Module 13

Cognitive Development of Infants and Toddlers

Learning Outcomes

In this module, you are challenge to:

 Trace the cognitive development of infants and toddlers.
 Identify factors that enhance / impede the cognitive development of infants and
toddlers
 Present your own or others’ research on the cognitive development of infants
and toddlers
 Draw implications of cognitive development concepts to childcare, education,
and parenting.

Cognitive Development in Infancy

- development in the way a baby thinks
- includes his/her language, communication and
exploration skills
Sensorimotor Stage – the 1st of the 4 stages of
cognitive development
- Infants construct an understanding of the world
by coordinating sensory experiences (such as
seeing and hearing) with physical, motoric actions
- Infants gain knowledge of the world from the
physical actions they perform on it.

6 Substages of the Sensorimotor Developmental

Stage (Santrock, 2002)
1) Simple Reflexes
2) First habits and primary circular reactions phase
3) Secondary circular reactions phase
4) Coordination of reactions stage secondary circular
5) Tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and curiosity
6) Internalization of Schemes (Invention of New Means Through Mental Combination)

 Its analysis shows that development begins from reflexive behaviors to more refined
and more coordinated activities.
 Cognitive development of infants evolves in orientation from:
o Becoming focused on themselves to becoming object or world-oriented
o One that us action-based to one that is mentally-based

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 o One that does not involve much of coordination of schemes to one involving
intentionality, novelty, and curiosity
o A thinking that is purely sensorimotor to a symbolic one
 Piaget’s substages are termed circular because the adaptive behavior to the world
involves repeated actions.
o Circular reactions – attempts to repeat an event that the baby likes; serve as
the building blocks for intelligence
o Primary circular reactions – oriented towards the infant’s own body
o Secondary circular reactions – aimed toward the environment including
others
 Are repetitive actions that involve recreating events which 4-10 months
old babies observe outside of their own bodies
o Tertiary circular reactions – seen from approx. 10-18 months; seen when a
baby does things over and over again, just a little differently each time
 Babies are born pattern seekers.
 Object Permanence – the understanding that objects continue to exist even when the
objects are not immediately perceptible through the senses

Learning and Remembering

Infantile amnesia – the inability to recall events that happened when we were very
young

Language Development
Stages in Producing Language:
1. Cooing – comprises largely vowel sounds
2. Babbling – comprises consonant as well as vowel
sounds; to most people’s ears, the babbling of
infants growing up among speakers from different
language groups sounds very familiar
3. One-word utterances – are limited in both the
vowels and the consonants they utilize
4. Two-word utterances and telegraphic speech
5. Basic adult sentence structure with
continuing vocabulary acquisition
Holophrases – one-word utterances; used to convey
intentions, desires and demands.

Overextension error

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 - the child overextends the meaning of words in his/her existing lexicon to cover
things and ideas for which a new word is lacking because the young child’s
vocabulary is very limited at the point in the development process

Telegraphic speech
- combination of single words to produce two-word utterances
- the 2-3-word utterances with rudimentary syntax but with articles and prepositions
missing

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

- a metaphorical organ that is responsible for language learning
- preprogrammed to learn language, whatever the language community children find
themselves in

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