Cognitive Development

1. Cognitive Development In the First Two Years

2. Jean Piaget: Period of Sensorimotor Intelligence • Piaget (Swiss, 1896-1980) believed that infants were smart, active learners • Also that they adapted to experience • Called infancy (birth to 24 months) the sensorimotor period because infants learn through their senses and motor skills • Period subdivided into 6 sub-stages

3. Stages 1 & 2: Primary circular reactions • The brain and senses interact involve the infant’s own body (birth to 1 month) • Sensation, perception and cognition cycle back and forth (Piaget’s circular reaction) • Stage 1: stage of reflexes--the reflexes of grasping, rooting, staring, listening--are adapted into deliberate actions • Sensation becomes perception

4. Stage 2 of Primary Circular Reactions: acquired adaptations • Accommodation and coordination of reflexes (1-4 months) • Example: sucking becomes adapted--infant sucks a pacifier differently than a nipple • This indicates thinking: the infant has figured out that the pacifier is something different than a bottle

5. Stages 3 & 4: Secondary Circular Reactions • Involve the infant’s responses to objects and people • Stage 3 (4-8 months) includes making interesting sights last: it is responding to people and objects, as in clapping hands when mother says “Patty-cake!” • Also includes responding to toys • The sight of something that delights the infant will trigger active efforts for interaction

6. Stage 4 of Secondary Circular Reactions • New adaptation and anticipation • Infant becomes more deliberate and purposeful in responding to people and objects • Example: putting other’s hands together in order to make her start playing patty-cake • Thinking is more innovative--babies are thinking about a goal and how to reach it

7. Goal-directed behavior is a big deal • This behavior stems from • 1) an enhanced awareness of cause and effect • 2) memory for actions already completed • 3) understanding of other people’s intentions • This new awareness coincides with new motor skills that are needed to achieve goals

8. Object Permanence: • Piaget thought babies attain this at 8 months • Object permanence refers to the awareness that objects or people continue to exist even if they cannot be seen, touched or heard • Probably occurs as early as 5 months, new research indicates it happens somewhere between 4 and 6 months

9. Stages 5 & 6: Tertiary Circular Reactions • Second year of life • Feedback loops involve active exploration of the environment and experimentation • “Little Scientists” in stage 5, (12-18 months) new means through active experimentation • Examples: putting a teddy bear in the toilet and flushing, or squeezing all the toothpaste out of the tube

10. Stage 6: • New means through mental combinations (18-24 months) • Considering before doing provides the child with new ways of achieving a goal without resorting to trial-and-error experiments • This will hopefully involve remembering that flushing teddy down the toilet resulted in an overflowing toilet the last time it was tried

11. Stage 6: • Using mental combinations involves intellectual experimentation that supersedes active experimentation • Children can now combine 2 ideas: they know a doll is not a real baby, but also that the doll can be belted into a stroller and taken for a walk • They begin to think about consequences • They also can defer imitation (copy behavior they saw hours or days before)

12. Criticism of Piaget: • Piaget underestimated infant cognition, probably because he based his ideas on observations of his own children, not of many children from many cultures • Modern research includes “Habituation” or repeated exposure to get used to an object or event • Then sensitive physiologic measurements are used to record reactions • Using this, even 1-month-olds can be demonstrated to differentiate between sounds

13. More criticism: • The brain and its growth can now be measured by fMRI, which measures electrical activity in the brain that indicates firing of neurons • This has shown us that the brain has a huge amount of early growth, then trims off dendrites • Also shows that growth continues after the first 2 years • Piaget didn’t have this technology

14. Summing up Piaget: • Piaget discovered that infants are very active learners • Described this as Sensorimotor Period • Substages: Circular Reactions • Lacked modern technology • Also used a restricted sample that may have led him to place some behaviors later than is true with the majority

15. Information Processing Theory: • A perspective that compares human thinking processes, by analogy, to computer analysis of data, including sensory input, connections, stored memories, and output • Many versions of this theory • All share the belief that a step-by-step description of the mechanisms of thought adds insight to our understanding

16. How it works: • Human information processing begins with input picked up by the senses • It proceeds to brain reactions, connections, and stored memories • It concludes with some output • With the aid of technology, the information processing model has found impressive intellectual capabilities in infants, like a basic grasp of cause and effect by the middle of the first year

17. Affordances: • Opportunities for perception and interaction that are offered by a person, place, or environment • Which particular affordance is perceived and acted upon depends on 4 factors: • Sensory awareness • Immediate motivation • Current level of development • Past experience

18. Selective perception: • Example: consider a lemon, an opportunity (an affordance) for smelling, touching, tasting, viewing, throwing, squeezing, and biting • Further, each of these is an affordance for pleasure, pain, or some other emotional response • Which affordance is perceived and acted upon is dependent upon sensations, motives, age, and experience

19. How do they research this? • Mostly by looking at what infants attend to on a TV screen • Varies with age • Varies with novelty • Varies with experience • Even varies with vocabulary

20. Visual Cliff experiment: • Tested depth perception • An infant’s awareness was affected by experience, especially with falling

21. Movement: Dynamic Perception • Dynamic perception is perception that is primed to focus on movement and change • Babies pay close attention to things that move and to people • They also love to move: they grab, they scoot, they crawl, they walk • And they realize that motion changes what the world affords them

22. Dynamic Perception: • Almost any moving creature will get the attention of an infant, who will chase and grab at it • Even infants who are not mobile will try to catch a ball moving past them • Experience affect this: younger babies may ignore slow-moving balls, but attempt to catch fast ones unsuccessfully, 20% or less success • 9-month-olds know to reach for the slow moving balls, with an almost 100% success rate

23. People Preference: • Another universal principle of infant perception is that they are innately attracted to other humans, evident in visual, auditory, tactile, and other preferences • In objects, infants prefer novelty • In people, infants prefer familiarity • They recognize their caregivers and expect certain affordances from them: comfort, food, entertainment)

24. More on people preference: • Infants can infer emotional affordances long before they understand language • They “get” and respond to smiles, shouts, facial expressions, and tones of voice very early in life • Studies indicate that 7-month-olds can reliably match facial expression and emotional tone of voice based on photos and tapes • And even younger infants can do this with people they know

25. Smiling and mommy and daddy: • In these experiments, infants did not match the facial expressions and emotional voice of strangers, but could do so for their moms/dads, reacting swiftly and correctly • The idea of researchers is that parents offer the affordance of JOY!

26. Memory: • Processing and remembering requires a certain amount of experience and brain maturation • Even with repetition, infants have difficulty storing memories in their first year • This is partly due to language deficits • But infants do form memories--especially if motivated and if reminded repeatedly • Experiments with mobiles and kicking indicate this

27. Reminders and Repetition: • Reminder session: a perceptual experience that is intended to help a person recollect an idea, a thing, or an experience, without testing whether the person remembers it at the moment • Research employing these sessions demonstrated that even 3-month-olds could remember actions that they learned 2 weeks previously

28. And it gets better: • After 6 months, infants can retain information with less training, repetition and reminding • By the end of the first year, many kinds of memory are apparent: deferred imitation by 9 months • By 18 months, infants can remember and repeat complex sequences • Toddlers action indicates conceptual thinking is present

29. Child-directed speech: • The high-pitched, simplified, and repetitive way adults speak to infants • Fosters early language development • By 7 months, infants begin to recognize words, but only words that are highly distinctive: bottle, dog, and mama are recognized before baby, Bobby, and Barbie • Within the first few months of life, hearing becomes more selective, too

30. What selective hearing means: • They prefer child-directed speech • They like alliterative sounds • They love songs--rhyme, rhythm, and repetition • And simple sounds more than complex sounds • Infants respond to sounds they like (by 4 months) with squealing, growling, gurgling, grunting, crooning, and yelling

31. Babbling: • The extended repetition of certain syllables, such as ba-ba-ba, that begins when babies are between 6 and 9 months old • Responses from other people encourage it • It stops in deaf babies because they cannot hear responses • Using sign language shows that babies can express language with gestures sooner than with speech

32. First words: • Usually at about 1 year • Caregivers understand the baby’s words before strangers • In the first months of the second year of life, vocabulary understanding is about 10 times the number of words they can say • Holophrases: a single word spoken in such a way that expresses a complete, meaningful thought

34. Naming Explosion: • A sudden increase in an infant’s vocabulary, especially in the number of nouns, that begins at about 18 months of age • In almost every language, the name of each significant caregiver, sibling, and sometimes, pet, is learned between 12-18 months of age • Once the vocabulary reaches 50 words, it builds at a rate of 50-100 words per month • 21 month olds say twice as many words as 18 month olds

35. Cultural differences: • Cultures and families vary a lot in how much child-directed speech children hear • Some are more verbal than others • Some cultures emphasize quiet children (not the US) • And languages vary: some are Verb-Friendly (verbs are placed before nouns) so infants learn as many verbs as nouns, unlike English

36. Social context matters, too • If social interaction is emphasized by the culture, verbs will be acquired as much as nouns • Example: Chinese toddlers learn more verbs than US toddlers, who learn more nouns • Ethnicities that speak the language of the country they have immigrated to have babies that learn language like the new culture

37. Concepts and Language: • Some concepts are easy, some are not • In English, infants confuse before and after • Dutch infants misuse out when it refers to taking off clothing • Learning adjectives is easier in Italian and Spanish than in English or French because of the patterns in those languages

38. Language: • Conveys/encodes cultural values and social constructs • If a child is more referential than expressive, it likely reflects the cultures, values, and priorities of the parents

39. Putting words together: • Grammar: all the methods--word order, verb forms, etc.--that languages use to communicate meaning, apart from the words themselves • Grammar is obvious in 2-word sentences (baby cry, more juice), at about 21 months • Grammar will correlate with the size of the child’s vocabulary, reflecting a knowledge of clear communication • Learning more than one language can slow down language and grammar acquisition

40. Theories of Language Learning: • 50 years ago, the first theory reflected behaviorism (learning theory) and said that children needed to be taught language, step by step, through reinforcement • This theory includes the ideas that parents/caregivers are expert teachers and help children speak • Frequent repetition is instructive • Well-taught infants become well-spoken children

41. Studies in Behavioral Theory: • Indicate great variation in how parents reinforce infants’ speech • The frequency of paternal response at 9 months predicted infants language many months later • Adults teach, infants learn language

42. Theory 2: Infants teach themselves • Noam Chomsky & followers believe that language is too complex to be learned through step-by-step conditioning • Believe that because infants all master basic grammar at about the same age, there is a human mental structure that all are born with that prepares them to incorporate aspects of language

43. Language Acquisition Device: • Chomsky’s term for a hypothesized mental structure that enables humans to learn language, including the basic aspects of grammar, vocabulary, and intonation • Enables children worldwide to derive the rules of grammar from the speech they hear everyday (whether English, Tamil, Urdu, Chinese, or Xhosa)

44. This theory is accepted by many: • Reflects the differences without ignoring language characteristics • Reflects the fact that all languages are logical, coherent and systematic • Believes that the brain expects language, and quickly and efficiently connects neurons to support whatever words an infant hears • Works even with deaf infants who are taught signs

45. Third Theory: Social impulses foster infant language learning • Social-Pragmatic theory: says that neither behaviorism nor epigentic theory is correct--says that communication, the social reason for learning language, is most important • Infants communicate because they are social beings dependent upon each other for survival, well-being, and joy

46. Social newborn: • Newborns seek out human faces • By 9 months, infants’ brain patterns indicate attention when they hear people talk to them • The emotional content, not the words, are most important in early communication • Communication is the servant of social interaction

47. Social toddler: • Social impulses propel toddler language acquisition • Toddlers learn language much more quickly from human interaction than from television, even though they watch TV • Thus social language acquisition is more meaningful than simply learning words

48. Hybrid theory: • All three perspectives have merit • Some of each theory has been demonstrated to work • The important thing is that children are active learners, and that multiple factors are involved in learning language