Lifespan Psychology Lecture, Chapter 2, Module 2.2

Chapter 2: Infancy

Module 2.2

Cognitive Development in Infancy

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

All children pass through a series of four universal stages in a fixed order from birth through adolescence:

SensorimotorPreoperationalConcrete Operational Formal Operational


• Movement from one stage to the next occurs when a child reaches an appropriate level of physical maturation and is exposed to relevant experiences.


• Assimilation is the process by which people understand an experience in terms of their current stage of cognitive development and way of thinking.

• Accommodation takes place when child

changes existing ways of thinking, understanding, or behaving in response to encounters with new stimuli or events.

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

Sensorimotor Stage

• The sensorimotor stage: Birth - 2 years Six substages.

Named for the Sensory and Motor skill development that occurs in this stage of cognitive development

Sensorimotor Stage

Substage 1 - Simple Reflexes (0-1 month):

• Various inborn reflexes

• At the same time, some of reflexes begin to

accommodate the infant’s experiences

Example: Infant who is being breast-fed, but who

also receives supplemental bottles, may start to change the way he or she sucks, depending on whether a nipple is on a breast or a bottle.

Sensorimotor StageSubstage 2 - First Habits (1 - 4 months):

• Beginning of coordination of what were separate actions into single, integrated activities.

For instance, an infant might combine grasping an object with sucking on it, or staring at something while touching it.

When an infant first puts his thumb in his mouth and begins to suck, it is a mere chance event. However, when he repeatedly sucks his thumb in the future, it represents a primary circular reaction, which he is repeating because the sensation of sucking is pleasurable.

Substage 3 - Secondary Circular Reactions(4-8 months):

• Child is engaging in what Piaget calls secondary circular reactions, which are schemes regarding repeated actions that bring about a desirable consequence.

A child who repeatedly picks up a rattle in her crib and shakes it in different ways to see how the sound changes is demonstrating her ability to modify her cognitive scheme about shaking rattles.

Sensorimotor Stage

Sensorimotor StageSubstage 4 - Coordination of Secondary Circular

Reactions (8 -12 months)

• Beginning of goal-directed behavior

Object permanence is the realization that people and objects exist even when they cannot be seen. It is a simple principle, but its mastery has profound consequences.

What did the infant do?Why did the infant stop looking at the toy?

What do you see?

Sensorimotor StageSubstage 5 - Tertiary Circular Reactions (12-18

months)• Development of schemes regarding deliberate variation

of actions that bring desirable consequences

• Carrying out miniature experiments to observe

consequences

Piaget observed his son Laurent dropping a toy swan repeatedly, varying the position from which he dropped it, carefully observing each time to see where it fell. Instead of just repeating the action each time (as in a secondary circular reaction), Laurent made modifications in the situation to learn about their consequences.

Sensorimotor StageSubstage 6 - Beginnings of Thought (18 months - 2 years)

• Capacity for mental representation or symbolic thought

• Infants can imagine where objects might be that they cannot see.

• They can even plot in their heads unseen trajectories of

objects, so if a ball rolls under a piece of furniture, they can figure out where it is likely to emerge on the other side.

Infants can:• Understand causality• Pretend • Imitate a person who is no longer present

Information-Processing Approach to Cognitive Development

• According to this approach, the quantitative changes in infants’ abilities to organize and manipulate information represent the hallmarks of cognitive development.

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 and Memory

Encoding—storage—retrieval

Information-Processing and Memory

• Encoding is the process by which information is initially recorded in a form usable to memory. Infants and children—indeed, all people—are exposed to a massive amount of information; if they tried to process it all, they would be overwhelmed. Consequently, they encode selectively, picking and choosing the information to which they will pay attention

• Storage refers to the placement of material into memory.

• Retrieval is the process by which material in memory storage is located, brought into awareness, and used.

• Only when all three processes are operating—encoding, storage, and retrieval—can information be processed

Memory Capabilities in Infancy

• Infants were taught that they could move a mobile hanging over the crib by kicking their legs. It took only a few days for 2-month-old infants to forget their training, but 6-month-old infants still remembered for as long as 3 weeks.

• Infants who were later prompted to recall the association between kicking and moving the mobile showed evidence that the memory continued to exist even longer. Infants who had received just two training sessions lasting 9 minutes each still recalled about a week later.

Memory Capabilities in Infancy• Older infants can retrieve information more rapidly and

they can remember it longer. • Although early research supported the notion of

infantile amnesia, the lack of memory for experiences occurring prior to 3 years of age, more recent research shows that infants do retain memories. – Example: 6-month-old children were exposed to an

unusual series of events in a laboratory, such as intermittent periods of light and dark and unusual sounds.

• When the children were later tested at the age of 1 1/2 years or 2 1/2 years, they demonstrated clear evidence that they had some memory of their participation in the earlier experience.

• Other research shows that infants show memory for behavior and situations that they have seen only once.

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

Memory Capabilities in Infancy

• 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

• In sum, the data suggest that although it is at least theoretically possible for memories to remain intact from a very young age—if subsequent experiences do not interfere with their recollection—in most cases memories of personal experiences in infancy do not last into adulthood.

Assessing the Information-Processing 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

Conclusions

• Piagetian and information-processing approaches are critical in providing an account of cognitive development in infancy.

• Coupled with advances in the biochemistry of the brain and theories that consider the effects of social factors on learning and cognition, the two help to paint a full picture of cognitive development.

Language Development

• Language, the systematic, meaningful arrangement of symbols, provides the basis for communication.

• Linguistic comprehension, the understanding of speech

• Linguistic production, the use of language to communicate.

Comprehension precedes production.

Comprehension Precedes Production

Language Development• Babbling - Universal!

• Prelinguistic communication - communication through sounds, facial expressions, gestures, imitation, and other nonlinguistic means.

• Speechlike but meaningless sounds, starts at the age

of 2 or 3 months and continues until around the age of 1 year.

• Infants repeat the same vowel sound over and over, changing the pitch from high to low (as in “ee-ee-ee,” repeated at different pitches). After the age of 5 months, the sounds of babbling begin to expand, reflecting the addition of consonants (such as “bee-bee-bee-bee”).


Infants with hearing impairments:

• Babble with hands instead of voices

• Gestural and verbal babbling activate same neural centers

• Infants who cannot hear and who are exposed to sign language babble with their hands instead of their voices. Their gestural babbling thus is analogous to the verbal babbling of children who can hear.


• 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

• Infants use a combination of sounds and gestures to communicate:5 month old spies her red ball just beyond her reach.

After reaching for it and finding that she is unable to get to it, she makes a cry of anger that alerts her parents that something is amiss, and her mother hands it to her. Communication has occurred.


• First Words - Increase at rapid rate:

10 to 14 months = first word15 months = 10 words18 months = one-word stage ends16 to 24 months = language explosion equally

50 to 400 words


• First sentences created around 8 to 12 months after first words

• Use order similar to adult speech with missing words:– Called telegraphic speech– The linguistic advance represented by two-word

combinations is important because the linkage not only provides labels for things in the world but also indicates the relations between them.

– Most early sentences don’t represent demands or even necessarily require a response. Instead, they are often merely comments and observations about events occurring in the child’s world.



• Underextension • Underextension occurs when language novices think

that a word refers to a specific instance of a concept, instead of to all examples of the concept.

– Sarah refers to her family car as “car” and has no words for other cars, she doesn’t realize that all of these types of vehicles are called cars

• Overextension • Words are used too broadly, overgeneralizing their

meaning. – Sarah refers to buses, trucks, and tractors as “cars,” making

the assumption that any object with wheels must be a car.– Although overextension reflects speech errors, it also shows

that advances are occurring in the child’s thought processes: The child is beginning to develop general mental categories and concepts.

Theories of Language Development

Nativist Approach:– Children are born with innate capacity to use language, which

emerges, more or less automatically, due to maturation.– Noam Chomsky:

• Universal Grammar - analysis of different languages suggests that all the world’s languages share a similar underlying structure

• Language-Acquisition Device (LAD),neural system that both permits the understanding of language structure and provides a set of strategies and techniques for learning the particular characteristics of the language to which a child is exposed.

• Language is uniquely human, made possible by a genetic predisposition to both comprehend and produce words and sentence

Interactionist Approaches:– 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• Infant-directed speech - a style of speech that

characterizes much of the verbal communication directed toward infants.– Short, simple sentences– Higher pitch, increased range, varied intonation – Repetition of words and restricted topics – Sometimes amusing sounds that are not even words, – Little formal structure, similar to telegraphic speech

Also known as Motherese or Baby Talk - we naturally speak this way to infants, science provides proof as to why!

Infant-Directed Speech

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


• 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


• Characteristics of infant-directed speech activate innate responses in infants.

• Infants seem to prefer infant-directed speech over adult-directed speech, suggesting that their perceptual systems may be more responsive to such characteristics.

• Another explanation is that infant-directed speech facilitates language development, providing cues as to the meaning of speech before infants have developed the capacity to understand the meaning of words.

Cognitive Development in InfantsBased upon findings of developmental researchers, infant

cognitive development may be promoted by:

• Provide infants the opportunity to explore the world. As Piaget suggests, children learn by doing, and they need the opportunity to explore and probe their environment. Make sure the environment contains a variety of toys, books, and other sources of stimulation.

• Be responsive to infants on both a verbal and a nonverbal level. Try to speak with babies, as opposed to at them.

• Ask questions, listen to their responses, and provide further communication.• Read to your infants. Although they may not understand the meaning of your

words, they will respond to your tone of voice and the intimacy provided by the activity. Reading together also is associated with later literacy skills and begins to create a lifelong reading habit. In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends daily reading to children starting at the age of six months (American Academy of Pediatrics, 1997; Reutzel, Fawson, & Smith, 2006; Weigel, Martin, & Bennett, 2006).

• Keep in mind that you don’t have to be with an infant 24 hours a day. Just as infants need time to explore their world on their own, parents and other caregivers need time off from childcare activities.

• Don’t push infants and don’t expect too much too soon. Your goal should not be to create a genius; it should be to provide a warm, nurturing environment that will allow an infant to reach his or her potential.

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Lifespan Psychology Lecture, Chapter 2, Module 2.2