1. Cognitive Development in Infancy
Chapter 5:
Cognitive Development in Infancy

2. In This Chapter Cognitive changes
Learning, categorizing, and remembering
The beginning of language
Measuring intelligence in infancy

3. Cognitive Changes Piaget’s Views
A quick review
Assimilation
Accommodation
Sensorimotor intelligence
Assimilation Process of fusing incoming information to existing schemes to make sense of experiences
Accommodation
Changing a scheme to incorporate new information
Sensorimotor intelligence
Refinement of innate schemes by experiences of the senses and motor actions

4. Cognitive Changes Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage
Basic reflexes
Primary circular reaction
Secondary circular reaction
Coordination of secondary schemas (means-end behavior)
Tertiary circular reaction
Transition to symbolic thought
Primary circular reaction: simple repetitive actions organized around the infant’s own body
Secondary circular reaction: baby repeatedly exhibits behavior to produce a desired outcome.
Means-end behavior: purposeful behavior to achieve a goal
Tertiary circular reaction: experiment with different behaviors to ascertain the outcomes.

5. Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage by Age
SENSORIMOTOR SUBSTAGE
AGE
Basic Reflexes
Birth to 1 month
Primary Circular Reactions
1 to 4 months
Secondary Circular Reactions
4 to 8 months
Coordination of Secondary Schemes
8 to 12 months
Tertiary Circular Reactions
12 to 18 months
Transition to Symbolic Thought
18 to 24 months
Basic Reflexes
The first schemes are inborn reflexes.
EXAMPLES: Rooting, sucking, grasping reflexes
2. Primary Circular Reactions
Infants discover actions involving their own bodies by accident, then learn by trial and error to repeat them
until they become habits (schemes).
EXAMPLES: At first, thumb comes to mouth by accident. Through trial and error, infants learn to reproduce the event until a thumb-sucking scheme becomes established.
3. Secondary Circular Reactions
Infants discover actions involving objects in the environment by accident, then learn by trial and error to repeat them until they become habits (schemes).
EXAMPLES: Holding a rattle, an infant may accidentally shake the rattle and enjoy the noise. Through trial and error, the infant learns to reproduce the event until a shaking scheme becomes established.
4. Coordination of Secondary Schemes
Infants intentionally put two schemes together to solve a problem or reach a goal. Intentionality is a new feature—these new behaviors are no longer discovered by accident.
EXAMPLES: An infant sees a toy behind a box, pushes the box aside, then reaches for the toy. The infant intentionally combined pushing and reaching
schemes to reach the goal (the toy).
5. Tertiary Circular Reactions
Babies are curious about objects in the world and explore them in a trial-and-error fashion, trying to produce novel reactions.
EXAMPLES: A baby drops a ball from shoulder height and watches what happens. The baby then explores the “dropping scheme” by dropping the ball from hip height, then from head height, then from knee height, observing each new result.
6. Transition to Symbolic Thought
Toddlers begin to form symbolic representations of events, showing the beginnings of mental thought. Representations still tend to be physical (rather than purely mental), as when toddlers use their own body movements to represent movements of objects in the world.
EXAMPLES: An eighteen-month-old girl would like to open the lid of a box, and to think about this she opens and closes her hand repeatedly. Rather than work directly on the box, she first uses her hand motion as a way to “think” about how to open it. She is thinking about the box using a symbolic representation (her hand).

6. Piaget: Object Permanence
Cognitive Changes
Piaget: Object Permanence
Object permanence: Realization that objects still exist when hidden from sight
2 months: surprise when an object disappears
6–8 months: looking for missing object
8–12 months: reaching for or searching for completely hidden toy
two months: rudimentary expectations shown by surprise when an object disappears
six to eight months: looking for missing object for a brief period of time
Eight to twelve months reaching for or searching for toy that is completely hidden

7. Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage Piaget: Imitation
Imitation: Performance of act whose stimulus is observation of act performed by another person
2 months: imitate actions they could see themselves make
8–12 months: imitate other people’s facial expressions
1 year: imitation of any action that wasn’t in child’s repertoire begins
18 months: deferred imitation (a child’s imitation of some action at a later time) begins

8. Cognitive Changes Challenges to Piaget’s Views
Underestimation of infant cognitive capacity
Inaccurate equation of infant’s lack of physical ability with lack of cognitive understanding
Underestimation of object permanence appearance beginning

9. Cognitive Changes Modern Studies of Object Permanence
Recent theories
Developing object permanence a process of elaboration rather than discovery
Baillargeon
Babies as young as 4 months show signs of object permanence but may be tied to experimental situations
Around 1 year can use sufficiently across situations
Biallargeon and others used possible/impossible events and habituation methods to study object permanence.

10. Cognitive Changes Summary of Differences
Piaget’s early research
Baby comes with repertoire of sensorimotor scheme by construction—world understanding via experiences.
Recent research
Newborns have considerable awareness of objects as separate entities that follow certain rules.
Biallargeon and others used possible/impossible events and habituation methods to study object permanence.

11. Figure 5.1 Facial Gesture Imitation in Newborns
Seminal research agrees that an infant will imitate gesture of tongue protrusion but disagree as to how much an infant will imitate.

12. Cognitive Changes Spelke’s Alternative Approach
Assumption: Babies have inborn assumptions about objects and their movement.
Method: Violation of expectations method
Researchers move an object the opposite way from that which the infant comes to expect.
Let’s look at the next slide for an example.

13. Figure 5.2 Spelke’s Classic Study of Object Perception
Ask: What do the data convey?
Three conditions on top
Actual results below
Babies habituated and stopped looking at expected result but showed surprise when results were inconsistent.
Figure 5.2

14. Cognitive Changes Baillargeon’s Alternative Approach
Assumption: Knowledge about objects is not built in, but strategies for learning are innate.
Method: Study of object stability perception
Researchers stack smiling-face blocks in stable and unstable positions.
Let’s look at the next slide for an example.

15. Figure 5.3 Baillergeon’s Study of Object Stability Perception
Two- to three-month-olds think smiling blocks will not fall under either condition.
Five-month-olds recognize stable condition.

16. Stop and Think!
After reviewing the information we have just covered, how would you explain an infant’s habit of throwing things out of her crib to a parent who viewed it as a misbehavior that needed to be corrected?

17. Learning, Categorizing, and Remembering Conditioning and Modeling
Learning: Permanent changes in behavior that result from experience
Classical Conditioning
Operant Conditioning
Modeling
Classical conditioning research
Gunther and breastfeeding: babies who felt smothered by the left breast learned to refuse the left breast.
Operant conditioning—reinforcements—sounds of mother’s voice or heartbeat, sweet liquids: the mother’s voice is an effective reinforcer for virtually all babies.
Classical conditioning
Learning of emotional responses as early as the first week of life
Stimulus-response connection
Operant conditioning
Both sucking responses and head-turning have been increased using reinforcement.
Learning from models too

18. Learning, Categorizing, and Remembering Schematic Learning
Schematic learning: Organization of experiences into expectancies or “known” combinations (schemas)
7 months: Infants actively use categories, but not levels, to process information.
2 years: Hierarchical or superordinate categories appear.
Schematic learning—often called schemas—is built up over many exposures to a particular experience; help baby to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar.
Categories By seven months, infants actively use categories to process information.
Cannot process levels of categories
Babies respond differently to animals versus furniture but not to dogs versus birds.
Hierarchical or superordinate categories appear by age two.
Superordinates: a higher-level category that includes lower-level categories; animal is a superordinate that contains dogs.

19. What do data from sequential learning studies suggest?
Infancy: respond to superordinate before basic level categories
12 months: understand basic and superordinate categories
2 years: partially understand smaller categories nested in larger categories
5 years: fully understand categories
Full understanding linked to language development and using words as category labels

20. Learning, Categorizing, and Remembering Memory
Carolyn Rovee-Collier’s research
Babies as young as 3 months old can remember specific objects and their own actions for as long as a week.
Young infants are more cognitively sophisticated than was previously assumed.
Newborns appear to be able to remember auditory stimuli to which they are exposed while sleeping.
Rovee-Collier hangs an attractive mobile over a baby’s crib, attaches a ribbon to the baby’s leg, records leg kicks. Her research supports the idea that the young infant is more developmentally sophisticated than developmentalists and Piaget had supposed.
Infant memory is tied strongly to the context in which learning takes place. Change the mobile or the bunting even slightly and the memory will not be recalled.

21. Figure 5.5 Rovee-Collier’s Study of Infant Memory

22. Learning, Categorizing, and Remembering
What else have we learned about memory?
Babies as young as three months old can remember specific objects and their own actions for as long as a week.
Young infants are more cognitively sophisticated than previously assumed.
“Lost” memories can be reactivated.
With age, infant memories become less and less tied to specific cues or context.

23. The Beginnings of Language Theoretical Perspectives
Behaviorist view
Nativist view
Interactionist view
Babies as young as three months old can remember specific objects and their own actions for as long as a week.
Young infants more are cognitively sophisticated than previously assumed.
“Lost” memories can be reactivated.
With age, infant memories become less and less tied to specific cues or context.
Let’s consider each!

24. The Beginnings of Language The Behaviorist View: B. F. Skinner
Parent-reinforced babbling and grammar use
Correct grammar reinforced, becomes more frequent
Non-grammatical words not reinforced
Is this what you observe when parents interact with very young children?
Begins with babbling, which parents reinforce
Respond to grammatical use of words with reinforcement
Withhold reinforcement for nongrammatical words
Correct grammar reinforced, becomes more frequent
BUT apparently NOT what happens—parents respond to all vocalizations.
Theory makes sense on surface and can explain some variations but does not completely tell the story of language acquisition.

25. The Beginnings of Language The Nativist View Noam Chomsky
Grammar rules acquired before exception mastery
Rule-governed errors made (overregulation)
Comprehension and production guided by Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
LAD = An innate language processor which contains the basic grammatical structure of all human language
Rule-governed grammatical errors: almost all three-year olds overregularize the past tense of verbs.
“Yesterday we goed to the store,” or, “I breaked my cookie.”
LAD separates sounds into vowels and consonants. All human languages have the same form, according to Chomsky.

26. The Beginnings of Language More about the LAD
Language Acquisition Device
Basic grammatical structure for all human language
Tells babies there are 2 types of sounds (consonants and vowels)
Enables infants to divide, analyze, and learn sounds of the specific language they are learning

27. The Beginnings of Language Slobin
Importance of “soundness”
Infants are preprogrammed to attend to beginnings and endings of sounds and to stressed sounds.
Programming is not attached to verbs or nouns, but to attention to sounds.

28. The Beginnings of Language The Interactionist View
Four key ideas
Language follows rules as part of cognition.
Language includes internal and external factors.
Infants are born with biological preparedness to pay more attention to language than other information.
The infant brain has generalized tools used across all cognitive domains—NOT language-specific neurological model.

29. The Beginnings of Language Bowerman and Bloom
Language does not initially introduce new meaning, but expresses meaning already formulated, independent of language.
Children attempt to communicate and learn new words when these aid in the communication of thoughts and ideas.
Lois Bloom & Melissa Bowerman: “When language starts to come in, it does not introduce new meanings to the child. Rather, it is used to express only those meanings the child has already formulated.”
Lois Bloom: from the beginning, the child’s attempt is to communicate, and he learns new words when they help him to communicate his thoughts and ideas.

30. The Beginnings of Language Influences on Language Development
Infant-directed speech
Higher pitch
Repetitions with variations
Infant preferred
Speech in a higher pitch
Adults repeat often, introduce minor variations, and use slightly more elongated sentences.
Babies prefer infant-directed speech to adult speech.
A baby more easily imitates a correct grammatical form “recast” from his own sentences by an adult.
Children whose parents talk to them a lot develop richer vocabularies and more complex sentences.

31. ? ?
Questions To Ponder
Which language theory appears to be right to you? Why? What are 3 effective strategies parents may use to help stimulate language development in their children?

32. The Beginnings of Language Early Milestones of Language Development
Birth–1 month
Crying predominant sound
1–2 months
Laughing and cooing sounds (aaaaa)
6–7 months
Babbling; repetitive vowel-consonant combinations
9–10 months
Hand gesture-vocalization combinations
Initially, babbling contains all kinds of sounds; by nine or ten months, babies typically begin to babble closer and closer to the language they hear.
Babbling is also linked to gestures for demanding or asking for something. Parents encourage gestures at this age as well.

33. Word Recognition Receptive Language
Receptive language: Ability to understand words
8 months: begin to store words in memory
9–10 months: understands 20–30 words
13 months: 100 words
Receptive language: the ability to understand words

34. The Beginnings of Language Expressive Language
Expressive language: Ability to produce words
12-13 months: Babies begin to say first words.
Words learned slowly in context with specific situations and cues
Expressive language: the ability to produce words
Repetition provides the mechanism for word production.

35. The Beginnings of Language First Words
Holophrases
Naming Explosion
Now let’s take a look at vocabulary growth during the toddler years.
Young children learn and express more frequently used words first and then concentrate on others.
Holophrases
Combining a single word with gestures to make a complete thought
Used between 12 and 18 months
Naming Explosion
Used between 16 and 24 months
16 months old: 50 words in vocabulary
24 months old: 320 words
Vocabulary grows in spurts.
Naming explosion includes names for things or people. Action words tend to appear later.

36. Figure 5.6 Vocabulary Growth in the Second Year
Goldfield and Reznick’s longitudinal study
Vocabulary growth of six children
Common language pattern: slow initial growth followed by growth spurt

37. The Beginnings of Language First Sentences
Short, simple sentences appear at 18–24 months.
Threshold vocabulary reaches around 100–200 words.
Sentences: Following rules created

38. The Beginning of Language Individual Differences in Language Development: Rate
Differences in rate of language development
A wide range of normal variations exists in sentence structures.
Most children catch up.
Those who don’t catch up have poor receptive language.
Poor receptive language may lead to poor cognitive development in general.

39. The Beginning of Language Individual Differences in Language Development: Style
Differences in style
Expressive style
Early vocabulary linked to social relationships rather than objects
Referential style
Early vocabulary made up of names of things or people
Expressive style: These children often learn pronouns (you, me) early and use many more personal social words such as no, yes, want, or please; they use multi-word strings such as love you and do it or go away. Expressive language may sound advanced but often has a smaller vocabulary.
According to Bates, referential style children are more cognitively oriented. They are drawn to objects, spend more time in solitary play, and interact with people more than objects. These children are often advanced in understanding adult language.

40. Figure 5.7 Variations in the Rate of Language Acquisition

41. The Beginning of Language Language Development across Cultures
Cooing, babbling, holophrases, and telegraphic speech typically found in all languages
Use of specific word order in early sentences is not the same.
Particular inflections are learned in highly varying and specific orders.
Some languages: noun/verb common
Others: verb/noun
Inflections: In Japanese, Yo is used at the end of a sentence when the speaker is experiencing some resistance from the listener; the word me is used when the speaker expects approval or agreement.
In Turkish, there is no two-word sentence stage; essentially, all inflections are learned by age two.

42. Measuring Intelligence in Infancy What Is Intelligence?
Intelligence: Ability to take in information and use it to adapt to environment Although each infant develops at a different pace, both genetic and environmental factors influence infant intelligence. So how can infant intelligence be measured?
Instead of testing school-like skills (skills an infant does not yet have), the items measure primarily sensory and motor skills, such as reaching for a dangling ring (an item for a typical baby at three months), putting cubes in a cup on request (nine months), or building a tower of three cubes (seventeen months).
Some more clearly cognitive items are also included, such as uncovering a toy hidden by a cloth, an item used with eight-month-old infants to measure an aspect of object permanence.

43. Measuring Intelligence in Infancy
Bailey Scales of Infant Development
Fagan Test of Infant Intelligence
Bailey Scales of Infant Development
Measure sensory and motor skills
Help identify children with serious developmental delays
Not as useful predicting later intelligence
Fagan Test of Infant Intelligence
Standardized test of habituation (novelty preference, visual recognition)
Useful when Bailey test cannot be used
Instead of testing school-like skills (skills an infant does not yet have), the items measure primarily sensory and motor skills, such as reaching for a dangling ring (an item for a typical baby at three months), putting cubes in a cup on request (nine months), or building a tower of three cubes (seventeen months).
Some more clearly cognitive items are also included, such as uncovering a toy hidden by a cloth, an item used with eight-month-old infants to measure an aspect of object permanence.

44. Measures of habituation are related to later measures of intelligence.
True or False?
Measures of habituation are related to later measures of intelligence.
Maybe