CH 6: Cognition in Infants and Toddlers Flashcards
Schemas
psychological structures that organize experience through mental categories and conceptual models of knowledge
- build as they gain experience with situations, people and objects around them
- sometimes lead to functional fixidness (stuck in a rut of thinking)
- don’t notice things that don’t fit in our schemas
- takes a while to organize in infancy
Basic Principles of Piaget’s Theory
• Children construct their understanding of the world by creating schemas
- change constrantly
- infants’ schemas based on actions
> need to learn that they can move their bodies and control how those movements occur
- older children’s and adolescents’ schemas are based on functional, conceptual and abstract properties
i.e. math formulas
• Assimilation
• Accommodation
Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage
0-2 years
Infant’s knowledge of the world is based on senses and motor skills
- infant progresses from developing schemas based on simple, reflex actions to symbolic processing of orderly sequence
• six substages
• by 8-12 months, one sensorimotor schema is used in the service of another
• by 8-12 months, infants experiment with sensorimotor schemas
• 18-24 months, infants begin to engage in symbolic processing
Evaluating Piaget’s Account of Sensorimotor Thought
• Children’s performance on tasks, such as object permanence, is sometimes better explained by ideas that are not part of Piaget’s theory
- infants who are unsuccessful in an object permanence task might be showing poor memory rather than inadequate understanding of the nature of objects
- other investigators have shown that babies understand objects much earlier than Piaget claimed
> shows that theory needs some revision to include important constructs that Piaget overlooked
• Children do what Piaget said they would do, but much more is happening in their brain than he said did
• Child moves through the four stages of cognitive development much faster than Piaget thought
Current view of child cognition
Children are specialists who generate naive theories in particular domains, such as physics and biology
Basic Features of the Information-Processing Approach
Cognitive development involves changes in mental hardware and mental software
• People and computers are both symbol processors.
• Hardware: sensory, working, and long-term memory.
• Software is task specific.
• Neo-Piagetian approach
Mental Hardware
Mental Hardware includes sensory, working and long-term memory
i.e. procedural, semantic and autobiographical or episodic memory
Mental Software
Mental Software refers to mental programs that allow people to perform specific tasks
Learning
- as stimulus becomes more familiar, infants habituate or respond to it less
- infants are capable of learning through classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and imitation
Memory
Studies of kicking show that infants can remember, forget, and be reminded of events that occurred in the past
• Young babies remember events for days and weeks.
• Babies forget events over time.
• Infantile amnesia
Infantile Amnesia
Children’s and adult’s inability to remember events from early in life
• infantile amnesia might reflect the acquisition of language, infants’ lack of an organized sense of self, or culture differences relating to sense of self and elaborative memory talk
Infants Understanding the World
• Infants can distinguish quantities probably by means of basic perceptual processes
• By 12 months, infants are more likely to know positions of objects relative to other objects (objective frame of reference)
- Infants have an egocentric frame of reference but will develop and objective frame of reference later.
Infant Intelligence Tests
• Individual differences are measured in mental tests for infants and toddlers.
- Bayley Scales of Infant Development
- Infant intelligence tests include mental and motor scales
- Scores on infant intelligence tests are not highly correlated with adult IQ
- Useful for determining whether development is progressing normally
- Habituation predicts later IQ more accurately than infant intelligence tests
Perceiving Speech
• phonemes
• before they speak, infants can recognize words by noticing stress and syllables that go together
• early speech sound detection leads to development of a vocabulary, which supports later literacy
• infants prefer infant-directed speech because it provides them with important language clues
- may help children learn language
• infants also pay attention to linguistic stress to decipher begin and end of conversation
Phonemes
basic units of sound that make up words
• infants can hear phonemes from foreign languages, but this ability is lost by their first birthday
First Words
Onset of language is due to a child’s ability to interpret and use symbols.
• children’s first words represent a cognitive accomplishment that is not specific to language but extends to other areas, including gestures
• the onset of language is due to a child’s ability to interpret and use symbols
• symbols represent actions and objects
- gestures are symbols that children start to use around the time they begin to talk.
First Steps to Speaking
- babies coo at about 3 months, followed by babbling of a single syllable
- 5 or 6 months - babbling turns into loner syllables and develops intonation over several months (around 7 or 8 months)
- deaf children babble later than children with normal hearing, but they make partial signs that are thought to be analogous with babbling
Fast Mapping Meanings to Words
• Children experience a naming explosion around 18 months of age, rapidly acquiring new words.
• children use several fast-mappings of new words
- joint attention
- constraints on word names
- sentence cues
• fast-mapping rules don’t always lead to correct word meanings
• underextension and overextension
Underextension
occurs when a child’s meaning of a word is narrower than an adult’s meaning
i.e. only Snoopy is a dog
Overextension
occurs when a child’s meaning of a word is broader than an adult’s meaning
i.e. all four-legged animals are dogs
Referential Style
a child’s initial tendency to learn primarily words that name objects, persons, or actions instead of social phrases
- uses language as an intellectual tool
i. e. cat, tree, book
Expressive Style
a child’s initial tendency to learn primarily social phrases in language rather than naming objects
- uses language as a social tool
i. e. “what’s that?”
Assimilation
cognitively incorporating new experiences into existing schemas
- children find they can readily assimilate most experiences into their existing schemas, but occasionally they need to accommodate their schemas to adjust to new experiences
Accommodation
Cognitive modification of schemas as a result of experience
- when becomes more frequent than assimilation, children reorganize their schemas, produces four different stages of mental development from uinfancy through adulthood
Equilibration
Piaget
The process of reorganizing schemas to incorporate new info or experience
• returning to equilibrium between assimilation and accommodation
- outmoded ways of thinking are replaced by quantitively different, more advanced schemas
• Piaget thought this caused children to move to the next stage of thinking
Piaget’s Four Stages of Cognitive Development
(1) Sensorimotor
(2) Preoperational thought
(3) Concrete operational thought
(4) Formal operational thought
- believed that revolutionary changes in though occur three times over the lifespan (stage 2-4)
Preoperational Thought
2-6 years
Child learns how to use symbols, such as words and numbers, to represent aspects of the world
Concrete Operational Thought
7-11 years
Child understands and applies logical operations to experiences
Formal Operational Thought
Adolescence and beyond
Adolescent or adult thinks abstractly
Piagetian Sensorimotor Stage: Substages
(1) Exercising Reflexes
(2) Learning to Adapt
(3) Making Interesting Events
(4) Using Means to Achieve Ends
(5) Experimenting
(6) Mental Representation
Sensorimotor Substage: Exercising Reflexes
~ birth to 1 month
Rely on reflex responses to stimuli
Some become coordinated behavioral schemas
i.e. sucking a nipple
Sensorimotor Substage: Learning to Adapt
~ 1-4 months
Reflexes modified by experiences
Chief mechanism for change is the primary circular reaction
i.e. thumb sucking
Sensorimotor Substage: Making Interesting Events
~ 4-8 months
As the infant shows greater interest in the world, objects become incorporated into circular reactions
Secondary circular reaction
i.e. shaking a toy to hear it rattle
Sensorimotor Substage: Using Means to Achieve Ends
~ 8-12 months
Marks the onset of deliberate, intentional behaviour because the “means” (action/method) and “end” (purpose/goal) of activities become distinct
i.e. “moving dad’s hand” schema is the means to achieve the goal of “grasping the toy”
Sensorimotor Substage: Experimenting
~ 12-18 months
Infant is an active experimenter with new objects
Repeat old schemas with objects as if trying to unerstand why different objects yeild different outcomes
Tertiary circular reaction
i.e. shaking different toys to hear the sounds they make
Sensorimotor Substage: Mental Representation
~ 18-24 months
Mental representations of the world
- can think about what’s happening around them without having to physically explore a situation
- work with symbols, such as words and gestures, to form an internal, mental representation of their world
Become more able to mentally work through simple problems that present themselves to the child
i.e. deferred imitation, the start of make believing
Secondary Circular Reaction
Learning about the sensations and actions associated with objects
- represent infant’s first efforts to explore properties and actions of objects in the environment
- grasping reflex gone
Tertiary Circular Reaction
Repetition of old schemas with objects of different kinds
- represent a significant extension of the intentional behaviour that emerged in substage 4 (using means to achieve an end)
Deferred Imitation
acting out events or behaviours seen at an earlier time
Object Permanence
understanding that objects continue to exist independently of one’s own actions
- develop at age 2
Baillargeon
found that 4.5 month olds consistently looked longer at the impossible event that the possible event, apparently thinking the impossible event (dissapearance and reappearance of the orange box (from behind the silver box) violates the that objects permanently exists) was novel, just as we are surprised when an object vanishes from a magician’s scarf
Naive Physics
Infants look longer at moving objects that violate their naive physics
i.e. a ball moving “through” a solid wall
• By 6 months, know that 1st object striking 2nd object will cause 2nd to move.
• Takes place throughout preschool years and later as well
Slaughter and her team found that infants understand their bodies in three ways
(1) through short-term mental representations of the body based on sensorimotor experiences
- sensorimotor knowledge develops first, during infancy
(2) through long-term knowledge of the physical location and interrelationships of the body parts, which is a kind of visuospatial knowledge
- visuospatial knowledge develops by aout 18 months
- occurs at varying developmental levels of complexity in infants
(3) through semantic understanding that comes by learning the names of body parts, which is called lexical-semantic knowledge
- lexicalsemantic knowledge develops along with the acquisition of language and becomes more detailed as children grow
Naive Biology
animate v.s. inanimate objects
• organize knowledge about the properties of objects and living things (though limited)
Procedural Memory
memory for how to do things
Semantic Memory
memory for particular facts
Autobiographical or Episodic Memory
memory for specific events and experiences in a person’s life
- impairments in episodic memory have been noted in children born very prematurely and who have experienced hypoxia (low levels of oxygen)
Orienting Response
a physical response to a strong or unfamiliar stimulus
- indicates noticing of the stimulus
- after repeated exposure to stimulus, it becomes familiar and the orienting response stops
- makes infant aware of potentially important or dangerous events in the environment
Habituation
a state of diminished responding to a stimulus as it becomes more familiar
- since constantly responding to insignificant stimulus is unnecessary, habituation keeps infants from wasting energy on biologically insignificant events
Dishabituation
a state of re-orientation, when a person becomes aware of a stimulus to which the person previously had habituated
Classical Conditioning
a form of learning in which a previously neutral stimulus elicits a response that was originally produced by another natural stimulus
- Pavlov’s dog (ringing bell, salivation)
Operant Conditioning
a form of learning in which the observed consequences of a behaviour affect the likelihood that the behaviour will reoccur
- positive/negative reinforcement or punishment
Information Processing
a theory proposing that human cognition is like computer hardware and software
- information from the environment becomes sensory memory, then working memory with interacts with long-term memory and leads to a response
Sensory Memory
raw, unanalyzed info held for only a few seconds
Working Memory
the active, cognitive manipulation of info
Long-Term Memory
limitless, permanent storage of acquired info
- info rarely forgotten from here, but can be hard to access
Neo-Piagetian Approach
a theory of cognitive development that retains Piagetian stage theory but takes an information processing approach to skill development
University of Alberta: Heth, Cornell, and Flood (2002) Study
Cognitive processes in direction
children age 6, and adluts ages 18-44
Conclusion: beliefs about sense of direction are based on a person’s recollecting the effectiveness of the attention and memory strategies they used during past way finding situations
Robbie Case
Neo-Piagetian approach
Argued that as children’s memory capacity and ability to mentally manipulate info improved, so too did children’s overall cognitive ability and understanding of the world
Rovee-Collier was able to demonstrate that three important features of memory exist as early as 2-3 months of age:
(1) an event from the past is remembered
(2) over times, the event can no longer be recalled
(3) a cue can serve to recall a memory that seems to have been forgotten
Explanations for infantile amnesia
(1) Once children learn to talk, they tend to rely on language to represent their past
- consequently, their earlier prelingual experiences might be difficult to retrieve from memory
(2) Some theorists argue that a child’s sense of self provides an organizing framework for children’s memories of events from their own lives
- infants and toddlers lack sense of self, can’t organize memories of life events, prevents later recall
Wang, Conway and Hou - Cultural Differences in Experience of Infantile Amnesia
Cultures that promote more of an autonomous or individualized sense of self tend to have people with shorter periods of infantile amnesia and more early childhood memories
Cultures that emphasized more elaborative memory talk also had shorter periods of infantile amnesia and more early childhood memories
- elaborative memory talk involves a way of engaging in conversation that encourages extended discussion and idea exchange through turn-taking and open-ended questions
Understanding Numbers
from basic life eaxperiences early in infancy
i.e. blocks, socks, food, etc.
small quantities might be perceptually obvious
Egocentric frame of reference
thinking of objects in space exclusively in terms of their relationship to the child’s own body position
Objective frame of reference
thinking of objects in space relative to the position of objects or persons other than oneself
Bayley Scales of Infant Development
Designed for 2-42 month olds, consist of mental and motor tasks or “scales”
- Mental scale assesses an infant’s adaptive behaviour, such as attending to visual and auditory stimuli, following directions, etc.
- Motor scale assesses an infant’s motor control coordination, etc.
Infant-directed speech
speaking slowly with exaggerated changes in pitch and loudness when communicating with babies
- formerlly called “motherese”
Cooing
long strings of vowel sounds produced
~ 2 months
• do it most often when they’re with people
• appears to start because of interaction and to cause interaction
Babbling
speech-like sound that has no meaning
~ 5-6 months
Influenced by the characteristics of speech they hear
• strong link between perception and production of speech
• Children with cerebral palsy have difficulty babbling
• may have more difficulty than other children with controlling the air expiration required for speech-related sounds
- resulting in monosyllabic and delayed babbling as compared with babies of the same age without cerebral palsy
• arises from learning to use their facial muscles
Intonation
a pattern of rising or falling pitch similar to the pattern in normal conversation
~ 7 months
Sign Language
Pettito and collegues - sign language works to activate the auditory cortex in people who are profoundly deaf
Fast Mapping
the rapid ability of children to connect new words to their referents
Joint Attention
Parents label objects, and children rely on adults’ behaviour to interpret the words they hear
- When children touch or look at an object, parents often vocally label it for them
- 18 to 20 month olds assume the label is the objects name only when adults show signs that they are refering to the object
Rules that help children match words with the correct referent (constraints on word names):
(1) Name refers to whole object and to all objects of the same type.
(2) If object already has a name and another name is presented, new name denotes subcategory of the original name.
(3) Given many similar category members, a word applied consistently to only one of them is a proper noun
Sentence Cues
Children hear many unfamiliar words embedded in sentences containing words they already know. The other words and the overall sentence structure can be helpful clues to a word’s meaning.
