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BergerCA8e_lecCh6.pptKathleen Stassen Berger
Part II
The First Two Years: Cognitive Development
Chapter Six
- Sensorimotor Intelligence
- Information Processing
- Language: What Develops in the
First Two Years?
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Sensorimotor Intelligence
- sensorimotor intelligence: Piaget’s term for the way infants think by using their senses and motor skills during the first period of cognitive development.
- Jean Piaget described four distinct periods of cognitive development.
- First stage begins at birth and ends at about 24 months.
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Stages One and Two: Primary Circular Reactions
- primary circular reactions: first of three types of feedback loops in sensorimotor intelligence
- The infant senses and tries to understand:
- motion
- sucking
- noise
- other stimuli
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- stage one: stage of reflexes lasts only a month.
- As reflexes adjust, the baby enters stage two, first acquired adaptations.
- first habits
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Stages Three and Four: Secondary Circular Reaction
- secondary circular reactions: Babies respond to:
- other people
- toys
- any other object they can touch or move
- stage three: (age 4 to 8 months)
- Infants attempt to produce exciting experiences, making interesting events last.
- Rattles make noise
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- stage four: (age 8 months to 1 year) called new adaptation and anticipation, babies think about a goal and how to reach it
- goal-directed behavior: purposeful action
- enhanced awareness of cause and effect
- memory for actions already completed
- understanding of other people’s intentions
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Object Permanence
- Object permanence: realization that objects (including people) still exist when they can no longer be seen, touched, or heard.
- 8 months of age
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Stages Five and Six: Tertiary Circular Reactions
- tertiary circular reaction–third type of feedback loops in sensorimotor intelligence
- active exploration
- Experimentation
Stage five: new means through active experimentation
- “little scientist”: Piaget’s term for the stage-five toddler who experiments using trial and error in active and creative exploration.
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Stages Five and Six: Tertiary Circular Reactions
- stage six:18 to 24 months toddlers begin to anticipate and solve simple problems by using mental combinations
- deferred imitation: stage six accomplishment in which an infant first perceives something that someone else does and then performs the same action a few hours or even days later
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Piaget and Modern Research
- Infants reach the various stages of sensorimotor intelligence earlier than Piaget predicted.
- when studying infants, always problems with fidelity and credibility
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- habituation: process of getting used to (aka bored with) object or event through repeated exposure
- Using habituation as a research strategy involves repeating one stimulus until babies lose interest, and then presenting another, slightly different stimulus.
Boredom as a Research Method
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- Techniques to measure brain activity have proven that babies are thinking long before they talk.
- fMRI: functional magnetic resonance imaging, a measuring technique in which the brain’s electrical excitement indicates activation anywhere in the brain
Measuring the Brain
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Information Processing
- Piaget was a “grand” theorist
- overview contrasts with the information-processing theory
- information-processing theory: perspective that compares human thinking processes to computer analysis of data, including:
- sensory input
- connections
- stored memories
- output
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- perception: mental processing of information that arrives at the brain from the sensory organs
- affordance: opportunity for perception and interaction offered by a person, place, or object in the environment
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Affordances
- selective perception: a person’s age affects what affordance he or she sees.
- research on early affordances: As information processing improves over the first year, infants become quicker to recognize affordances.
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- visual cliff: experimental apparatus that gives an illusion of a sudden dropoff between one horizontal surface and another
- depth perception: once thought that a visual deficit prevented young babies from seeing the drop
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Movement & People
- Babies pay more attention to things that move and to people.
- Dynamic perception: perception that is primed to focus on movement and change
- people preference: universal principle of infant perception, consisting of an innate attraction to other humans
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Memory
- Processing and remembering events requires a certain amount of experience and brain maturation.
- Memories are particularly evident when:
- experimental conditions similar to real life.
- motivation is high.
- retrieval strengthened by reminders and repetition.
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- Rovee-Collier experiment demonstrated that 3-month-old infants could remember after two-weeks if they had a brief reminder session before being retested.
- Reminder session: perceptual experience intended to help a person recollect an idea, a thing, or an experience, without testing
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Language: What Develops in the First Two Years?
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The Universal Sequence
- Timing of language acquisition varies.
- Most advanced 10% of 2-year-olds speak more than 550 words.
- Least advanced 10% speak fewer than 100 words.
- Although timing varies, sequence is the same worldwide.
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Listening and Responding
- Infants begin learning language before birth.
- Newborns look closely at facial expressions and prefer to hear speech over other sounds.
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- adults talk to babies with:
- higher pitches
- simpler words
- repetition
- exaggerated tone
- varied speed
- called:
- baby talk
- motherese
- Scientific term: child-directed speech
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- At between 6 and 9 months, babies begin to repeat certain syllables.
- babbling: extended repetition of certain syllables
- ba-ba-ba, da-da-da
Babbling
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- holophrase: single word that expresses a complete, meaningful thought
- naming explosion: sudden increase in an infant’s vocabulary
First Words
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- Culture and families vary a great deal in how much child-directed speech children hear.
- The idea that children should be “seen and not heard” is contrary to the emphasis on communication in many U.S. families.
Cultural Differences
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- Children can master two languages, but the crucial variable is how much speech in both languages the child hears.
- Sometimes hearing two languages slows down grammar.
- takes longer to understand how words should be combined
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- Worldwide, people younger than 2 already use language well.
- Three schools of thought:
- behaviorism
- epigenetic theory
- sociocultural theory
Theories of Language Learning
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- Behaviorism or Learning Theory.
- Skinner saw that spontaneous babbling usually reinforced by mother:
- repeating.
- praising.
- giving attention to the infant.
- parents are expert teachers
- other caregivers help
- Well-taught infants become well-spoken children.
Theory One: Language Needs to Be Taught
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- Epigenetic Theory-Noam Chomsky
- language too complex to be mastered merely through step-by-step conditioning.
- universal grammar:
- all young children master basic language at about the same age
- language acquisition device (LAD): term used for a hypothesized mental structure that enables humans to learn language.
- includes basic aspects of grammar, vocabulary, and intonation
Theory Two: Infants Teach Themselves
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- Sociocultural theory
- social-pragmatic:
- neither vocabulary reinforcement (behaviorism)
- nor innate connection (epigenetic)
- social reason for language: communication
- Infants communicate in every way they can because humans are social beings, dependent on one another for survival and joy.
Theory Three: Social Impulses Foster Infant Language
