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Cognitive Development During Infancy
The cognitive development that occurs during infancy is one of the most vital stages of
development one will experience throughout one’s entire lifetime. Infants perceive the world in
a way that is very different from the way someone is experiencing Adulthood or even the
Adolescence development stage. Infants create schemes through their real-life experiences, such
as learning what a person’s face looks like by looking at it; they can begin to familiarize
themselves with how a person should sound by listening to their voices; they learn what a
blanket feels like by being wrapped in one. Each event an infant experiences sends information
that is critical to their cognitive development, resulting in the most growth that one will go
through during their life (George, 2023)
As babies grow older and their ability to explore and experience their world, they begin
to develop personalities as they learn what their interests are by repeating the enjoyable things
and by avoiding situations that they thought were unpleasant. They learn cause and effect by
repeating an action while subconsciously noting the results of each action. Slowly, they begin to
understand that everything they do has a consequence and that sometimes those consequences
are positive, and sometimes they are negative. However, a young infant cannot be aware of the
existence of an object while being unable to see it, meaning that whenever an object leaves their
line of sight than it will become irrelevant to them until they can see it again, then they will recall
the things they learned before it leaving their line of sight.
Due to Babies being unable to learn everything on their own, people in the later stages of
life must help teach them how to do the things that would otherwise be unlearnable.
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To teach them cause and effect, an infant will require outside help to make the consequences
clearer to them; for example, having them knock down a block tower shows them that when you
push something it causes it to move. In order to help them with making connections between
similar objects as well as differentiating them, one can show them several variants of the same
thing so that they can recognize it easier. Playing a peek-a-boo by covering your face and then
revealing it afterward shows them that even though they are unable to see something does not
mean it was never there in the first place.
