CHAPTER 5
Infancy: Cognitive Development
Cognitive Development: Jean Piaget
Cognitive Development – Jean Piaget
• Piaget hypothesized that cognitive processes develop in an orderly
sequence of stages (4).
•
•
•
•
Stage 1:
Stage 2:
Stage 3:
Stage 4:
Sensorimotor
Preoperational
Concrete operational
Formal operational
Piaget Basics
• Schemes
-Children’s concepts of the world
• Cognitive development
-Way of perceiving and mentally representing the world
• Assimilation
-Absorbing new events into existing schemes
• Accommodation
-Modifying existing schemes when assimilation does not allow
the child to make sense of novel events
Sensorimotor Stage
• Refers to 0-2 years of cognitive development
• First substage (1st month after birth)
-Dominated by assimilation of sources of stimulation
into inborn reflexes such as grasping, visual tracking.
• Second substage (1 to 4 months)
Primary circular reactions
-characterized by beginnings of the ability to
coordinate various sensorimotor schemes
-focus on the infant’s own body rather than on external
environment
Sensorimotor Stage (cont’d)
• Third substage (4 to 8 months)
Secondary circular reactions
-include repeated patterns of activity due to effect on the
environment
-focus shifts objects and environmental events
• Fourth substage (8 to 12 months)
-Infants begin to show intentional, goal-directed behavior in
which they differentiate between the means of achieving a
goal and the goal or end itself
• Fifth substage (12 to 18 months)
Tertiary circular reactions
-purposeful adaptations of established schemes to specific
situations
Sensorimotor Stage (cont’d)
• Sixth substage (18 to 24 months)
-Transition between sensorimotor development and the
development of symbolic thought
-External exploration replaced by mental exploration
-Use imitation to symbolize or stand for a plan of action
• Object permanence
-Recognition that an object or person continues to exist when
out of sight
-Advances in the development of the object concept by about
the sixth month
Fig. 5-1, p. 95
Evaluation of Piaget
Confirmation
• Remains a comprehensive model of infant cognition
• Many of his own observations of his own infants have
been confirmed by others.
• Pattern and sequence of events he described have
been observed among American, European, African,
and Asian infants
Piaget Criticisms
– Cognitive development not as tied to discrete stages
– Emphasis on maturation with exclusion of adult and
peer influences on cognitive development
– Underestimation of infants’ competence
• Infants display object permanence earlier than Piaget
believed.
• Infants display deferred imitation as early as 9 months and
not 18 months as Piaget believed.
Information Processing
Information Processing
Memory
• Memory improves between 2 and 6 months of age.
• Older infants more capable of encoding than younger
ones
• Infant memory can be improved if infants receive a
reminder.
Deferred Imitation
-Imitation of actions after a time delay occurs as early as 6
months
-Imitation of neonates likely reflexive
Fig. 5-2, p. 96
Fig. 5-2, p. 97
Mirror Neurons
• Activated when the individual performs a motor act or
observes another individual engaging in the same act
• Also connected with emotions in humans
– The frontal lobe is active when people experience
emotions such as disgust, happiness, pain, and also
when they observe another person experiencing an
emotion
• Has been suggested that mirror neurons are connected
with the built-in human capacity to acquire language
Individual Differences in
Intelligence Among Infants
Individual Differences in Intelligence Among
Infants
• Understanding of infants’ intelligence based on scales
of infant development
• Bayley Scales of Infant Development
-Consists of 178 mental-scale items and 111 motor-scale
items
-Mental scale assesses verbal communication, perceptual
skills, learning and memory, and problem-solving skills
-Motor scale assesses gross and fine motor skills
-Behavior rating scale based on examiner
observation of the child during the test also used
• Testing used to identify handicaps
Instability of Intelligence Scores Attained in
Infancy
• Scores obtained during first year of life correlated
moderately with scores obtained a year later.
• Bayley scales and socioeconomic status were able to
predict cognitive development among LBW children
from 18 months to 4 years.
• Bayley and other scales do not predict school grades or
IQ scores very well.
• Bayley scales are best at identifying gross lags in
development and relative strengths and weaknesses.
Table 5-1, p. 98
Use of Visual Recognition Memory
• Visual recognition memory
- Ability to discriminate previously seen objects from novel objects; procedure
based on habituation
• Children with greater visual recognition memory attained higher IQ
scores.
• Individual differences in capacity for visual recognition memory are
stable.
• Capacity for visual recognition memory increases over first year
after birth.
• Studies on visual recognition memory and later IQ scores show
good predictive validity for broad cognitive abilities throughout
childhood.
Language Development
Early Vocalizations
• Children develop language according to an invariant
sequence of steps or stages.
• Language begins with prelinguistic vocalizations.
-Cooing (2nd month)
-Infants use tongues, vowel-like sounds
-Appears to be linked to pleasure
-Babbling (6-9 months)
-Combination of consonants and vowels
• Echolalia (10-12 months)
-Infants repeat syllables
• Intonation (end of 1st year)
-Use of patterns that rise and fall; resembles adult speech
Table 5-2, p. 101
Development of Vocabulary
• First word
-Spoken between 11-13 months
-Brief and consist of one or two
syllables
• General nominals
-Similar to nouns
-Includes names of
classes of objects
• Vocabulary acquisition
-Slow at first
-3 or 4 months from when the
first word is spoken, children
learn 10-30 words
-18-month-old vocabulary may be
50 words
-22-month-old vocabulary may be
300 words
• Specific nominals
-Proper nouns
Overextension
• Overextension
– Children extend the meaning of one word to refer to
things and actions for which they do not have words.
– Overextensions gradually pulled back to proper
references
Development of Sentences
• Telegraphic speech
-Brief expressions that have meanings of sentences
• Mean length of utterance (MLU)
-Average number of morphemes that communicators use in
their sentences
• Morphemes
-Smallest units of meaning in a language
-e.g. Walked is two morphemes:
walk = verb, -ed = past-tense suffix
• MLU increases rapidly once speech begins
Fig. 5-5, p. 103
Development of Sentences (cont’d)
• Holophrases
-Single words that are used to express complex meanings
-e.g., “Mama” means… “There goes Mama”
• Telegraphic speech
-Two-word sentences
-e.g., “That ball”; words is and a are implied
-Shows understanding of syntax
-Rules in a language for placing words in order to form
sentences
Theories of Language Development
• Nurture view
-Holds that a child learns the language that the family speaks
1. Imitation
-Children learn language, at least in part, by observation and
imitation.
2. Reinforcement
-Children learn language due to the social cues of smiling,
stroking, and talking back to them.
Extinction
-Foreign sounds drop out due to the lack of reinforcement.
Shaping
-Reinforcing children’s utterances as they approximate actual
words (may be selective)
Theories of Language Development (cont’d)
• Nature
-Holds that children have inborn tendency in the form of
neurological “pre-wiring” to language learning
• Psycholinguistic theory
-Language acquisition involves interaction between
environmental influences.
-Innate tendency labeled language acquisition device (LAD)
-Inborn tendency supported by studies of deaf children and in
the language development among all languages
Theories of Language Development (cont’d)
• Surface and deep structure
-On the surface, languages differ in vocabulary and grammar.
-However, languages share “universal grammar” allowing for
transforming ideas into sentences.
• Chomsky maintains children are genetically pre-wired to
attend to language and deduce the rules for
constructing sentences from ideas.
Brain Structures Involved in Language
• Biological structures of LAD based in left hemisphere of
the cerebral cortex for nearly all right-handed people
and for 2 out of 3 left-handed
• Damage to Broca’s or Wernicke’s area called aphasia
-Disruption in the ability to understand or produce language
-Located left hemisphere
• Broca’s aphasia
-Can understand but not reproduce speech well
• Wernicke’s aphasia
-Can speak freely with proper syntax
-Have trouble understanding speech and finding the words to
express themselves
Fig. 5-6, p. 107
The Sensitive Period
• Language learning most efficient beginning at 18 to 24
months (sensitive period)
• During this period, neural development provides
plasticity of the brain.
• Damage to the brain easier to heal the younger the child
• Social contacts important in the development of
language
• Malnutrition and abuse can contribute to poor language
learning and ability.