Chapter Six
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN
INFANCY
Piaget’s Approach to Cognitive
Development
Piaget
• Knowledge is the product of direct motor
behavior
• Knowledge not acquired from facts
communicated by others or through sensation
and perception
Key Elements of Piaget’s Theory
• Piaget assumed that all children pass through
a series of four universal stages in a fixed
order from birth through adolescence:
sensorimotor
preoperational
concrete
operational
formal
operational
Key Elements of Piaget’s Theory
Assimilation: The process in which people
understand an experience in terms of their current
stage of cognitive development and way of thinking
Accommodation: Changes in existing ways of
thinking that occur in response to encounters with
new stimuli or events
Piaget’s Six Substages of the
Sensorimotor Stage
Substage 1: Simple Reflexes
Inborn reflexes
• create center of a baby’s physical and
cognitive life
• determine nature of his or her interactions
with the world
Developing reflexes
• Some of reflexes begin to accommodate
infant’s experience
Substage 2: First Habits and Primary
Circular Reactions
• Infants begin to coordinate separate actions
into single, integrated activities focused on
their own body
• If an activity engages a baby’s interests,
infant may repeat it, simply for the sake of
continuing to experience it
Substage 3: Secondary Circular
Reactions
• Infants begin to act upon outside world
• Infant’s activity involves actions relating to
the world outside
Substage 4: Coordination of Secondary
Circular Reactions
• Infants begin to employ goal-directed
behavior and repeat enjoyable activities
• Several schemes are combined and
coordinated to generate a single act
Object permanence: The realization that
people and objects exist even when they
cannot be seen
Substage 5: Tertiary
Circular Reactions
• Infants develop schemes regarding deliberate
variation of actions that bring desirable
consequences.
• Infants carry out miniature experiments to
observe the consequences
Substage 6:
Beginnings of Thought
• The major achievement of Substage 6 is the
capacity for mental representation, or
symbolic thought.
Mental representation: An internal image of a
past event or object
Deferred imitation: An act in which a person
who is no longer present is imitated by children
Appraising Piaget:
Support and Challenges
• Most developmental researchers would
probably agree that in many significant ways,
Piaget’s descriptions of how cognitive
development proceeds during infancy are
quite accurate.
• Yet, there is substantial disagreement over
the validity of the theory and many of its
specific predictions.
What Do You Think?
• In general, what are some implications for
child-rearing practices according to Piaget’s
observations about the ways children gain an
understanding of the world?
• Would you use the same child-rearing
approaches for a child growing up in a nonWestern culture?
• Why or why not?
Information-Processing Approaches to
Cognitive Development
Information-processing approaches: The
model that seeks to identify the way that
individuals take in, use, and store information
• Cognitive growth is characterized by
increasing sophistication, speed, and
capacity in information processing.
Encoding, Storage, and Retrieval: The
Foundations of Information Processing
Information processing has three basic
aspects:
• Encoding is the process by which information is
initially recorded in a form usable to memory.
• Storage refers to the placement of material into
memory.
• Retrieval is the process by which material in
memory storage is located, brought into
awareness, and used.
Automatization
Automatization: the degree to which an
activity requires attention.
• Infants and children develop an understanding
of concepts, categorizations of objects, events,
or people that share common properties.
Memory Capabilities
in Infancy
Memory: The process by which information
is initially recorded, stored, and retrieved
• Infants can distinguish new stimuli from old
stimuli, and this implies that some memory of
the old must be present.
The Duration of Memories
Infantile amnesia: The lack of memory for
experiences that occurred prior to 3 years of age
• Early research on infantile amnesia
• More recent research shows that infants do
have memory retention
The question of how well memories formed
during infancy are retained in adulthood
remains not fully answered.
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory
• Explicit memory is conscious memory that can
be recalled intentionally.
• Implicit memory is memory that is recalled
unconsciously.
• Explicit and implicit memory emerge at different
rates and involve different parts of the brain.
Individual Differences in Intelligence: Is
One Infant Smarter Than Another?
Although it is clear that different infants show
significant variations in their behavior, the issue
of just what types of behavior may be related to
cognitive ability is complicated.
What Is Infant Intelligence?
• Developmental experts do not agree on a
general definition of intelligent behavior, even
among adults
• Several approaches devised to investigate
nature of individual differences in infant
intelligence
Approaches Used to Detect Differences in
Intelligence
Developmental Scales
Developmental quotient: An overall developmental score that
relates to performance in four domains: motor skills, language
use, adaptive behavior, and personal–social behavior
Bayley Scales of Infant Development: A measure that
evaluates an infant’s development from 2 to 42 months (Table
6-3)
Sample Items from the Bayley Scales
What Do You Think?
• In what ways is the use of such
developmental scales as Gesell’s or Bayley’s
helpful? In what ways is it dangerous?
• How would you maximize the helpfulness and
minimize the danger if you were advising a
parent?
Information-Processing Approaches to
Individual Differences in Infant Intelligence
Contemporary Approaches
• Suggest that infant information processing
speed may correlate most strongly with later
intelligence
Assessing Approaches
Piagetian and Information-Processing
• Approaches are critical in providing account
of infant cognitive development
• Advances in biochemistry of the brain and
theories that consider the effects of social
factors on learning and cognition, the two
help paint full picture of cognitive
development
Why Formal Education Is Lost on Infants
• Do you think that purchasing educational toys
and media for infants is worth a try, despite the
lack of scientific research supporting its use?
Why?
• Under what conditions might its use actually have
undesirable consequences?
• Why do you think parents generally do not seem
to be concerned about the lack of scientific
evidence for the effectiveness of educational toys
and media for infants?
The Roots of Language: From Sounds to
Symbols
Language: The systematic, meaningful arrangement of
symbols, which provides the basis for communication
• Language has several formal characteristics that
must be mastered as linguistic competence is
developed. They include:
Early Sounds and Communication
Prelinguistic communication: communication
through sounds, facial expressions, gestures,
imitation, and other nonlinguistic means.
Babbling: Making speechlike but meaningless
sounds
First Words
• Timing of first words
• Effects of culture
Holophrases: One-word utterances that stand
for a whole phrase, whose meaning depends on
the particular context in which they are used
First Words
First Sentences
• Timing of infant vocabulary development
• Sentence development
Telegraphic speech: Speech in which words
not critical to the message are left out
Children’s Imitation of Sentences
Use of Words and Language
Underextension: The overly restrictive use of words,
common among children just mastering spoken
language
Overextension: The overly broad use of words,
overgeneralizing their meaning
Use of Words and Language
Referential style: A style of language use in which
language is used primarily to label objects
Expressive style: A style of language use in which
language is used primarily to express feelings and
needs about oneself and others
Learning Theory Approaches: Language
as a Learned Skill
Learning theory approach: The theory
that language acquisition follows the basic
laws of reinforcement and conditioning
• Approach does not adequately explain how
children acquire the rules of language as
readily as they do.
Nativist Approaches: Language as an
Innate Skill
• Difficulties with the learning theory approach
have led to the development of an alternative,
championed by the linguist Noam Chomsky
and known as the nativist approach.
Nativist approach: The theory that a
genetically determined, innate mechanism
directs language development
Nativist Approaches: Language as an
Innate Skill
Universal grammar: Chomsky’s theory that all the
world’s languages share a similar underlying
structure
Language-acquisition device (LAD): A neural
system of the brain hypothesized to permit
understanding of language
The Interactionist Approaches
Interactionist Perspective
• Suggests that language development is
produced through combination of genetically
determined predispositions and environmental
circumstances that help teach language
Infant-Directed Speech
Infant-directed speech: A type of speech
directed toward infants, characterized by
short, simple sentences
• Characterized by short, simple sentences,
infant-directed speech plays an important role
in infants’ acquisition of language.
Features of Infant-Directed Speech
What Do You Think?
• What are some implications of differences in
the ways adults speak to boys and girls?
• How might such speech differences
contribute to later differences not only in
speech, but also in attitudes?
Looking Back
• What are the fundamental features of
Piaget’s theories of cognitive development?
Looking Back
• How do infants process information?
• How is infant intelligence measured?
Looking Back
• By what processes do children learn to use
language?
• How do children influence adults’ language?