current developmental level•Provide objective assessment of behavior relative to norms

NO•Do not provide good prediction for future development

Maybe?

Information Processing Approaches to Individual Differences in Intelligence

• Using IP approach suggests relationship between information processing efficiency and cognitive abilities

• Moderately strong correlation between early information processing capabilities and later IQ measures

• Predicting child may do well on IQ tests later in life is not same as predicting child will be successful

• More recent information processing approaches continuous manner from infancy to the later stages of life

And so…what does IP research reveal?

Relationship between information processing efficiency and cognitive abilities•Correlate moderately well with later measures of intelligence

•More efficient information processing during the 6 months following birth is related to higher intelligence scores between 2 and 12 years of age and other measures of cognitive competence

What about the multimodal approach?

Cross-modal transference•Ability to identify a stimulus previously experienced through only one sense by using another sense is associated with intelligence

Assessing the IP Approach

PROS•Often uses more precise measures of cognitive ability•Critical in providing information about infant cognition

CONS•Precision makes it more difficult to get overall sense of cognitive development

Taking the Einstein Out of Baby Einstein

• Whether parents actively engaged their children with the DVD or just passively watched it, those children did not learn the words significantly better than the control group.

• Only the children who were learning the words from their parent (with no DVD) learned them better than the control group

• Babies learn vocabulary best when they initiate the learning and when they choose the object to be labeled.

Review and Apply

Review and Apply

Review and Apply

THE ROOTS OF LANGUAGE

The Fundamentals of Language

Comprehension Precedes Production

Early Sounds and Communication

Prelinguislic communication•Babbling

– Universal– Repetition of sounds– and best of all…spit bubbles!

Broca's Area

Areas of the brain that are activated during speech, left, are similar to areas activated during the production of hand gestures, right.

See what I say…

Infants with hearing impairments•Babble with hands instead of voices

•Gestural and verbal babbling activate same neural centers

What comes after “ba-ba-ba-ba”?

Progression from Simple to Complex•Exposure to speech sounds of particular language initially do not influence babbling

– At 6 months babbling reflects of language of culture– Distinguishable from other language babbling

•Combinations of sounds and gestures used to communicate

First Words

Increase at rapid rate•10 to 14 months = first word•15 months = 10 words•18 months = one-word stage ends•16 to 24 months = language explosion equally 50 to 400 words

The Top 50:The First Words Children Understand

First Sentences

First sentences •Created around 8 to 12 months after first words•Indicate understanding of labels and relationships between these•Often observations rather than demands•Use order similar to adult speech with missing words

Children's Imitation of Sentences Showing Decline of Telegraphic Speech

Other Early Language Characteristics

• Underextensions

• Overextensions

Speaking in style and stylish speaking

Can you think of an example of each?

THE ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Learning Theory Approaches: Language as a Learned Skill

• Language acquisition follows the basic laws of reinforcement and conditioning

• Through the process of shaping, language becomes more and more similar to adult speech

Counter-Arguments to Learning Theory Approach

• Does not adequately explain how children readily learn rules of language

• Does not account for how children move beyond specific heard utterances to produce novel phrases, sentences, and constructions

• Does not explain how young children can apply linguistic rules to nonsense words

Nativist Approaches: Language as an Innate Skill

• Genetically determined, innate mechanism that directs the development of language

• Children are born with innate capacity to use language, which emerges, more or less automatically, due to maturation– (Chomsky's universal grammar and LAD)

Assessing Chomsky's Approach

PRO•Specific gene related to speech production identified•Language processing in infant brain structures similar to those in adult speech processing

CON•Uniqueness of speech countered by primate researchers•Even with genetic priming, language use still requires significant social experience to be used effectively

Interactionist Approaches: Language as a Social Device

• Specific course of language development is determined by the language to which children are exposed and reinforcement they receive for using language in particular ways

• Social factors are key to development

Infant-Directed Speech

How does this speech change?

• Infant-directed speech changes as children become older– Around the end of the first year, takes on more adult-

like qualities– Sentences become longer and more complex,

although individual words are still spoken slowly and deliberately

– Pitch used to focus attention on important words

Does Cootsy-Coo Work?

• Infant-directed speech plays an important role in infants’ acquisition of language– Occurs all over the world, though there are cultural

variations– Preferred by newborns – Babies who are exposed to a infant-directed speech

early in life seem to begin to use words and exhibit other forms of linguistic competence earlier

Developmental Diversity

Do people everywhere say “ba-ba-boo” to their infants?•Words differ but ways spoken are similar

•Basic similarities across cultures and in some facets of language specific to particular types of interactions

•Quantity of speech differ by cultures

What then do these similarities in infant-directed speech mean?

Let's Pretend

Turn to a classmate. One of you is a 8-month-old infant; the other is a parent.

As the parent, ask your “infant” classmate:“Would you like a cookie?”

Boys will be boys and girls will be…sweethearts?

Gender differences: Parental language varies by child gender

Do you think men and women use different sorts of language?

Infant cognitive development may be promoted by:

• Providing infants the opportunity to explore the world• Being responsive to infants on both a verbal and a

nonverbal level• Asking questions, listening to their responses, and

providing further communication• Reading to infants• Not pushing infants and don't expect too much too soon

• Keeping in mind that you don't have to be with an infant 24 hours a day

Review and Apply

Review and Apply

Review and Apply

EPILOGUE

Before we proceed to social and personality development in the next chapter, turn back to the prologue of this chapter, about Amelie Hawkins's conversations with her three-month-old daughter, and answer the following questions.

•Is Amelie correct that her daughter is learning from the baby talk that Amelie directs at her?

•When can Amelie expect that “exciting day” when she hears her daughter's first word? What is that word likely to be?

EPILOGUE

• If you were to advise Amelie, what would you tell her to expect in terms of her daughter's language development over time?

• What milestones in cognitive development can Amelie expect her daughter to achieve in the coming year?