Piaget assumed baby ASSIMILATES incoming information to the limited array of schemes she is born with looking listening sucking grasping and ACCOMODATES those schemes based on experiences These are called SENSORIMOTOR INTELLIGENCE Sensorimotor stage period during which infants develop and refine sensorimotor intelligence Primary circular reactions Piaget s phrase to describe a baby s simple repetitive actions in the substage 2 of the sensorimotor stage organized around the baby s own body Secondary circular reactions repetitive actions in substage 3 of the sensorimotor period oriented around external objects Tertiary circular reactions the deliberate experimentation with variations of previous actions that occurs in sub stage 5 of sensorimotor period Means end behavior purposeful behavior carried out in pursuit of a specific goal Substage 4 8 12 month shows understanding of causal connetions moves into EXPLARATORY GEAR 1 consequence of this drive to explore means end behavior the ability to keep a goal in mind and devise a plan to achieve it e g move a toy one way to get another Challenges in Piaget s work 124 He underestimated the cognitive capacity of infants Object permanence he said children had object permanence if they moved a blanket in order to retrieve a hidden object children can t do this until 7 8 months so his method couldn t work for smaller infants They started recording children s eyes when an object moved Babies pay far more attention to relationships between events than Piaget s model supposed Imitation simple imitation hand movement develops at months Two part imitations develop at 15 18 months Two important exceptions to Piaget s theory Infants imitate some facial gestures in the firsrt weeks of life and deferred imitation seems to occur earlier than Piaget proposed Scientists found that newborns can imitate certain facial gestures e g tongue protrusion Behaviorist view 130 1950s B F Skinner who made operant conditioning explained language development Babies babble babbling sounds like words parents respond with praise encourage reinforcement Parents don t respond to bad grammar but do to good grammar another form of reinforcement Nativist view on language development Children s comprehension and production of language are guided b an innate language processor called Language acquisition device Language Acquisition device an innate language processor theorized by Chomsky that contains the basic grammatical structure of all human language LAD tells infants two basic types of sounds consonants and vowels what characteristics of language to look for in the stream of speech they hear so they can analyze and learn sounds that are specific to their language Evidence that all human languages have same grammatical forms Another nativitist Dan Slobin poposes that babies are preprogrammed to pay attention to the beginnings and endings of strings of sounds and to stress sounds Interactionist theorists who argue that language development is a subprocess of general cognitive development and is influenced by both internal and external factors 1 2 Infants are born with some kind of biological preparedness to pay more attention to language than to other kind of information Infant s brain has generalized set of tools that it employs across all sub domains of cognitive development allow infants to extract general principles from all kinds of specific experiences including those that they have with language Not have a neurological module that is specific to language 25 Theories of attachment Attachment theory the view that infants are biologically predisposed to form emotional bonds with caregivers and that the characteristics of those bonds shape later social and personality development Freud Bowlby 4 phrases in development of infant s attachment Claim that these stages appear in a fixed seuqnece over the first 24 36 months of life that is strongly influenced bt genes that are presenting all healthy human infants Phase 1 nonfocused orienting and signaling birth 3months babies exhibit behaviors crying smiling making eye contact that draw the attention of others ad signal their needs Direct this attention to everyone they come into contact with Phase 2 Focus on one or more figures 3 6m Babies direct their come here signals to fewer Phase 3 Secure base behavior 6 24m True attachment emerges Babies show proximity seeking behaviors such as following and clinging to to caregivers whom they regard as safe bases esp when anxious injured or have physical needs such as hunger Most direct these behaviors to a primary caregiver when that person is available and to others only when primary caregiver f for some reason cannot or will not respond to them or is absent Phase 4 internal model 24m internal model of attachment relationship allows children older than 2 to imagine how an anticipated action might affect the bonds they share with their caregivers The internal model plays a role in later relationships in early caregivers and in other significant relationships throughout life Erikson s view of infant development more accurate than Freud Piaget a child more readily assimilates data that fit the model Model affects the child s behavior Child tends to recreate in each new relationship pattern with which is he familiar Stranger anxiety expressions of discomfort such as clinging to the mother in the presence of strangers Separation anxiety expressions of discomfort such as crying when separated from an attachment figure Secure attachment a pattern of attachment in which an infant readily separates from the parent seeks proximity when stressed and uses the parent as a safe base for exploration Insecure avoidant attachment a pattern of attachment in which an infant avoids contacts with the parent and shows no preference for the parent over other people Insecure Ambivalent attachment a pattern of attachment in which the infant shows little exploratory behavior is greatly upset when separated from the mother and is not reassured by her return or efforts to comfort him Insecure disorganized attachment a pattern of attachment in which an infant seems confused or apprehensive and shows contradictory behavior such as moving toward the mother while looking away from her TABLE 6 1 153 Temperament inborn predispositions such as activity level that form the foundations of personality Associate KAGAN with this He argued that when you lookat kids behaviors ou don t have to lookat the mother Easy children