Infant Cognitive DevelopmentAnnouncements and RemindersOutline • Behavioral approach • Piaget • LanguageBehaviorist Approach • Babies are born to learn • Classical Conditioning • Operant Conditioning • Rovee-CollierLearning, Remembering, and Conceptualizing • Attention • focusing of mental resources • Joint attention • focusing on the same object or event by both personsLearning, Remembering, and Conceptualizing • Imitation • Meltzoff (2007) • Deferred imitation • Imitation after a delay of hours or days • Occurs by 9 mos.Learning, Remembering, and Conceptualizing • Memory • Involves retention of information over time • Implicit memory: Unconscious remembering • Explicit memory: Conscious remembering • Childhood amnesiaLearning, Remembering, and Conceptualizing • Concept formation • As early as 3 mos. • Categorization • Perceptual categorization • As early as 3 mos. • Conceptual categorization • As early as 7-9 mos.Piaget • Schemes actions or mental representations that organize knowledge • Organization -- is the grouping of isolated behaviors and thoughts into a higher-order systemPiaget: Cognitive structures develop through 3 processes • Adaptation • Assimilation • AccommodationEquilibrium and Disequilibrium • Disequilibrium • Cognitive conflict • the child assimilates and accommodates to decrease conflict • Equilibration • mechanism by which children shift from one stage of thought to the next • Cognition is qualitatively different in each stageSensorimotor Stage: 0-2 years • Intelligence evidenced by motor actions • Sensory-motor integration • the relationship of sensory inputs to motor actsObject Permanence • Object exists even when out of sight • Before 8 months: • If I drop my toy and I can’t see it….it is gone! • 8-12 months: • You hid my toy…I’m looking for it the last place I saw it! • After 12months: • You hid my toy…I’m looking for it!Evaluating and Modifying Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage • A-not-B error is the term used to describe the tendency of infants to reach where an object was located earlier rather than where the object was last hidden • Room for debate • Infants’ perceptual abilities are highly developed very early in developmentWhat DO infants “know”? • Research • Habituation • Orienting reflex: infants pay more attention to novel stimuliLanguage Development • What is language • How does language develop? • Theories of language developmentLanguage • Language: Form of communication • Spoken, written, or signed • symbolic • words and the rules for using themKey Milestones in Language Development • First year sequence: • Crying: at birth • Cooing/laughing: about 6 weeks • Babbling: 6 months • Gestures: about 9 to 12 monthsRecognizing Language Sounds • Phonemes -- the basic sound units of a language • First words: 10 to 15 months • Understands more words than they can use • Receptive vocabulary – • Spoken/expressive vocabulary – • Vocabulary spurt: 18-24 months • 3 years old: says 1,000 words with developing syntax3-20 Figure 3.23 - Variation in Language MilestonesTwo-Word Utterances • 18 to 24 months of age • Telegraphic speech: short, precise words without grammatical markersLanguage • Overextension • UnderextensionTheories on Language Development • Behaviorists: language is acquired through reinforcement • Noam Chomsky: Language Acquisition Device (LAD) -- Humans are biologically prewired to learn languageLanguage • Influence of • Family’s socioeconomic status • How parents talk to children • Child-directed speechDevelopmental PSYC in real life • Read books to (with) infants • Infants learn about social world • Pointing at pictures enriches vocabulary • Strengthen joint attention skillsVirtual Person Paper • Start working on it
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