Chapter 6: Cognitive Development in Infancy
Total Teaching Package Outline
Chapter Outline / Resources You Can UsePiaget’s Theory of Infant Development (pg. 183-188) / Learning Goal 1: Summarize Piaget’s theory of infant development.
· The Sensorimotor Stage of Development
· Understanding Physical Reality
§ Object Permanence
§ Causality
· Evaluating Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage
§ Perceptual Development
§ Conceptual Development
/ Personal Application 1: Something Old, Something New
üWebsite: Jean Piaget-Intellectual Development
LResearch Project 1: Object Permanence
·Films/Videos: Scales of Infant Psychological Development
·Films/Videos: The Infant Mind
VAD: Object Permanence (video)
¿Image Database on OLC: Piaget’s Six Substages of Sensorimotor Development (fig. 6.1, pg. 184)
¿Image Database on OLC: The Infants’ Understanding of Causality (fig. 6.3, pg. 187)
OLC: Piaget’s Stages
OLC: Sensorimotor Development OLC: Cognitive Milestones
OLC: Challenges to Piaget
Learning and Remembering (pg. 188-191) / Learning Goal 2: Describe how infants learn and remember.
· Conditioning
· Habituation and Dishabituation
· Imitation
· Memory / Lecture Suggestion 1: Why Can’t We Remember Events from Our Early Childhood?
~Classroom Activity 7: Toy Story: How Cognitively Stimulating are Children's Toys?
~Classroom Activity 8: Infant Attention and Habituation
Personal Application 2: Oh, That Again?!üWebsite: Breakthrough: Infant Learning
Films/Videos: Discovering the Outside World
·Films/Videos: Mastering Early Skills
·Films/Videos: Young Minds: Is Zero-to-Three Destiny
¿Image Database on OLC: Habituation and Dishabituation (fig. 6.5, pg. 189)
OLC: Infant Cognition
OLC: Infant Memory Research
Individual Differences in Intelligence (pg. 191-193) / Learning Goal 3: Discuss the assessment of intelligence in infancy
Lecture Suggestion 2: To Test or Not to Test
·Films/Videos: Individual Differences and Developmental Milestones
OLC: Bayley Scales of Infant Development
OLC: Zero to Three
Language Development (pg. 194-199) / Learning Goal 4: Explain language development in infancy
· What is Language?
· How Language Develops
§ Babbling and Other Vocalizations
§ Recognizing Language Sounds
§ First Words
§ Two-Word Utterances
§ Language Production and Language Comprehension
· Biological Foundations of Language
§ Biological Evolution
§ Biological Prewiring
· Behavioral and Environmental Influences / Lecture Suggestion 3: Infant Speech Perception: Use It or Lose It?
~Classroom Activity 1: Testing Language Development Classroom Activity 2: Do Animals Have the Ability to Communicate?
~Classroom Activity 3: Observation of Parent-Infant Interaction
LResearch Project 2: Caregiver-Infant Language
VAD: Language development (video)
VAD: Early concept development (video)
VAD: Infant directed speech (video)
·Films/Videos: Language and Thinking
·Films/Videos: Symbolic Formation and the Acquisition of Language
·Films/Videos: Developing Language
·Films/Videos: Language Development
·Films/Videos: Symbolic Formation and the Acquisition of Language
üWebsite: Babies Don’t Forget What They Hear
üWebsite : The Language Explosion: Newsweek
üWebsite: Understanding Language Dev. and Hearing
OLC: Language Milestones
OLC: The Naming Explosion
OLC: Brain and Language Development
¿Image Database on OLC: Variation in Language Development (fig. 6.8, pg. 196)
¿Image Database on OLC: Some Language Milestones in Infancy (fig. 6.9, pg. 197)
¿Image Database on OLC: Level of Maternal Speech and Infant Vocabulary (fig. 6.10, pg. 199)
Reach Your Learning Goals
/ Lecture Suggestion 4: Is It Possible to Accelerate Infant Cognitive Development?~Classroom Activity 4: Supporting Arguments for Three Views of Language Development
~Classroom Activity 5: Critical Thinking Multiple-Choice
~Classroom Activity 6: Critical Thinking Essays
·Films/Videos: Infancy: Cognition and Language
·Films/Videos: Language and Thinking
·Films/Videos: The Mind: Development
Lecture Outline
1Learning Goals
1. Summarize Piaget’s theory of infant development.
2. Describe how infants learn and remember.
3. Discuss the assessment of intelligence in infancy.
4. Explain language development.
1 PIAGET’S THEORY OF INFANT DEVELOPMENT
· Piaget believed that children pass through four stages of thought from infancy to adolescence.
· Passage through the stages results from biological pressures to adapt to the environment (assimilation and accommodation) and organize structures of thinking.
· 1Schemes, cognitive structures that help individuals organize and understand their experiences, change with age.
· The stages of thought are qualitatively different from one another. The way individuals think at one stage is different from thinking at other stages.
1The Stage of Sensorimotor Development
· The sensorimotor stage lasts from birth to about 2 years of age. Mental development is characterized by progression in infant’s ability to organize and coordinate sensations with physical movements and actions.
· Sensorimotor stage is divided into six substages in which schemes change in organization.
1Substages
· 1The simple reflexes (0-1 month) substage involves coordinating sensation and action through reflexive behaviors (rooting and sucking). Babies develop the ability to produce behaviors that resemble reflexes in the absence of obvious reflexive stimuli which is evidence that the infant is initiating action and is actively structuring experiences in the first month.
· 1The first habits and primary circular reactions (1-4 months) substage involves infants’ reflexes evolving into adaptive schemes that are more refined and coordinated.
· A habit is a scheme based on simple reflex that is separate from its eliciting stimuli.
· A primary circular reaction is a scheme based on the infant’s attempt to reproduce an interesting or pleasurable event that initially occurred by chance.
· 1The secondary circular reactions (4-8 months) substage involves the infant becoming more object-oriented or focused on the world, moving beyond preoccupation with the self in sensorimotor interactions.
· 1The coordination of secondary circular reactions (8-12 months) substage includes several significant changes that involve the coordination of schemes and intentionality.
· 1In the tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and curiosity (12-18 months) substage, the infant becomes intrigued by the variety of properties that objects possess and by the many things they can make happen to objects.
· 1In the internalization of schemes (18-24 months) substage, the infant’s mental functioning shifts from a purely sensorimotor plane to a symbolic plane, and the infant develops the ability to use primitive symbols.
1Understanding Physical Reality
Object Permanence
· 1Object permanence involves understanding that objects and events continue to exist, even when they cannot directly be seen, heard, or touched.
· 1Causality refers to infants’ knowledge of cause and effect. By 5 ½ to 6 ½ months old, infants begin to understand that one action can cause another.
1Evaluating Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage
· Infant development is viewed in terms of coordinating sensory input with motor actions.
· In the last three decades, many research studies in the areas of perceptual development and conceptual development have suggested that Piaget’s theory needs to be revised.
Perceptual Development
· In perceptual development, researchers have found that a stable and differentiated perceptual world is formed earlier than Piaget envisioned.
· Spelke found that 4-month-old infants have intermodal perception (the ability to coordinate information from two or more sensory modalities).
· Baillargeon found that 4-month-olds demonstrate object permanence.
Conceptual Development
· Researchers have found that memory and other forms of symbolic activity occur at least by the second half of the first year of life, much earlier than Piaget believed.
1LEARNING AND REMEMBERING
1Conditioning
· Classical and operant conditioning occur in infancy.
· Operant conditioning techniques (behavior is more likely reoccur if followed by a reward) have been useful for researchers to determine what infants perceive.
· Infants will suck faster on a nipple when the sucking behavior is followed by a visual display, music, or a human voice.
Habituation and Dishabituation
· 1Habituation is the repeated presentation of the same stimulus that causes reduced attention to the stimulus.
· 1Dishabituation is an infant’s renewed interest in a stimulus.
· Newborns are capable of habituation, but it becomes more acute over the first three months.
· Habituation allows researchers to determine what infants’ perceive, the extent to which they see, hear, smile, taste, and experience touch.
· Habituation also allows researchers to determine if infants recognize previously seen stimuli.
1Imitation
· Meltzoff assessed infants’ imitative abilities which he believes are biologically based because infants can imitate facial expressions as newborns.
· Other researchers say that babies are merely engaging in automatic responses to a stimulus, not imitating the facial expressions.
· Deferred imitation occurs after a time delay of hours or days.
· Meltzoff found that 9-month-olds could imitate actions they had seen the day before.
1Memory
· Memory involves the retention of information over time.
· Research found that 2-month-olds can retain information about perceptual-motor actions.
· However, critics argue that research fails to distinguish between retention of a perceptual-motor variety that is involved in conditioning tasks. Many experts argue that what many of us think of as memory (explicit memory) does not occur until the second half of life.
· 1Implicit memory – retention of a perceptual-motor action as part of a conditioning task
· 1Explicit memory – the ability to consciously recall the past
· Infantile amnesia is the inability to remember anything from the first three years of life.
· One explanation of this is the lack of maturation of the brain, especially the frontal lobes, which occurs during infancy.
1INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN INTELLIGENCE
· It is important to know whether an infant is developing at a slow, a normal, or an advanced pace so that we can intervene if necessary.
· 1The current version of Gesell’s developmental test provides a developmental quotient (DQ), which is an overall developmental score that combines subscores in motor, language, adaptive, and personal-social domains.
· 1The Bayley Scales of Infant Development are widely used in the assessment of infant development. The current version has three components: a mental scale, a motor scale, and an infant behavior profile.
· The mental score includes assessment of the following:
· auditory and visual attention to stimuli, manipulation (combining objects or shaking a rattle), examiner interaction (babbling and imitation), relation with toys (banging spoons together), memory involved in object permanence (finding a hidden toy), goal-directed behavior that involves persistence (putting pegs in a board), and ability to follow directions and knowledge of objects’ names (understanding the concept of “one”).
· 1The Fagan Test of Infant Intelligence is also used to assess infant’s abilities to process information by comparing the amount of time babies look at a new object with the amount of time they look at a familiar object.
· Global infant intelligence measures are not good predictors of childhood intelligence because the developmental scales are considerably less verbal than later tests.
· However, specific aspects of infant intelligence, such as information-processing tasks involving attention, are better predicators of childhood intelligence, especially in a specific area.
1LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
Defining Language
· Language is a form of communication, whether spoken, written, or signed, that is based on a system of symbols.
· All languages have some common characteristics (infinite generativity and organizational rules).
· 1Infinite generativity is the ability to produce an endless number of meaningful sentences using a finite set of words and rules.
How Language Develops
· 1 Babbling and Other Vocalizations
· Crying (present at birth)
· Cooing (1 to 2 months) “oo” sounds (e.g. oo, coo, goo)
· Babbling (6 months) includes consonants and vowels
· Gestures (8 to 12 months) – waving bye bye, nodding.
· Recognizing Language Sounds
· 1Phonology is a language’s sound system and provides a basis for constructing a set of words out of two or three dozen phonemes
· Babies can recognize all of the sounds that make up human speech up to 7 months old, but by 11 months, they start to specialize in the speech sounds of their native language.
· First Words
· first words are spoken at about 10 to 15 months of age
· two-word utterances happen at 18 to 24 months old
· 1Telegraphic speech is the use of short and precise words to communicate.
· 1Language Production and Language Comprehension
· Language production – the words and sentences children use
· Language comprehension – the language children understand
· At 8 to 12 months, infants indicate their first word comprehension but don’t say their first word until an average of 13 months old
· Infants understand about 50 words at 13 months but can’t say this many words until about 18 months
1Biological Foundations of Language
· The strongest evidence for the biological basis of language is that children all over the world reach language milestones at about the same time developmentally and in about the same order despite the vast variation of language input.
Biological Evolution
· In evolution, language clearly gave humans an enormous edge over other animals and increased their chance of survival.
Biological Prewiring
· 1Linguist Chomsky proposed the concept of language acquisition device (LAD) which is a biological endowment that enables the child to detect certain language categories, such as phonology, syntax, and semantics.
· Support for the LAD involves the uniformity of language milestones across languages and cultures, biological substrates for language, and deaf children’s ability to create language.
1Behavioral and Environmental Influences
· Behaviorists argue that language reinforcement and imitation are factors in language acquisition.
· Critics argue that there is no evidence to document that reinforcement is responsible for language’s rule systems and that this view fails to explain the extensive orderliness of language.
· Environmental influences do influence the acquisition of competent language skills.
· 1Adults teach language to children through various means:
· Infant-directed speech (also called “parentese” is often used by parents and other adults when they talk to babies, it has higher than normal pitch and involves the use of simple words and sentences.
· Recasting involves rephrasing something the child has said in a different way, perhaps by turning it into a question.
· Echoing involves repeating what the child says, especially if it is an incomplete phrase or sentence.
· Expanding is stating, in a linguistically sophisticated form, what a child has said.
· Labeling is identifying the names of objects.
· Parents should talk extensively with an infant, especially about what the baby is attending to (live talk, not mechanical talk).
Lecture Suggestions