Cognitive Development

in Infancy
 Cognitive Development :
 Piaget thought that, just as our physical bodies have structures that enable us to adapt to
the world, we build mental structures that help us to adapt to the world.
 Adaptation involves adjusting to new environmental demands. .
 Piaget stressed that children actively construct their own cognitive worlds; information
is not just poured into their minds from the environment
Difference
between
scheme &
schema
 For example,
 your schema for your friend might include information about her appearance, her
behaviors, her personality, and her preferences.
 Social schemas include general knowledge about how people behave in certain
social situations.
 Self-schemas are focused on your knowledge about yourself.
 Example for Scheme:
 A child that grows up in a loving home and a safe environment will learn a
“scheme” that views the world as a benign place, where a child that grows up in a
violent and unpredictable home will grow up viewing the world as a dangerous
place.
Cognitive processes to construct the knowledge of world

 Schemes: In Piaget’s theory, actions or mental representations that organize knowledge.

 For example : A baby’s schemes are structured by simple actions that can be performed
on objects such as sucking, looking, and grasping. Older children have schemes that
include strategies and plans for solving problems.
 Assimilation: Piagetian concept of using existing schemes to deal with new
information or experiences.
 Example : a toddler who has learned the word car to identify the family’s car. The
toddler might call all moving vehicles on roads “cars,” including motorcycles and trucks;
the child has assimilated these objects to his or her existing scheme
 Accommodation: Piagetian concept of adjusting schemes to fit new information and
experiences.
 In continuation of example of previous slide the child soon learns that motorcycles and
trucks are not cars and fi ne-tunes the category to exclude motorcycles and trucks,
accommodating the scheme.
 organization : Piaget’s concept of grouping isolated behaviors and thoughts into a
higher-order, more smoothly functioning cognitive system.
 Example: A boy who has only a vague idea about how to use a hammer may also have a
vague idea about how to use other tools. After learning how to use each one, he relates
these uses, organizing his knowledge.
Example of Assimilation and accommodation
process

 For example, 2-year-old Deja learned the schema for dogs because her family has a Poodle.
When Deja sees other dogs in her picture books, she says, “Look mommy, dog!” Thus, she
has assimilated them into her schema for dogs.
 One day, Deja sees a sheep for the first time and says, “Look mommy, dog!” Having a basic
schema that a dog is an animal with four legs and fur, Deja thinks all furry, four-legged
creatures are dogs.
 When Deja’s mom tells her that the animal she sees is a sheep, not a dog, Deja must
accommodate her schema for dogs to include more information based on her new
experiences.
 Deja’s schema for dog was too broad since not all furry, four-legged creatures are dogs. She
now modifies her schema for dogs and forms a new one for sheep
 Equilibration: A mechanism that Piaget proposed to explain how children shift from one stage of
thought to the next.
 In trying to understand the world, the child inevitably experiences cognitive conflict, or disequilibrium.
 That is, the child is constantly faced with counterexamples to his or her existing schemes and with
inconsistencies.
 For example, if a child believes that pouring water from a short and wide container into a tall and narrow
container changes the amount of water, then the child might be puzzled by where the “extra” water came
from and whether there is actually more water to drink.
 The puzzle creates disequilibrium; for Piaget, an internal search for equilibrium creates motivation for
change.
 The child assimilates and accommodates, adjusting old schemes, developing new schemes, and
organizing and reorganizing the old and new schemes.
 Eventually, the organization is fundamentally different from the old organization; it is a new way of
thinking.
 Jean Piaget’s Approach to Cognitive Development
 Cognitive development is an orderly sequence of stages.
 Focus is on the change in understanding that occurs as a child moves through each stage.
 Four stages of cognitive development
 Sensorimotor
 Preoperational
 Concrete operational
 Formal operational
 11

Piaget’s Cognitive Stages

PIAGET’S SIX SUBSTAGES OF
SENSORIMOTOR DEVELOPMENT
 Sensorimotor Stage ( 0 to 2 years)
 Developments demonstrated by sensory and motor activity.
 Infants progress from responding to reflexes to goal oriented behavior.
 Mental representations and problem solving
 6 Stages of Sensorimotor Development
 Stage 1: Simple Reflexes (0 – 1 mo)
 Piaget’s first sensorimotor substage, which corresponds to the first month after birth. In this
substage, sensation and action are coordinated primarily through refl- -exive behaviors
 For example, a newborn will suck a nipple or bottle only when it is placed directly in the baby’s
mouth or touched to the lips. But soon the infant might suck when a bottle is only nearby.
 Stage 2: Primary Circular Reactions (1 – 4 mo)
 the infant coordinates sensation and two types of schemes: habits and primary circular
reactions.
 A habit is a scheme based on a reflex that has become completely separated from its
eliciting stimulus.
 For example, infants in substage 1 suck when bottles are put to their lips or when they
see a bottle.
 Infants in substage 2 might suck even when no bottle is present. A circular reaction is
a repetitive action.
 A primary circular reaction is a scheme based on the attempt to reproduce an event
that initially occurred by chance.
 Example, suppose an infant accidentally sucks his fingers when they are placed near his
mouth.
 Later, he searches for his fingers to suck them again, but the fingers do not cooperate
because the infant cannot coordinate visual and manual actions.
 During this substage, the infant’s own body remains the infant’s center of attention.
 Stage 3: Secondary Circular Reactions (4 – 8 mo)
 In this substage, the infant becomes more object-oriented, moving beyond preoccupation with the
self.
 The infant’s schemes are not intentional or goal-directed, but they are repeated because of their
consequences.
 By chance, an infant might shake a rattle.
 Repeated actions meant to bring about a desirable consequence on the outside world.
 Infant begins to act on the world (“rattles” or shakes a rattle).
 Shift in focus and initial cognitive awareness of external world.
 Stage 4: Coordination of Secondary Schemes (8 – 12 mo)
 Coordination of secondary schemes to achieve certain goals.
 Emergence of mental representations – object permanence develops
 Object Permanence: Recognition that objects continue to exist even when they are not seen.
 Object Permanence : The Piagetian term for understanding that objects and events continue to exist, even when
they cannot directly be seen, heard, or touched.
 First six months
 Out of sight, out of mind
 By 8 – 12 months
 Will begin to look for objects that have been hidden.
 Gain ability to imitate actions of others
 18

Object Permenence
 The infant must coordinate vision and touch, hand and eye. Actions become more
outwardly directed.
 Significant changes during this substage involve the coordination of schemes and
intentionality.
 Infants readily combine and recombine previously learned schemes in a coordinated way.
 For example, infants might manipulate a stick in order to bring a desired toy within
reach or they might knock over one block to reach and play with another one.
 Tertiary circular reactions are schemes in which the infant purposely explores new
possibilities with objects, continually doing new things to them and exploring the results.
 It is the starting point for human curiosity and interest in novelty.
Stage 5: Tertiary Circular Reactions (12 – 18 mo) Purposeful
adaptations of established schemes to specific situations.

Overt trial and error in problem solving.

Experimental quality to behavior (child conducting “miniature

experiments”.

infants become intrigued by the many properties of objects and

by the many things that they can make happen to objects. A
block can be made to fall, spin, hit another object, and slide
across the ground.
 Stage 6: Internalization of schemes is Piaget’s sixth substage (18 – 24 mo)
 In this the infant develops the ability to use primitive symbols.
 Primitive symbols permit the infant to think about concrete events without directly acting
them out or perceiving them.
 Piagetian example, Piaget’s young daughter saw a matchbox being opened and
closed. Later, she mimicked the event by opening and closing her mouth. This was
an obvious expression of her image of the event.
 Analysis of Piaget
 Support: Most developmentalists agree with Piaget’s description of cognitive development
during infancy
 Research has supported his theory that children learn about the world around them by acting
on objects in their environment
 Criticisms: Some developmentalists have questioned the stage concept, instead suggesting
that development is more continuous
 Piaget’s work is grounded in motor development, ignoring sensory and perceptual abilities
Recent research has suggested that object permanence and imitation may occur earlier than
Piaget reported
Summary of
Piaget s
theory
VYGOTSKY’S THEORY

 Another developmental theory that focuses on children’s cognition is Vygotsky’s theory.

 Like Piaget, Vygotsky (1962)emphasized that children actively construct their knowledge and
understanding.
 In Piaget’s theory, children develop ways of thinking and understanding by their actions and
interactions with the physical world.
 In Vygotsky’s theory, children are more often described as social creatures than in Piaget’s theory.
 They develop their ways of thinking and understanding primarily through social interaction.
 Their cognitive development depends on the tools provided by society, and their minds are shaped by the
cultural context in which they live (Gredler, 2008; Holzman, 2009).
 How children learn and his view of the role of language in cognitive development.
 Vygotsky proposed that we should evaluate development from the perspective
of four interrelated levels in interaction with children’s environments—
 microgenetic, ontogenetic, phylogenetic, and sociohistorical.
 Microgenetic development refers to changes that occur over relatively brief
periods of time, such as the changes that one may see in a child solving
addition problems every week for 11 consecutive weeks , or even the changes
in the use of memory strategies
 Ontogenetic development refers to development of the individual over his or
her lifetime.
 Phylogenetic development - refers to changes over evolutionary time,
measured in thousands and even millions of years.
 Here, Vygotsky anticipated the current evolutionary psychology perspective,
believing that an understanding of the species’ history can provide insight into
child development (Bjorklund & Pellegrini, 2002; Ellis & Bjorklund, 2005).
 Sociohistorical development refers to the changes that have occurred in one’s
culture and the values, norms, and technologies such a history has generated.
It is this sociohistorical perspective that modern-day researchers have
emphasized most about Vygotsky’s ideas.
 Contd..

 The Zone of Proximal Development Vygotsky’s belief in the importance of social influences, especially
instruction, on children’s cognitive development is reflected in his concept of the zone of proximal
development.
 Zone of proximal development (ZPD) is Vygotsky’s term for the range of tasks that are too difficult for the
child to master alone but that can be learned with guidance and assistance of adults or more-skilled children.
 Thus, the lower limit of the ZPD is the level of skill reached by the child working independently.
 The upper limit is the level of additional responsibility the child can accept with the assistance of an able
instructor
 The ZPD captures the child’s cognitive skills that are in the process of maturing and can be accomplished
only with the assistance of a more skilled person .
 Vygotsky (1962) called these the “buds” or “flowers” of development, to distinguish them from the “fruits”
of development, which the child already can accomplish independently.
Zone of
proximal
development
zone
Contd..

 Scaffolding Closely linked to the idea of the ZPD is the concept of

scaffolding.
 Scaffolding means changing the level of support.
 Over the course of a teaching session, a more-skilled person (a teacher or
advanced peer) adjusts the amount of guidance to fit the child’s current
performance (Daniels, 2007).
 When the student is learning a new task, the skilled person may use direct
instruction. As the student’s competence increases, less guidance is given.
 31

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.
 32

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.
 33

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
Development Quotient 34

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)
 35
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
Contemporary Approaches to Assess 36

Infant Intelligence
 Visual-recognition Memory

 Cross-modal Transference

Measure how quickly infants process information

These measures correlate moderately well with later
measures of intelligence
 37

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.
 38

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
Other Criteria in Determining Adult 39

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.
 Information Processing
 How children take in, use and store information
 Development is dependent on memory
 Three basic aspects of memory: encoding, storage and retrieval
 Encoding – the process by which information is initially recorded in a form usable to memory
 Storage – placement of material into memory
 Retrieval – the process by which information is located and brought into awareness
 Infantile amnesia – the lack of memory for experiences that occurred prior to 3 years of age
 41

Information Processing Approaches

 Encoding Recorded in memory

(Keyboard)

 Storage Saved in memory

(on hard drive)

 Retrieved Brought into awareness

(on screen)
Information-Processing 42

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.
language

 The Roots of Language

 Language is the systematic, meaningful arrangement of symbols which provides the basis for
communication
 Language includes several formal characteristics:
 Phonology – the basic sounds of language (phonemes) that can be combined to form words or sentences.
 Ex: “a” in “mat” and “mate” are two different phonemes
 English language - 40 phonemes to make up the entire language
 Morphemes – the smallest language unit that has meaning.
 s” for plural or “-ed” for past tense
 Semantics – rules that govern the meaning of words and sentences.
 Language and Thought The use of dialogue as a tool for scaffolding is only
one example of the important role of language in a child’s development.
 According to Vygotsky, children use speech not only to communicate socially
but also to help them solve tasks.
 Vygotsky (1962) further believed that young children use language to plan,
guide, and monitor their behavior.
 This use of language for self-regulation is called private speech.
 For Piaget, private speech is egocentric and immature, but for Vygotsky it is an
important tool of thought during the early childhood years (John-Steiner, 2007).
 Vygotsky said that language and thought initially develop independently of each other and then
merge.
 He emphasized that all mental functions have external, or social, origins.
 Children must use language to communicate with others before they can focus inward on their
own thoughts.
 Children also must communicate externally and use language for a long period of time before they
can make the transition from external to internal speech.
 This transition period occurs between 3 and 7 years of age and involves talking to oneself.
 After a while, the self-talk becomes second nature to children, and they can act without verbalizing.
 When they gain this skill, children have internalized their egocentric speech in the form of inner
speech , which becomes their thoughts.
 Vygotsky reasoned that children who use a lot of private speech are more socially competent than
those who don’t.
 He argued that private speech represents an early transition in becoming more socially
communicative.
 For Vygotsky, when young children talk to themselves, they are using language to govern their
behavior and guide themselves.
 For example, a child working on a puzzle might say to herself,
 “Which pieces should I put together first?
 I’ll try those green ones first.
 Now I need some blue ones.
 No, that blue one doesn’t fit there.
 I’ll try it over here.”
 Piaget maintained that self-talk is egocentric and reflects immaturity.
 However, researchers have found support for Vygotsky’s view that private speech
plays a positive role in children’s development (Winsler, Carlton, & Barry, 2000).
 Researchers have found that children use private speech more when tasks are
difficult, after they have made errors, and when they are not sure how to proceed
(Berk, 1994).
 They also have revealed that children who use private speech are more
attentive and improve their performance more than children who do not use
private speech (Berk & Spuhl, 1995).
THE RULE
SYSTEMS OF
LANGUAGE
Theories of Language Development

 ■ Three major theoretical perspectives on language acquisition:

 ■ Learning theorists believe:
 ■ Children acquire language as they imitate others’ speech and are reinforced
for grammatically correct utterances, but this is unsupported by research.
 ■ Adults use child-directed speech and reshape their primitive sentences with
expansions and recasts.
 ■ Children will acquire language as long as they have partners with whom to
converse, even without these environmental supports.
 ■ Nativists believe:
 ■ Human beings are innately endowed with biological linguistic processing capabilities (a language
acquisition device or language-making capacity) that function most efficiently prior to puberty.
 ■ This means that children require nothing more than being exposed to speech in order to learn to speak the
language they hear.
 ■ Nativists identify linguistic universals and observe that language functions are served by Broca’s and
Wernicke’s areas of the brain.
 ■ Deaf children of hearing parents and other children exposed to ungrammatical pidgins may create languages
of their own.
 ■ Both first- and second-language learning seem to proceed more smoothly during the “sensitive period” prior
to puberty.
 ■ Nativists admit that it is not clear how children sift through verbal input and make the crucial discoveries that
further their linguistic competencies.
 Linguist Noam Chomsky (1959, 1968) has argued that the structure of even the simplest
of languages is incredibly elaborate Chomsky proposed that we humans (and only
humans) come equipped with a language acquisition device (LAD)—an inborn linguistic
processor that is activated by verbal input.

 According to Chomsky, the LAD contains a universal grammar, or knowledge of rules

that are common to all languages. So regardless of the language (or languages) a child
has been listening to, the LAD should allow any child to acquire a suffi cient vocabulary,
combine words into novel, rule-bound utterances, and understand much of what he hears.
Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas
■ Interactionist perspective proponents believe:
■ Children are biologically prepared to acquire language.
■ Instead of a specialized linguistic processor being innate, humans have
a nervous system that gradually matures and predisposes them to
develop similar ideas at about the same age.
■ Biological maturation affects cognitive development, which, in turn,
influences language development.
■ Environment plays a crucial role in language learning, for companions
continually introduce new linguistic rules and concepts.
Language Development in Infancy

 Prelinguistic Period
 Infants are well prepared for language learning:
 ■ Development during the prelinguistic phase allows them to discriminate speech-like
sounds and become sensitive to a wider variety of phonemes than adults are.
 ■ They are sensitive to intonational cues from birth.
 ■ By 7 to 10 months of age, infants are already segmenting others’ speech into phrases
and wordlike units.
 ■ Infants begin cooing by age 2 months and start to babble by age 4 to 6 months
 ■ They later match the intonation of their babbles to the tonal qualities of the language
they hear and may produce their own vocables to signify meaning.
 ■ Infants less than 1 year old have already learned that people take turns while
vocalizing and that gestures can be used to communicate and share meaning with
companions.
 ■ Once infants begin to understand individual words, their receptive language is ahead
of their productive language.
One Word at a Time: The Holophrase Period

 Holophrase (or one-word) phase:

 ■ Infants speak in holophrases and spend several months expanding their vocabularies
one word at a time.
 ■ Infants talk mostly about moving or manipulable objects that interest them.
 ■ Infants show a vocabulary spurt (naming explosion) between 18 and 24 months of age.
 ■ Most children in Western cultures develop a referential style of language, whereas a
smaller number of Western infants and many infants from social harmony– emphasizing
cultures adopt an expressive style of language.
 Toddlers use social and contextual cues to fast map words onto objects, actions, and
attributes.
 ■ Other strategies, or processing constraints, such as the object scope constraint, mutual
exclusivity, lexical context, and syntactic bootstrapping help toddlers fi gure out what
new words mean.
 ■ Toddlers still frequently make such semantic errors as overextensions and
underextensions.
 ■ Toddler’s one-word utterances are called holophrases because they often seem less like
labels and more like attempts to communicate an entire sentence’s worth of meaning.
From Holophrases to Simple Sentences: The Telegraphic
Period

  
 At 18 to 24 months of age, toddlers begin to produce two- and three-word sentences known as
telegraphic speech because they omit grammatical markers and smaller, less important words.
 ■ Although telegraphic sentences are not grammatical by adult standards, they are more than
random word combinations.
 ■ In their earliest sentences, children follow certain rules of word order when combining
words and also express the same categories of meaning (semantic relations).
 ■ Toddlers are also becoming highly sensitive to pragmatic constraints, including the
realization that speakers must be more directive and elaborate when a listener doesn’t share
their knowledge.
 ■ Young children are also learning certain sociolinguistic prescriptions such as the need to be
polite when making
 59

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
 60

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)
A Different Language for Boys and 61

Girls

 Boys
Girls
Hear
 Don’t
twice
hear
as as
many
many
diminutives
diminutives
Parents
 Parents
respond
respond
with
with
a soft
a firm
answer
“no”
Are
 Hear
exposed
clearer
to warmer
languagephrases
 As adults they tend to be more assertive
Language Acquisition 62

Cognitive Rationalist Social Behaviorist

Piaget Chomsky Learning Skinner
-Mental -Innate -learned -Acquired
schemes tendency to -imitation by
that child acquire consequen-
can apply a language ces or by
linguistic -Innate reinforce-
label to it acquisition ment
device
SOME
LANGUAGE
MILESTONES
IN INFANCY.