2. 3. Sensorimotor Intelligence
1. Introduction
2. Fact or Fiction?
3. Sensorimotor Intelligence
4. Information Processing
5. Language: What Develops in the First Two Years?
6. Closing Thoughts 2

3. [Video: Cognitive Development Introduction]
Instruction:
Click to play video
This presentation explores infant cognitive development from the perspectives of Piaget’s sensorimotor stage, the information processing theory and research on early cognition, and infants’ acquisition of language.
Babies might look like they’re not doing very much sometimes, but infancy is a time of incredible cognitive development. This period of development is the time when the foundations of learning how to process all different kinds of information, communicate, and use their bodies are being built.
[Video: Cognitive Development Introduction] 3

4. Fact or Fiction? Fiction Fact
1. If a 5-month-old drops a rattle out of a crib, the baby probably will not look down to search for it.
2. A baby is given keys to grasp, and if the baby is teething, it will be motivated to see if these keys afford an opportunity to chew.
3. Children the world over follow the same sequence in early language development.
Instruction: Click to reveal each question, then the category.
Please note, this page is available to use with a clicker system.
4. When they first begin combining words, infants tend to put them in the correct order, as in “more juice.” 4 4

5. What happens during the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development?
sensorimotor intelligence: Piaget’s term for the way infants think—by using their senses and motor skills.
What happens in each stage of Sensorimotor Development?
Primary circular reactions
Secondary circular reactions
Tertiary circular reactions
Instruction:
In Piaget’s theory, the sensorimotor period is the first period of cognitive development.
Click to reveal more.
In Piaget’s theory, how children think changes with time and experience, and their thought processes always affect their behavior.
Sensation, perception, and cognition cycle back and forth in what Piaget called circular reactions.
Stage 1 (birth – 1 month)
Stage 3 (4 - 8 months)
Stage 5 (12 – 18 months)
Stage 2 (1 – 4 months)
Stage 4 (8 – 12 months)
Stage 6 (18 – 24 months) 5 5 5

6. [Video: Piaget’s Stages of Sensorimotor Intelligence]
Instruction:
Click to play a video about cognitive development of infants and Piaget’s theory.
In this video, you’ll observe infants in various stages of sensorimotor development.
What stages of sensorimotor intelligence did you observe in this video clip? What did the infants do that served as an example of each stage?
[Video: Piaget’s Stages of Sensorimotor Intelligence] 6 6

7. Primary Circular Reactions
How do infants adapt as they learn to suck a thumb?
primary circular reactions: When the infant senses motion, sucking, noise, and other stimuli, and tries to understand them.
Instruction:
These reactions are the first of three types of feedback loops in sensorimotor intelligence, involving the infant’s own body.
Click for animation.
In stage one, reflexes become deliberate; sensation leads to perception, next to cognition, and then sensorimotor intelligence begins.,
In stage two, infants adapt their reflexes as repeated responses provide information about what the body does and how that action feels. 7 7 7

8. Secondary Circular Reactions
secondary circular reactions: Infants respond to other people, to toys, and any other object they can touch or move.
object permanence: The realization that objects (including people) still exist when they can no longer be seen, touched, or heard.
Where are you? Where is it?
Instruction:
Automatic Animation.
In stage three, infants attempt to produce exciting experiences, making them last, like waving their arms and laughing when a rattle is put in their hands. Even the sight a favorite book or a smiling parent can trigger active efforts for interaction.
Stage four involves new adaptation and anticipation, because babies have a goal that they try to reach (a means to an end). They might employ two circular reactions in concert to attain a goal—for instance, by grabbing a toy in each hand or batting a mobile back and forth. 8 8 8

9. [Video: 9-Month Old Failing A-not-B Task]
Secondary Circular Reactions
Instruction:
Click to play a video that shows a 9-month-old passing an object permanence test, but failing an A-not-B task.
As this video clip shows, parents can hide a forbidden object to stop their baby from fussing—but as a toddler, that child can retrieve the object, having remembered where it was hidden!
How is this video an example of object permanence?
[Video: 9-Month Old Failing A-not-B Task] 9 9

10. Stages Five and Six What is Doll Play?
tertiary circular reactions: Infants explore a range of new activities, varying their responses as a way of learning about the world.
Instruction:
These reactions are the third and last type of feedback loop in sensorimotor intelligence, involving active exploration and experimentation.
In stage five, a “little scientist” experiments without anticipating the results by using trial and error in active and creative exploration—as in taking your phone apart or playing with food.
Deferred imitation is a milestone of stage six: The infant follows a sequence of first perceiving something that someone else does, and then performing the same action hours or days later—like imitating your gestures while on the phone, or doll play. 10 10 10

11. Piaget and Research Methods
Can babies think before they talk?
EEG (electroencephalogram): Technique that measures electrical activity in the top layers of the brain, where the cortex is.
Instruction:
Automatic animation.
Using habituation—the process of getting used to an object or event through repeated exposure—researchers have studied ways in which babies detect the difference between stimuli.
Before the advent of the EEG and other modern technologies, Piaget confined primary circular reactions to reflexes in infants from birth to age 4 months. Modern technologies monitor such things as infant eye-gaze, heart rate, and electrical activity in the brain. These technology-driven observations indicate to scientists that 1-month-olds can detect the difference between puh and bah sounds or between a circle with two dots inside it and a circle without any dots—these and many other observations indicate infant cognitive experiences in advance of Piaget’s stages.
Using ERP (event-related potential): Brain wave activity shows that infants can understand language before they can talk. 11 11 11 11

12. [Video: Understanding Neuroscience Methods: ERP]
Piaget and Research Methods
Instruction:
Click to play a video that shows a baby being tested.
In this video, an infant is being tested for ERP, or event-related potential.
What does the researcher hope to learn by testing this infant for ERP (event-related potential)?
[Video: Understanding Neuroscience Methods: ERP] 12 12

13. When can you catch a ball?
Affordances
When can you catch a ball?
affordance: An opportunity for perception and interaction that is offered by a person, place, or object in the environment.
dynamic perception: Perception that is primed to focus on movement and change.
Instructions:
Automatic animation.
Similar to how computers analyze data, researchers in information processing consider how humans analyze information, including sensory input, connections, stored memories, and output.
When the child in this animation was just 3-month-old, he/she would have tried to catch the ball as it whizzed past and would have succeeded at touching it only about 20 percent of the time. By contrast, 9-month-olds (like the child in this animation) know when a ball affords catching. They grab the slower balls and refuse to try to for the fast ones, and their success rate at touching the ball is almost 100 percent. 13 13 13

14. [Video: The Visual Cliff Clip]
Affordances
Instructions:
Click to start a video of an experiment with infants on an apparatus called a visual cliff.
Children sense movement of objects—like a thrown ball they might try to catch—and they sense the movement that could occur if they were to suddenly drop—and that is what the visual cliff experiment is about.
How does crawling affect each child in this video and his or her experience with the visual cliff? What do you think this finding might indicate about cognitive development in infants?
[Video: The Visual Cliff Clip] 14 14

15. Memory
reminder session: A perception 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.
A baby learns that when it kicks, the mobile moves… then, as time passes, what happens?
1 week later when ribbon is attached
2 weeks later when ribbon is attached
More than 2 weeks later when ribbon is attached
After reminder session and ribbon is attached
Instruction:
Click to reveal the findings.
This experiment by Carolyn Rovee-Collier indicates that babies remember a previous experience at one week out and sometimes at two weeks out.
During a reminder session in this experiment, the babies watched the mobile move but were not tied to it or positioned in such a way that they could kick.
Many other studies have found that infant memory is fragile, but that reminders and repetition may help even 4-month-olds to remember (S.P. Johnson & Shuwairi, 2009).
After about 6 months of age, infants retain information for a longer time than younger babies, and with less training and reminding. By 1 year, many kinds of memories are apparent—for instance, a 9-month-old may watch someone play with a toy he or she has never seen before; then, if given that toy on the next day, the 9-month-old will play with the toy based on the previous day’s observation.
A day after the reminder session, babies remember to kick
Most if not all babies do not remember to kick
Most babies kick to move the mobile
Not all babies remember to kick 15 15 15

16. [Video: Research of Carolyn Rovee-Collier]
Memory
Instruction:
Click to see a video that shows this experiment.
In this video clip, watch what the baby does and what happens to the mobile.
How do your observations of this video support (or refute) the experiment findings presented in the chart?
[Video: Research of Carolyn Rovee-Collier] 16 16

17. How do we learn our native language?
Environment Spoken language heard
provides input to
design
Brain Mechanisms for understanding and producing language
Behavior Mastery of native language
Genes
Instruction:
Automatic animation.
Habituation to noise has been demonstrated in fetuses several weeks before birth, suggesting that listening and remembering are inborn, basic to being human.
By 6 months of age, infants can distinguish, just by looking at someone’s mouth movements (and no sound), whether that person is speaking their native language or not.
In the next two slides, you’ll hear how language develops every few months, from birth up through 24 months. 17 17 17

18. [Video: Infant Speech Perception]
What Develops in the First Two Years?
Instruction:
Click to play a video about infant speech perception.
In this video, children learn sounds from their native and from nonnative languages.
How did researchers go about learning whether or not an infant can learn sounds from native and nonnative languages? What do the findings in this experiment indicate?
[Video: Infant Speech Perception] 18 18

19. The Universal Sequence: From Birth Through 24 Months
Newborn
2 months old
child-directed speech: The high-pitched, simplified, and repetitive way adults speak to infants.
babbling: The extended repetition of certain syllables, such as ba-ba-ba.
3 months old
6 months old
Instruction:
Child-directed speech is also called baby talk or motherese.
Babbling begins when babies are between 6 and 9 months old.
Click each image to hear milestones in language development.
Infants respond vocally to adult noises and expressions, as well as their own internal pleasures and pain—with crying, cooing, and a variety of other sounds.
They like alliteration, rhymes, repetition, rhythm, and varied pitch (Hayes & Slater, 2008; Schön et al., 2008)—like lullabies.
When parents use signs with their deaf children, at 10-months-old, the child uses about a dozen distinct repetitive hand gestures, as if babbling—and all babies express concepts with gestures sooner than with speech (Goldin-Meadow, 2006). 23 23 23

20. [Video: A Journey Through Infancy and Toddlerhood]
The Universal Sequence: From Birth Through 24 Months
Instruction:
Click to start video.
According to this video clip, how would you describe the responses of infants to their mother’s voices?
[Video: A Journey Through Infancy and Toddlerhood] 24 24 24

21. The Universal Sequence: From 9 Months Through 24 Months
9 months old
12 months old
holophrase: A single word that is used to express a complete, meaningful thought. (For example: “Dada!”)
naming explosion: A sudden increase in an infant’s vocabulary, especially in the number of nouns, which begins at about 18 months of age.
18 months old
24 months old
Instruction:
Click each image to hear milestones in language development.
At around the one-year mark, babies are no longer just singing and talking to themselves (as in babbling) but communicating in language.
Once they reach a vocabulary of about 50 expressed, words (understood words are far more extensive), it builds rapidly, at a rate of 50 to 100 words per month, with 21-month-olds saying twice as many words as 18-month-olds (Adamson & Bakeman, 2006).
Although all new talkers say names, use similar sounds, and say more nouns that any other part of speech, the ratio of nouns to verbs and adjectives varies from culture to culture. 29 29 29

22. [Video: A Journey Through Infancy and Toddlerhood]
The Universal Sequence: From 9 Months Through 24 Months
Instruction:
Click to start video.
According to Steven Pinker, what is “universal grammar”?
[Video: A Journey Through Infancy and Toddlerhood] 30 30 30

23. Theories of Language Learning
Four Theories About Language Learning
Based on behaviorism (for example: baby says “ma-ma-ma”; mother reinforces by smiling, repeating the sound, praising/rewarding the baby)
Parents are expert teachers
Frequent repetition of words is instructive
Well-taught infants become well-spoken children
Infants communicate in every way they can because humans are social beings
Early communication focuses on emotional messages of speech and not the words
Infants need to be taught
Social-pragmatic
Theories of Language Learning
Instruction:
Click to reveal details for each theory of language learning.
The behaviorist B.F. Skinner (1957) noticed that spontaneous babbling is usually reinforced.
According to the social-pragmatic theory, social impulses, not explicit teaching, lead infants to learn language “as part of the package of being a human social animal” (Hollich et al., 2000).
Noam Chomsky coined the term L.A.D. and used the term universal grammar to describe the common mental structure all children use for human language.
Infants teach themselves
Hybrid theory
Some aspects of language may be explained by one theory at one age and another theory at another age.
How language is learned depends on the age of the child as well as on the particular circumstances.
Language Acquisition Device (LAD): A hypothesized mental structure that enables humans to learn language, including basic aspects of grammar, vocabulary, and intonation. 31 31 31

24. [Video: Chomsky’s View of Language Development]
Theories of Language Learning
Instruction:
Click to see a video clip that shows an interview with Chomsky.
In addition to the interview in this video, you’ll observe how deaf learners use signs.
According to this interview, how would you summarize Chomsky’s view of language development? How does Chomsky’s view explain signs used by the deaf?
[Video: Chomsky’s View of Language Development] 32 32 32

25. Closing Thoughts
In a few sentences, how would you summarize the leap in cognitive development that infants make in their first two years? (Include thinking, memory, and language in your response). 33 33