1. Cognitive Development
In the First Two Years

2. Jean Piaget: Period of Sensorimotor Intelligence
Piaget (Swiss, ) believed that infants were smart, active learners
Also that they adapted to experience
Called infancy (birth to 24 months) the sensorimotor period because infants learn through their senses and motor skills
Period subdivided into 6 sub-stages

3. Stages 1 & 2: Primary circular reactions
The brain and senses interact involve the infant’s own body (birth to 1 month)
Sensation, perception and cognition cycle back and forth (Piaget’s circular reaction)
Stage 1: stage of reflexes--the reflexes of grasping, rooting, staring, listening--are adapted into deliberate actions
Sensation becomes perception

4. Stage 2 of Primary Circular Reactions: acquired adaptations
Accommodation and coordination of reflexes (1-4 months)
Example: sucking becomes adapted--infant sucks a pacifier differently than a nipple
This indicates thinking: the infant has figured out that the pacifier is something different than a bottle

5. Stages 3 & 4: Secondary Circular Reactions
Involve the infant’s responses to objects and people
Stage 3 (4-8 months) includes making interesting sights last: it is responding to people and objects, as in clapping hands when mother says “Patty-cake!”
Also includes responding to toys
The sight of something that delights the infant will trigger active efforts for interaction

6. Stage 4 of Secondary Circular Reactions
New adaptation and anticipation
Infant becomes more deliberate and purposeful in responding to people and objects
Example: putting other’s hands together in order to make her start playing patty-cake
Thinking is more innovative--babies are thinking about a goal and how to reach it

7. Goal-directed behavior is a big deal
This behavior stems from
1) an enhanced awareness of cause and effect
2) memory for actions already completed
3) understanding of other people’s intentions
This new awareness coincides with new motor skills that are needed to achieve goals

8. Object Permanence: Piaget thought babies attain this at 8 months
Object permanence refers to the awareness that objects or people continue to exist even if they cannot be seen, touched or heard
Probably occurs as early as 5 months, new research indicates it happens somewhere between 4 and 6 months

9. Stages 5 & 6: Tertiary Circular Reactions
Second year of life
Feedback loops involve active exploration of the environment and experimentation
“Little Scientists” in stage 5, (12-18 months) new means through active experimentation
Examples: putting a teddy bear in the toilet and flushing, or squeezing all the toothpaste out of the tube

10. Stage 6: New means through mental combinations (18-24 months)
Considering before doing provides the child with new ways of achieving a goal without resorting to trial-and-error experiments
This will hopefully involve remembering that flushing teddy down the toilet resulted in an overflowing toilet the last time it was tried

11. Stage 6:
Using mental combinations involves intellectual experimentation that supersedes active experimentation
Children can now combine 2 ideas: they know a doll is not a real baby, but also that the doll can be belted into a stroller and taken for a walk
They begin to think about consequences
They also can defer imitation (copy behavior they saw hours or days before)

12. Criticism of Piaget:
Piaget underestimated infant cognition, probably because he based his ideas on observations of his own children, not of many children from many cultures
Modern research includes “Habituation” or repeated exposure to get used to an object or event
Then sensitive physiologic measurements are used to record reactions
Using this, even 1-month-olds can be demonstrated to differentiate between sounds

13. More criticism:
The brain and its growth can now be measured by fMRI, which measures electrical activity in the brain that indicates firing of neurons
This has shown us that the brain has a huge amount of early growth, then trims off dendrites
Also shows that growth continues after the first 2 years
Piaget didn’t have this technology

14. Summing up Piaget:
Piaget discovered that infants are very active learners
Described this as Sensorimotor Period
Substages: Circular Reactions
Lacked modern technology
Also used a restricted sample that may have led him to place some behaviors later than is true with the majority

15. Information Processing Theory:
A perspective that compares human thinking processes, by analogy, to computer analysis of data, including sensory input, connections, stored memories, and output
Many versions of this theory
All share the belief that a step-by-step description of the mechanisms of thought adds insight to our understanding

16. How it works:
Human information processing begins with input picked up by the senses
It proceeds to brain reactions, connections, and stored memories
It concludes with some output
With the aid of technology, the information processing model has found impressive intellectual capabilities in infants, like a basic grasp of cause and effect by the middle of the first year

17. Affordances:
Opportunities for perception and interaction that are offered by a person, place, or environment
Which particular affordance is perceived and acted upon depends on 4 factors:
Sensory awareness
Immediate motivation
Current level of development
Past experience

18. Selective perception:
Example: consider a lemon, an opportunity (an affordance) for smelling, touching, tasting, viewing, throwing, squeezing, and biting
Further, each of these is an affordance for pleasure, pain, or some other emotional response
Which affordance is perceived and acted upon is dependent upon sensations, motives, age, and experience

19. How do they research this?
Mostly by looking at what infants attend to on a TV screen
Varies with age
Varies with novelty
Varies with experience
Even varies with vocabulary

20. Visual Cliff experiment:
Tested depth perception
An infant’s awareness was affected by experience, especially with falling

21. Movement: Dynamic Perception
Dynamic perception is perception that is primed to focus on movement and change
Babies pay close attention to things that move and to people
They also love to move: they grab, they scoot, they crawl, they walk
And they realize that motion changes what the world affords them

22. Dynamic Perception:
Almost any moving creature will get the attention of an infant, who will chase and grab at it
Even infants who are not mobile will try to catch a ball moving past them
Experience affect this: younger babies may ignore slow-moving balls, but attempt to catch fast ones unsuccessfully, 20% or less success
9-month-olds know to reach for the slow moving balls, with an almost 100% success rate

23. People Preference:
Another universal principle of infant perception is that they are innately attracted to other humans, evident in visual, auditory, tactile, and other preferences
In objects, infants prefer novelty
In people, infants prefer familiarity
They recognize their caregivers and expect certain affordances from them: comfort, food, entertainment)

24. More on people preference:
Infants can infer emotional affordances long before they understand language
They “get” and respond to smiles, shouts, facial expressions, and tones of voice very early in life
Studies indicate that 7-month-olds can reliably match facial expression and emotional tone of voice based on photos and tapes
And even younger infants can do this with people they know

25. Smiling and mommy and daddy:
In these experiments, infants did not match the facial expressions and emotional voice of strangers, but could do so for their moms/dads, reacting swiftly and correctly
The idea of researchers is that parents offer the affordance of JOY!

26. Memory:
Processing and remembering requires a certain amount of experience and brain maturation
Even with repetition, infants have difficulty storing memories in their first year
This is partly due to language deficits
But infants do form memories--especially if motivated and if reminded repeatedly
Experiments with mobiles and kicking indicate this

27. Reminders and Repetition:
Reminder session: a perceptual experience that is intended to help a person recollect an idea, a thing, or an experience, without testing whether the person remembers it at the moment
Research employing these sessions demonstrated that even 3-month-olds could remember actions that they learned 2 weeks previously

28. And it gets better:
After 6 months, infants can retain information with less training, repetition and reminding
By the end of the first year, many kinds of memory are apparent: deferred imitation by 9 months
By 18 months, infants can remember and repeat complex sequences
Toddlers action indicates conceptual thinking is present

29. Child-directed speech:
The high-pitched, simplified, and repetitive way adults speak to infants
Fosters early language development
By 7 months, infants begin to recognize words, but only words that are highly distinctive: bottle, dog, and mama are recognized before baby, Bobby, and Barbie
Within the first few months of life, hearing becomes more selective, too

30. What selective hearing means:
They prefer child-directed speech
They like alliterative sounds
They love songs--rhyme, rhythm, and repetition
And simple sounds more than complex sounds
Infants respond to sounds they like (by 4 months) with squealing, growling, gurgling, grunting, crooning, and yelling

31. Babbling:
The extended repetition of certain syllables, such as ba-ba-ba, that begins when babies are between 6 and 9 months old
Responses from other people encourage it
It stops in deaf babies because they cannot hear responses
Using sign language shows that babies can express language with gestures sooner than with speech

32. First words: Usually at about 1 year
Caregivers understand the baby’s words before strangers
In the first months of the second year of life, vocabulary understanding is about 10 times the number of words they can say
Holophrases: a single word spoken in such a way that expresses a complete, meaningful thought

34. Naming Explosion:
A sudden increase in an infant’s vocabulary, especially in the number of nouns, that begins at about 18 months of age
In almost every language, the name of each significant caregiver, sibling, and sometimes, pet, is learned between months of age
Once the vocabulary reaches 50 words, it builds at a rate of words per month
21 month olds say twice as many words as 18 month olds

35. Cultural differences:
Cultures and families vary a lot in how much child-directed speech children hear
Some are more verbal than others
Some cultures emphasize quiet children (not the US)
And languages vary: some are Verb-Friendly (verbs are placed before nouns) so infants learn as many verbs as nouns, unlike English

36. Social context matters, too
If social interaction is emphasized by the culture, verbs will be acquired as much as nouns
Example: Chinese toddlers learn more verbs than US toddlers, who learn more nouns
Ethnicities that speak the language of the country they have immigrated to have babies that learn language like the new culture

37. Concepts and Language:
Some concepts are easy, some are not
In English, infants confuse before and after
Dutch infants misuse out when it refers to taking off clothing
Learning adjectives is easier in Italian and Spanish than in English or French because of the patterns in those languages

38. Language: Conveys/encodes cultural values and social constructs
If a child is more referential than expressive, it likely reflects the cultures, values, and priorities of the parents

39. Putting words together:
Grammar: all the methods--word order, verb forms, etc.--that languages use to communicate meaning, apart from the words themselves
Grammar is obvious in 2-word sentences (baby cry, more juice), at about 21 months
Grammar will correlate with the size of the child’s vocabulary, reflecting a knowledge of clear communication
Learning more than one language can slow down language and grammar acquisition

40. Theories of Language Learning:
50 years ago, the first theory reflected behaviorism (learning theory) and said that children needed to be taught language, step by step, through reinforcement
This theory includes the ideas that parents/caregivers are expert teachers and help children speak
Frequent repetition is instructive
Well-taught infants become well-spoken children

41. Studies in Behavioral Theory:
Indicate great variation in how parents reinforce infants’ speech
The frequency of paternal response at 9 months predicted infants language many months later
Adults teach, infants learn language

42. Theory 2: Infants teach themselves
Noam Chomsky & followers believe that language is too complex to be learned through step-by-step conditioning
Believe that because infants all master basic grammar at about the same age, there is a human mental structure that all are born with that prepares them to incorporate aspects of language

43. Language Acquisition Device:
Chomsky’s term for a hypothesized mental structure that enables humans to learn language, including the basic aspects of grammar, vocabulary, and intonation
Enables children worldwide to derive the rules of grammar from the speech they hear everyday (whether English, Tamil, Urdu, Chinese, or Xhosa)

44. This theory is accepted by many:
Reflects the differences without ignoring language characteristics
Reflects the fact that all languages are logical, coherent and systematic
Believes that the brain expects language, and quickly and efficiently connects neurons to support whatever words an infant hears
Works even with deaf infants who are taught signs

45. Third Theory: Social impulses foster infant language learning
Social-Pragmatic theory: says that neither behaviorism nor epigentic theory is correct--says that communication, the social reason for learning language, is most important
Infants communicate because they are social beings dependent upon each other for survival, well-being, and joy

46. Social newborn: Newborns seek out human faces
By 9 months, infants’ brain patterns indicate attention when they hear people talk to them
The emotional content, not the words, are most important in early communication
Communication is the servant of social interaction

47. Social toddler: Social impulses propel toddler language acquisition
Toddlers learn language much more quickly from human interaction than from television, even though they watch TV
Thus social language acquisition is more meaningful than simply learning words

48. Hybrid theory: All three perspectives have merit
Some of each theory has been demonstrated to work
The important thing is that children are active learners, and that multiple factors are involved in learning language