Summary chapters 5, 6, Development through the lifespan

Chapter 5, Cognitive development in infancy and toddlerhood

This chapter describes three theories: Piaget’s cognitive-developmental theory, information processing,
Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, and different tests to measure babies' intelligence and some basics
about language appearance in babies’ worlds.

Jean Piaget was a Swiss scientist who believed that babies are “motivated explorers” whose intelligence
develops as they act directly with the world around them. In this chapter, the part of Piaget’s theory is
about the sensorimotor stage, which covers the first two years of life. His theory build around four
phases of psychological structure, also known as schemes. Schemes are account for changes through
adaptation, which helps to build schemes through direct interaction with the environment and consists
of 2 complementary activities: assimilation (usage of current schemes to interpret the external world)
and accommodation (adjusting or changing schemes to explore even more world); and organization,
internal process of connecting schemes among each other to create interconnected solid cognitive
system.

The sensorimotor stage occurs during the first two years of life and is divided into six substages. Firstly,
babies use circular reaction, which helps them adapt their first schemes and connect with strengthening
motor activity until it becomes a flexible action pattern. During the 4th substage, around 8-12-month-
old babies can engage in intentional/goal-oriented behavior by operating schemes to solve different
problems. They also begin to master object performance, understanding the existence even of the
hidden object. Finally, with the 6th substage, they can create mental representations - internal
depictions of the information that the mind can manipulate, and the most useful are images and
concepts.

Nevertheless, some of the newest research showed that babies gain certain understandings earlier than
stated in Piaget's theory. For example, scientists proved that infants could react to unexpected events,
as displayed in the violation-of-expectation method. Also, object-tracking research showed that babies
could track objects earlier than Piaget thought. Furthermore, by the age of 10-12 months, kids can solve
problems involving thinking by analogy. By age 1, kids understand some words that don't stand for
physically present objects or placed reference. By the age of 2, toddlers can treat pictures symbolically,
but only if the pictures are accurate. Around two-year-old babies can get puzzled by videos, but by the
age of 2.5 years, the video deficit effect declines. Other studies showed that newborns have their on-
built tools to observe the world. Hence, the theory of core knowledge perspective arouses, pointing out
that infants are already born with some core domains of knowledge that supports their rapid growth.
And also, a lot of scientists believe that development continues and doesn't get divided into stages.

On the other hand, information-processing researchers agreed with Paige that kids are active, inquiring
beings. Still, they focused on many different aspects rather than building up just on theory. Firstly they
focus on the general model of information processing, which states that there are three parts of the
mental processing system: the sensory register, the short-term memory store, and long-term memory.
Then the central executive joins working memory to manage cognitive thinking activities and process
the information. The better is joining of these two, the more automatically we can use them. And the
more effectively we process data in working memory, the more likely it will transfer to long-term
memory. Also, as working memory gains more capacity and more processing speed are involved, the
executive function develops, making diverse cognitive operations and strategies to achieve goals in
cognitively challenging situations.
 Talking about babies' attention, firstly, it's more focused on novelty but growing more they can attend
more aspects of the world around them and procced information quickly and in the 2nd year sustained
attention is getting better than attention to novelties. Young infants also can operate recognition and
recall information that isn't present anymore. During their 2nd year, babies expand the number of
categories and categorize objects more freely, and then they shift from a perceptual to a conceptual
basis of classifying.

Overall, the information-processing theory questions the statements of Piage about infants being only
in sensorimotor stages, but still, the information-processing theory failed to provide a broad
understanding of babies' thinking.

Another theory is the sociocultural theory of Vygotsky, which states that children live in rich social and
cultural aspects which affect the structure of their cognitive world. For example, he believed that babies
advance tasks within their proximal development zone, which means lessons that babies can't tackle
alone but can do with parents or other adults. And as early as 1-year cultural differences play an
essential role in the variety of mental strategies.

Talking about some differences among different babies, it's impossible to predict their intelligence in
the future, so there are some tests called developmental quotients, not IQ tests. And the speed of
habituation and recovery to visual stimuli are better predictors of performance in the future.

That's not a secret that the influence of early mental development, organized, stimulating home
environment, parental affection, how and for how much they talk to their children, encouragement, and
involvement predict higher scores on intelligence tests in the future. Of course, the quality of children's
care plays a huge role in future cognitive, academic, language, and social skills. High quality can prevent
the gradual declines in intelligence and academic performance in the case of poverty-stricken children.

Improvements in the perception and cognition of babies lead to another human achievement -
language. Different theories exist around this. Noam Chomsky (1957), with his nativist theory, proposed
that all children have a language acquisition device, an innate system with universal grammar, which
enables children to understand and speak their mother's harsh as soon as they know enough words. The
other idea, the interactionist perspective, emphasizes interaction between inner capacities and
environmental influences. Some of the scientists of this idea stick more to the information-processing
theory, through which kids make sense of their complex language environments by applying powerful
cognitive capacities of a general kind. Others blend information-processing theory with a nativist
perspective and agree that infants can well analyze speech and other information. However, still, they
don't have enough skills to acquire intricate grammatical structures.

Talking about direct language development, infants begin their speech development around two
months when they start cooing, and then they proceed to babble around six months. Also, babies stick
to joint attention, paying attention to the same things that the caregiver does. Also, adults can help kids
master language by responding to kids' coos and babbles, playing turn-taking games, and labeling
objects and babies' preverbal gestures. Around 12 months, kids may say their first word. But they also
might make mistakes like underextension and overextension, when they either apply one word only to
one object and not to similar ones, or vice-versa, by applying one word to subjects from one category.
When kids reach 200-250 words, they begin to use 2-word utterances, known as telegraphic speech.
Cultural and individual differences can also influence the development of speech in babies. Different
factors like the reaches of caregiver vocabulary, social norms, temperant, gender, amount of parent-
child conversations, reading of books, etc. Adults can help kids to develop language by speakings in the
way of infant-direct speech, which is a simplified form of communication well-suited for babies. We can
make different predictions on early language development and reading success in schools by the
amount and quality of parent-toddler conversation.