Chapter 6 Infancy: Cognitive Development

1. Chapter 6Infancy: Cognitive Development

2. Cognitive Development Jean Piaget

3. Cognitive Development – Jean Piaget • Focus on development of children’s way of perceiving and mentally representing the world • Schemes • Concepts • Assimilate • “Fit” new ideas into existing schemes • Accommodate • Modify schemes to accept new ideas

4. What is the Sensorimotor Stage of Cognitive Development? • Development through sensory and motor activity • Birth through 2 years • Progress from reflex responses to goal oriented behavior • Form mental representations • Hold complex pictures of past events in mind • Solve problems by mental trial and error

5. What are the Parts or Substages of the Sensorimotor Development? • Simple Reflexes • Birth to 1 month • Modify reflexes based on experience • Primary Circular Reactions • 1 to 4 months • Primary = focus on infant’s own body • Circular = repeated behaviors • Secondary Circular Reactions • 4 to 8 months • Secondary = focus on objects or environmental events • Track moving objects until they disappear from view

6. What are the Parts or Substages of the Sensorimotor Development? • Coordination of Secondary Schemes • 8 to 12 months • Coordinate schemes to attain specific goals • Begin to imitate others • Tertiary Circular Reactions • 12 to 18 months • Deliberate trial and error behaviors • Invention of New Means Through Mental Combinations • 18 to 24 months • External exploration is replaced by mental exploration.

7. How Does Object Permanence Develop? • Neonates show no response to objects not within their immediate grasp • 2 month - show surprise when a screen is lifted after an object was placed behind a screen and now is not there • 6 month - try to retrieve a preferred object partially hidden • 8 to 12 month - try to retrieve objects completely hidden • Commit A not B error • After 12 months no longer show A not B error • More recent research – object permanence in some form as early as 2 1/2 - 3 1/2 months

8. What are the Strengths of Piaget’s Theory? • Comprehensive model • Confirmation from research of others • Pattern and sequence appear cross culturally

9. What are the Limitations of Piaget’s Theory? • Stages are more gradual than discontinuous • Underestimate infants’ competence • Emergence of object permanence • Deferred imitation • Computational concepts

10. Information Processing

11. What are Infants’ Tools for Processing Information? • Memory • Neonates show memory for previously exposed stimuli • By 12 months dramatic improvement in encoding and retrieval • Rovee-Collier (1993) studies of infant memory

12. What are Infants’ Tools for Processing Information? • Imitation • Deferred imitation – 9 months • Neonates imitate adults who stick out their tongue • Not present in older infants • May indicate reflexive response

13. Individual Differences in Intelligence Among Infants

14. How do we Measure Individual Differences in the Development of Cognitive Functioning? • Scales of infant development or intelligence • Bayley Scales of Infant Development • 178 mental-scale items • 111 motor-scale items • behavior rating scale based on examiner observation • Screening for handicaps • Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale • Denver Developmental Screening Test

15. How Well do Infant Scales Predict Later Intellectual Performance? • Overall infant scale scores do not predict school grades or IQ of schoolchildren • Visual recognition memory – ability to discriminate previously seen objects from novel objects • Good predictive validity for IQ and language ability

16. Language Development

17. What are Prelinguistic Vocalizations? • Prelinguistic vocalizations do not represent objects or events • Examples of prelinguistic vocalizations • Crying • Cooing – vowel-like, linked to pleasant feelings • Babbling – combine vowels and consonants • Echolalia – repetition of vowel/consonant combinations • Intonation – patterns of rising and falling melody

18. Developing in a World of Diversity Babbling Here, There, and Everywhere

19. How Does Vocabulary Develop? • Receptive vocabulary outpaces expressive • First word – typically 11 to 13 months • 3 or 4 months later – 10 to 30 words • First words generally nominals • general (class nouns) and specific (proper nouns) • 18 to 22 months rapid increase from 50 to more than 300 words

20. A Closer Look Teaching Sign Language to Infants

21. Styles in Language Development • Referential language style • Use language to label objects • Expressive language style • Use language as means for engaging in social interactions • Overextensions • Extend meaning of one word to refer to things or actions for which the word is not known

22. How do Infants Create Sentences? • Telegraphic speech • Brief expression with the meanings of sentences • Mean length of utterance (MLU) • Average number of morphemes used in sentence • Holophrases • Single words used to express complex meanings • Two word sentences • 18 to 24 months telegraphic two word sentences begin • Demonstrate syntax

23. How do Learning Theorists Account for Language Development? • Imitation • Children learn from parental models • Does not explain utter phrases that have not been observed • Reinforcement • Sounds of adults’ language are reinforced • Foreign sounds become extinct • Use of shaping

24. Language Development The Nativist View

25. What is the Nativist View of Language Development? • Innate or inborn factors cause children to attend to and acquire language in certain ways • Psycholinguistic Theory • Interaction between environmental influences and inborn tendency to acquire language

26. Language Acquisition Device • The inborn “prewired” tendency to acquire a language • Evidence for LAD • Universality of language abilities • Regularity of early production of sounds, even among deaf children • Invariant sequences of language development, regardless of language • Chomsky – children are “prewired” to perceive and use a “universal language”

27. What Parts of the Brain Are Involved in Language Development? • Key structures for most people are based in left hemisphere • Broca’s area • Wernicke’s area • Aphasia – caused by damage in either area • Broca’s aphasia – slow laborious speech with simple sentences • Wernicke’s aphasia – impairment comprehending speech of others and expressing their own thoughts • Angular gyrus • Translates visual information into auditory sounds • Impairment can cause reading difficulties and dyslexia

28. Figure 6.7 Broca’s and Wernicke’s Areas of the Cerebral Cortex

29. What is Meant by a Sensitive Period in Language Development? • Plasticity of brain provides a sensitive period of learning language • Begins about 18 to 24 months and continues through puberty • Left hemisphere injuries • Children recover good deal of speech, utilizing right hemisphere • Case studies • Genie • Simon and ASL

30. A Closer Look Motherese