Infancy
Cognitive, Physical, Language
Development
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Neonates
• States of Arousal
• Reflexes
• Neonatal Assessment
• Learning and Habituation
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States of Arousal
Peter Wolff (1966)
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Waking activity
Crying
Alert inactivity
Drowsiness
Regular sleep
Irregular sleep
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Survival Reflexes
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Breathing
Rooting
Sucking
Pupillary
Eye-blink
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Primitive Reflexes
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Moro (startle)
Palmar
Plantar
Babinski
Stepping
Swimming
Tonic neck
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Swimming
Startle (Moro)
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Tonic Neck
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Babinski
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Plantar
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Stepping
Palmar
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Brazelton’s Neonatal Behavioral
Assessment Scale (BNBAS)
• An assessment measure that hospitals
use the first few days of a baby’s life.
• 28 measures are grouped into 7 clusters
• Includes
– Neurological examination
– Assessment of social responsiveness
– Assessment of behavioral capabilities
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Clusters of Brazelton’s Neonatal
Behavioral Assessment Scale
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Habituation
Orientation
Motor tone and activity
Range of State
Regulation of state
Autonomic stability
Reflexes
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Habituation and Learning
Habituation Method
• To study infant perceptual abilities,
researchers habituate infants to certain
stimuli and then change the stimuli.
• Examples
– Habituating neonates to turn their heads to
the left to obtain milk whenever a bell was
rung
– Neonates learned to turn on a light by turning
their heads to the left.
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Erich Fromm
Man is the only
animal that can be
bored
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Physical and Motor Development
• Erik Erikson
• First Psychosocial Stage
Trust vs. Mistrust
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First 4 Months
doubled in weight
eyes have begun to focus
the 1st tooth is about to erupt
most reflexes have disappeared
From 5 to Eight Months
increasing competence in fine and
gross motor skills
playing games
crawling, bearwalking, scooting
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From 9 to 12 Months
about three times heavier than they
were at birth
may be walking
can manipulate the environment
using a pincer grasp
From 13 to 18 Months
are walking on their own
can stack blocks
can feed themselves
May be able to undress partially
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From 19 to 24 Months
are called toddlers
can pedal a tricycle
can jump in place
can climb stairs
can scribble
can dress and undress without
assistance
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Sensory and Perceptual
Development
• Sensation
The translation of a stimulus by a sense
organ
• Perception
The complex process by which the mind
interprets and gives meaning to sensory
information
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Studying Infant Perceptual
Capabilities
• The novelty Paradigm
Closely related to habituation method
• The Preference Method
Gives a choice of stimuli to look at or listen to
• The Surprise Method
Relies on the fact that infants react with surprise
when their expectations are violated
• Event-Related Potential Method
Provides the equivalent of a complex
electroencephalograph
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Vision and Visual Perception
• Infants are born with a full intact set of visual
structures.
• Newborns’ eyes are sensitive to brightness
• They have some control over eye movement
• Newborns focus optimally on objects at a range
of 7 to 10 inches
• They look primarily at the edges and contours of
objects
• Are responsive to human face and are able to
imitate facial expressions
• By the first 4 to 6 months, infants can focus
almost as well as adults, acuity sharpens, and
they can discriminate between most colors
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Visual Cliff
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Depth and Distance Perception
• Because the newborn eyes are not well
coordinated and the infant has not yet
learned to interpret all of the information
transmitted by the eyes.
• Early depth perception is probably not very
sophisticated.
• Even when coaxed by their mothers,
infants 6 months or over will not crawl over
the edge of the visual cliff.
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Auditory Perception
• Neonates can hear. They are startled by
loud sounds
• Newborns are soothed by low-pitched
sounds such as lullabies
• Infants seem able to localize sounds, and
prefer human voices
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Taste, Touch, and Smell
• They are fully operating at birth, and the
sense of touch is well developed.
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Sensory Integration and
Intermodal Perception
• Research generally indicates that either
the senses are integrated at birth or
integration occurs early and rapidly.
• Behavior and emotion become integrated
over time as a result of the interaction of
experience and maturation
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Cognitive Development
• The Active Mind
Infants take an active role in their cognitive
development.
This was the basic position of Jean Piaget.
Infants possess mental structures called
schemes that process and organize
information.
This occurs in a series of stages.
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Jean Piaget
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Jean Piaget
1- Knowledge = motor behavior
2- Universal stages in a fixed order
3- Qualitative and quantitative acquisition
of knowledge
4- Mental Structures or schemes
5- Two Principles:
Assimilation
Accommodation
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1- Acquisition of Knowledge
• Action = Knowledge
• Infants attain understanding of the world
by doing.
• Knowledge is a product of direct motor
behavior
• Children don’t learn:
– Through sensation and perception
– From facts communicated by others
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2- Piaget’s Stages of
Cognitive Development
• Sensorimotor Stage
(birth – 2)
• Preoperational Stage
(2 – 7)
• Concrete Stage
(7 – 11)
• Formal Operations Stage
(12 – adulthood)
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Piaget’s Cognitive Stages
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Sensorimotor Stage
Substages
1- Simple Reflexes (first month)
Reflexes determine the infant’s interaction
with world
2- First Habits & Primary Circular
Reactions (1 – 4 months)
Coordination of actions
Repeating enjoyable actions on the infant’s
own body
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Sensorimotor Stage
Substages
3- Secondary Circular Reactions (4 – 8)
Repeated actions meant to bring about
desirable consequence on the outside
world
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Sensorimotor Stage
Substages
4- Coordination of Secondary Circular
Reactions (8 – 12)
Goal Directed Behavior
Several schemes are combined and
coordinated to generate a single act to
solve a problem
Object Permanence
The realization that people and objects exist
even when they cannot be seen
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Object Permenence
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Sensorimotor Stage
Substages
5- Tertiary Circular Reactions (12 – 18)
The deliberate variation of actions to bring
desirable consequences
6- Beginning of Thought (18 – 24)
Symbolic Representation
The use of a word, picture, gesture or other sign to
represent past & present events, experiences,
and concepts.
a. Understanding Causality
b. Deferred Imitation
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3- Quality and Quantity
• Until the 1930s, children were considered
like miniature adults as far as intelligence
was concerned.
• They were supposed to differ from adults
in the quantity of knowledge they had
managed to acquire.
• According to Piaget, children acquire
knowledge in a qualitative and
quantitative manner.
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Constructivism
• All we know is based on our mental
construction or ideas.
• We don’t passively discover knowledge
ready-made.
• We actively construct knowledge.
How?
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4- Schemes/Mental Structures
• Infants have mental structures or
schemes:
(organized patterns of sensorimotor
functioning)
Sensorimotor Functioning
Physical activity that changes with mental
development
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5- Principles for Children’s
Schemes
• 1- Assimilation
• 2- Accommodation
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5- Principles for Children’s
Schemes
1- Assimilation is when people understand
an experience in terms of their current
stage of cognitive development or way of
thinking.
Example:
A flying squirrel = a bird
The child is assimilating his existing
scheme of a bird.
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5- Principles for Children’s
Schemes
2- Accommodation is change in existing
ways of thinking that occur in response to
encounters with new stimuli or events.
Example:
A flying squirrel = a bird with a tail
The child is accommodating to new
knowledge, modifying her scheme of
“bird”
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Criticism on Piaget’s Theory
• Piaget constructed his view by mainly
observing his three children (not a
representative population)
• A stable and differentiated perceptual
world is established much earlier in
infancy than Piaget envisioned
• Memory and other forms of symbolic
activity occur by at least the second half of
the first year.
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Memory in Infancy
Infants as young as 3 months old show memory
skills.
• The Large Black Boxes Study
Infants predicted a four-step sequence and most
could remember it up to 2 weeks later.
• Carolyn Rovee-Collier
Infants can remember intricate material.
• Nancy Myers
An infant’s experience at 6 months can be
remembered 2 years later.
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Infants’ Memory
• Infantile Amnesia
The lack of memory for experiences that
occurred prior to three years of age
Although memories are stored from early
infancy, they cannot be easily retrieved.
Early memories are susceptible to
interference from later events.
Memories are sensitive to environmental
context.
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Infants’ Intelligence
1- Development Quotient
Arnold Gesell
2- Bayley Scales of Infant Development
Nancy Bayley
Are useful in identifying infants who are significantly
behind their peers
Are not good for predicting future behavior
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Development Quotient
Arnold Gesell
• An overall developmental score that
relates to performance in 4 areas:
1- Motor Skills (balance and sitting)
2- Language Use
3- Adaptive Behavior (alertness &
exploration)
4- Personal-Social (feeding and dressing)
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Bayley’s Scales of Infant Development
Nancy Bayley
• A measure that evaluates an infant’s
development from 2 to 3 months
• It focuses on 2 areas:
1- Mental Scale
Senses, perception, memory, learning, problem
solving, language
2- Motor Scale
Gross motor skills
Fine motor skills
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Contemporary Approaches to
Assess Infant Intelligence
• Visual-recognition Memory
• Cross-modal Transference
Measure how quickly infants process
information
These measures correlate moderately well with
later measures of intelligence
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Visual-Recognition Memory
Measures how quickly an infant can retrieve
previous experiences of a stimulus from
memory
1- Measures how quickly infants lose
interest in stimuli that have already been
seen
2- Measures their responsiveness to new
stimuli.
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Cross-Modal Transference
• Measures the ability to identify a stimulus
that has previously only been experienced
through one sense by using another
sense.
Example
Identifying a screw driver that she has only
previously touched, but not seen
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Other Criteria in Determining
Adult Intelligence
• The degree of environmental stimulation
• Intelligence measured by IQ tests relates
to a particular type of intelligence, one that
emphasizes abilities that lead to academic
success but not artistic or professional
success.
• So, predicting that a child will do well on
IQ tests does not necessarily indicate
success in life.
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Linguistic Competence
Phonemes
Basic sounds of
language
Morphemes
words, suffixes,
prefixes
Semantics
Rules that govern
the meaning of words
Syntax
How words are combined into meaningful
statements
Pragmatics
The use of language in
context
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12 weeks cooing, smiles when talked to
16 weeks turns head in response to human voice
20 weeks makes vowels and consonant sounds
6 months babbling (all sounds)
8 months repeat certain syllables (ma-ma)
12 months understands and says some words
18 months can produce up to 50 words
24 months more than 50 words, two-word phrases
30 months about 100 words, phrases of 3-5 words
36 months vocabulary of about 1,000 words
48 months most basic aspects of language are
well established
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Terms
Holographic Speech the use of single
words to convey complete thoughts
Overextensions the tendency to
overgeneralize words
Telegraphic Speech omitting the less
significant words and including the words
that carry the most meaning
Pivot Grammar action words + nouns (see
Daddy)
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A Different Language for Boys
and Girls
• Girls
Hear twice as many
diminutives
Parents respond with
a soft answer
Are exposed to
warmer phrases
• Boys
• Don’t hear as many
diminutives
• Parents respond
with a firm “no”
• Hear clearer
language
• As adults they tend
to be more assertive
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Language Acquisition
Cognitive
Piaget
-Mental
schemes
that child
can apply a
linguistic
label to it
Rationalist
Chomsky
Social
Learning
-Innate
-learned
tendency to -imitation
acquire
language
-Innate
acquisition
device
Behaviorist
Skinner
-Acquired
by
consequences or by
reinforcement
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Information Processing
Approaches
• Encoding
Recorded in memory
(Keyboard)
• Storage
Saved in memory
(on hard drive)
• Retrieved
Brought into awareness
(on screen)
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Information-Processing
Automatization
1- Knowledge acquisition is automatic when
processes require little attention
Children are automatically aware of how often they
have encountered people.
Automatically, children develop an understanding
of concepts, categorizations of objects, events,
or people.
2- Knowledge is deliberate and controlled when
processes require large amounts of attention.
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Information Processing
Approaches
Cognitive Architecture
Determines the specific steps through
which material is processed as it travels
through the human mind.
Assume that the basic architecture of
information-processing systems is
constant over the course of development,
although the speed and capacity of the
system are thought to grow.
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Prelinguistic Communication
2 – 3 months to 1 yr.
10 – 14 months
15 months
16 – 24 months
18 months
19 months
babbling
holophrases
15 words
100 words
telegraphic speech
first sentence
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