The First Two Years: Cognitive Development
cognition = “thinking”
• “thinking” in a very broad sense includes…
– language
– learning
– memory
– intelligence
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Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
Senori-motor Stage (0 – 24 months)
Infants learn through senses and motor actions
Sensorimotor period is subdivided into 6 stages
Primary Circular Reactions
» Stage 1 – Reflexes
» Stage 2 – First Acquired Adaptations
Secondary Circular Reactions
» Stage 3 – An awareness of Things
» Stage 4 – New Adaptation and Anticipation
Tertiary Circular Reactions
» Stage 5 – New means through active experimentation
» Stage 6 – New means through mental combinations
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Piaget and Research Methods
• Piaget’s sensorimotor intelligence actually occurs
earlier for most infants than Piaget predicted.
– Piaget used observation to make his conclusions
– More extensive experimental methods have determined that he
was not always correct. This technology was not available to
Piaget.
– Habituation, the process of getting used to (i.e., bored with) a
stimulus after repeated exposure. An infant can show this by
looking away.
– If a new object appears and the infant reacts (change in heart rate,
sucking), it is assumed they recognize the object as something
different.
– fMRI also indicate that information is being noticed and processed
by infants at an earlier age than believed.
– Thinking develops before motor skills can execute thought.
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Information Processing Theory
• a perspective that compares human
thinking processes to computer analysis
of data
– including sensory input
– connections
– stored memories
– output
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Information Processing Theory
perception = the mental processing of
information that arrives at the brain from the
sensory organs
= the 1st step of information processing
Two people can have very different perceptions
of the same situation (actually observe it
differently)
Eleanor and James Gibbs – perception is far
from automatic, it is a cognitive
accomplishment that requires selectivity.
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Information Processing Theory
• The environment offers or affords many
opportunities for perception and for interaction with
what is perceived.
• Affordances = these opportunities for action
provided by the environment
• We do not perceive things we perceive how we
can interact with them
• Depends on four factors:
– sensory awareness
– immediate needs and motivation
– current developmental level
– past experiences
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Information Processing Theory
• Research on Early Affordance
– Information processing improves over the
first year infants become quicker to
recognize affordances
– Experiences affect which affordances are
perceived
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Information Processing Theory
• Sudden Drops
visual cliff = an apparatus to measure depth
perception (further study has found that not
crossing the visual cliff is not completely about
depth perception)
– Mothers could encourage 6 month olds to wiggle
across the visual cliff.
– Once kids can crawl they realize that crawling
over the visual cliff affords falling.
– the cliff “affords” danger for older infants who have
had experience with falling – they would not cross
the visual cliff.
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Information Processing Theory
• Movement and People
– All infants have:
• dynamic perception
– primed to focus on movement and change
• a people preference
– a universal principle of infant perception,
consisting of an innate attraction to other
humans, which is evident in visual, auditory,
tactile, and other preferences
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Information Processing Theory
• Memory
– Developmentalists now agree that even
very young infants can remember under
the following circumstances:
• experimental conditions are similar to
“real life”
• motivation is high
• special measures are taken to aid
memory retrieval
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Information Processing Theory
• Reminders and Repetition
– reminder sessions
• 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
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Information Processing Theory
– after about 6 months infants can retain
information for longer periods of time…
with less training or reminding
– Around 1 many kinds of memory is
apparent (ex. deferred imitation)
– by the middle of the 2nd year toddlers
can remember and reenact more
complex sequences
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Information Processing Theory
– Memory is not one “thing”
• brain-imaging techniques reveal many
distinct brain regions devoted to
particular aspects of memory
– implicit memory is memory for routines
and memories that remain hidden until
particular stimulus bring them to mind
– explicit memory is memory that can be
recalled on demand
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Language: What Develops
in the First Two Years?
• Language = the most impressive human
accomplishment
• The Universal Sequence
– Around the world children follow the
same sequence of early language
development
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Language
• Listening and Responding
• infants begin learning language before birth
• infants prefer speech over other sounds
– child-directed speech
• the high-pitched, simplified, and repetitive
way adults speak to infants
Newborns
2 month olds
3 – 6 month olds
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Language
• Babbling (6 – 10 mos.)
– repeating certain syllables (e.g., da-dada).
• all babies babble, even deaf babies
(although later and less frequently).
• babbling is a way to communicate.
Babies also use hand gestures
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Language
• First Words
– usually around 1 year the average baby
speaks, or signs a few words
• they are often familiar nouns
– by 13 months spoken language increases very
gradually
– 6 to 15 month-olds learn meaning rapidly and
comprehend about 10 times as many words
as they speak
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Language
• The Naming Explosion
– a sudden increase in an infant’s
vocabulary, especially in the number of
nouns begins at about 18 months
– Once vocabulary reaches about 50
expressed words it continues to build
rapidly at a rate of 50 to 100 per month,
21 month-olds saying twice as many as
18 month-olds
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Language
• Cultural Differences
– the ratio of nouns to verbs and adjectives
show cultural influences.
– one explanation is the language itself
– another explanation is social context (toys
and objects)
– every language has some concepts encoded
in adult speech that are very hard for infants
to understand
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Language
• Beginning Sentences
“Dada!” “Dada?” and “Dada.”
– each is a holophrase, a single word that expresses a
complete, meaningful thought.
– intonations varying in tone and pitch is extensive in
babbling and again in holophrases at about 18 months
– Are communicating with others
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Language
• grammar--all the methods that languages use to
communicate meaning. Word order, prefixes,
intonation, verb forms,… are all aspects of grammar.
• Obvious when 2 word communication begins
• Grammar correlates with the size of the vocabulary.
• Comprehension correlates with vocabulary and
grammar.
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Language
• Theories of Language Learning
– There are 3 theories of how infants
learn language:
• they are taught (view of B. F. Skinner)
• they teach themselves (view of Noam
Chomsky)
• social impulses foster learning
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Language
• Theory One: Infants Need to Be Taught
– Approximately 50 years ago the dominant learning theory in
North America was behaviorism
– B. F. Skinner (1957) noticed that spontaneous babbling is
usually reinforced… a grinning mother appears, repeating,
praising, giving attention to the infant
– Parents are expert teachers, other caregivers help
– Frequent repetitions is instructive when linked to daily life
– Well-taught infants become well-spoken children
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Language
• Theory Two: Infants Teach Themselves
– a contrary theory is that language learning is
innate--adults need not teach it
– Norm Chomsky (1968,1980) felt that
language is too complex to be mastered
merely through step-by-step conditioning
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Language
• Theory Two: Infants Teach Themselves
– universal grammar--all young children master basic
grammar at about the same age
– Universal grammar = evidence that humans are born
with a mental structure that prepares them to seek
some elements of human languages
– Language acquisition device (LAD)
• a term used for a hypothesized mental structure that
enables humans to learn language, including the
basic aspects of grammar, vocabulary and intonation
from the speech they hear every day.
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Language
• Theory Three: Social Impulses Foster Infant
Language
– a third theory called social-pragmatic perceives the
crucial starting point to be neither vocabulary
reinforcement (behaviorism) nor innate connection
(epigenetic), but rather the social reason for
language; communication
– Infants communicate in every way they can because
humans are social beings and depend on one
another for survival and joy
– Language is acquired as a by-product of social
interactions with adults.
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Language
• A Hybrid Theory
– the integration of all three perspectives… notably in
a monograph based on 12 experiments designed
by 8 researchers
– their model an emergentist coalition… combing
valid aspects of several theories about the
emergence of language during infancy
– Children learn language to do numerous tasks.
– Some aspects of language are best learned one
way and some another.
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