Test 2 Study Guide Chapter 5 How Scientists Know What Babies Know o How do researchers ask babies questions about what they know Two techniques based on the concepts of habituations and novelty responsiveness and use a similar approach Baby gets bored and looks away Good for researcher because they know that the baby has developed some sort of mental representation Habituation the process in which a baby compares each new stimulus with a developing memory of the stimulus based on previous exposures thus learning about the new stimulus Novelty responsiveness following habituation the process in which a baby looks more at a new stimulus than at a familiar one Tells the researcher that the baby recognizes the old picture and can tell the difference between the new and old ones Third approach learning Fourth approach showing babies a sequence of results and seeing if they imitate them o Infants have an active mental life o They are constantly learning developing and testing new ideas Piaget and Infant Cognitive Development o Piaget suggested that each infant constructs an understanding of the world including space time causality and substance on the basis of his or her own motor activity and interactions in the world o Write that infants actively construct what they know o Assimilation and accommodation Adaptation the process whereby knowledge is altered by experience Adaptation has 2 complimentary processes Assimilation process by which information can be incorporated according to what the infant already knows allows the infant to use existing understanding to make sense of this world Accommodation process by which an infant changes to reach new understanding the modification of existing understanding to make it apply to a new situation allows infant to understand reality better and better o Stage theory Piaget held that mental development unfolds in a fixed sequence of developmental steps Infancy encompasses the sensorimotor period A developmental time consisting of a six stage sequence when thinking consists of coordinating sensory information with motor activity One of the accomplishments during the sensorimotor period is learning that certain actions produce certain results causality Another major advance is object permanence Mental Representation in Infancy o Categorizing o Challenges to Piaget The understanding that an object continues to exist even though it cannot be sensed Object permanence is the first step toward mental representation The ability to hold in the mind an image of objects and people that are not physically present Seems that Piaget underestimated what infants know at different ages One major criticism is that Piaget focused on the ways that infants learn through movement and ignored other ways in which they learn Piaget overestimated the importance of active mobile and tactile exploration and underestimated other sensory and organizational capacities of newborns and young infants Other research shows that object permanence and the capacity for mental representation of the physical world appear much earlier than Piaget proposed As early as 6 months infants can imitate a model s novel actions after a delay Developmental scientists now agree that Piaget seriously underestimated infants perceptual and cognitive capacities Infants competencies in understanding sequences on events means ends relations space causality and number are all evidence much earlier in development that Piaget predicted Grouping separate items into a set according to some rule Helps to simplify and order the infant s world in three ways Helps infant understand that items are still the same items in the dark as they are in the lights Infants does not have to remember every single aspect of every object facilitates the storage and retrieval of information Knowledge of an attribute of one member of a category provides information about other members of the same category and new information can be added to that category and automatically applied to other members of the category Evidence that infants categorize comes from habituation and novelty responsiveness Studies shows that categorization abilities progress during the first three years Categories function at different levels of inclusiveness Understanding whether and how infants use them tells us whether and how infants mentally represent information By 1 year infants show that they have a grasp of the most inclusive categories Recognize less inclusive categories at 18 months Can tell least inclusive categories at 3 years Memory representations underlie the infant s awareness experience knowledge and interpretation of the world Freud coined the term infantile amnesia to describe the phenomenon which attributed the repression of memories of traumatic events o Remembering o Playing Piaget also believed that memories may not be possible during the first year because infants don t have the capacity to encode information symbolically Infant memory has been studied using many techniques By habituating infants and testing them immediately afterward with the same stimulus we can study short term memory Imposing a delay between habituation and a later test allows us to assess long term memory Infants ability to remember clearly improves with age Deferred imitation reproducing a series of actions seen at n earlier time Study time also affects infant memory Piaget proposed that play increases in sophistication as children mature and that infants progress from exploratory play to symbolic play Exploratory play activities are tied to the tangible properties of objects primarily happens in the first year Symbolic play enacts activities performed by the self others and objects in pretend or make believe scenarios Play normally occurs in the context of social interaction Children may imitate play but adults influence its development by outfitting the play environment engaging children actively and responding to their overtures Infants play is more sophisticated complex and varied when interacting with their mothers than solitary play Infant Intelligence o Infant tests The Bayley Scale Nancy Bayley set out to measure mental and motor growth in infancy The Bayley Scales of Infant Development have become the most widely used assessments of infant development Today there are two scales A Mental Development Index A Psychomotor Development Index They assess motor sensation perception cognition memory language and social behavior Validity the degree to which a