CHAPTER 5

Cognitive
Development in
Infancy
 Chapter Outline
• Piaget’s theory of infant development
• Learning, remembering, and conceptualizing
• Individual differences and assessment
• Language development

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 Piaget’s Theory of Infant Development
• Cognitive processes
• The sensorimotor stage
• Evaluating Piaget’s sensorimotor stage

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 Cognitive Processes
• Schemes: Actions or mental representations
that organize knowledge
– Behavioral scheme
– Mental scheme
• Assimilation: Using existing schemes to deal
with new information or experiences
• Accommodation: Adjusting schemes to fit new
information and experiences

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 Cognitive Processes
• Organization: Grouping of isolated behaviors
and thoughts into a higher-order system
• Equilibration and stages of development
– Equilibration: Mechanism by which children shift
from one stage of thought to the next
– Individuals go through four stages of development
• Cognition is qualitatively different from one stage to
another

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 The Sensorimotor Stage
• Lasts from birth to about 2 years of age
– Construct an understanding of the world by
coordinating sensory experiences
– Substages
• Simple reflexes
• First habits and primary circular reactions
• Secondary circular reactions
• Coordination of secondary circular reactions
• Tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and curiosity
• Internalization of schemes

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 Piaget’s Six Substages of
Sensorimotor Development

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 The Sensorimotor
Stage
• Object permanence:
Understanding that objects
and events continue to
exist:
• When they cannot directly
be seen, heard, or
touched

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 Evaluating Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage
• A-not-B error: Occurs when infants make the
mistake of selecting the familiar hiding place
(A) rather than the new hiding place (B)
– As they progress into substage 4 in Piaget’s
sensorimotor stage
• Perceptual development and expectations
• The nature-nurture issue
– Core knowledge approach: Infants are born with
domain-specific innate knowledge systems
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 Evaluating Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage
• Conclusions
• Piaget thought to not be specific enough
• Infant cognition has become extremely specialized
• Currently trying to understand how
developmental changes in cognition take place,
examine the big issue for nature and nurture, and
to study the brain’s role in cognitive development

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 Learning, Remembering, and
Conceptualizing
• Conditioning
• Attention
• Memory
• Imitation
• Concept formation and categorization

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 Conditioning
• Operant conditioning
• Information retention
• Attention: Focusing of mental resources on
select information
– Orienting/investigative process
– Sustained attention

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 Conditioning
• Habituation - Decreased responsiveness to a stimulus
after repeated presentations of the stimulus
• Dishabituation - Increase in responsiveness after a
change in stimulation
• Joint attention: requires:
– Ability to track another’s behavior
– One person’s directing another’s attention
– Reciprocal interaction

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 Gaze Following in Infancy

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Memory
• Retention of
information over time
• Implicit memory:
Without conscious
recollection
• Memories of skills and
routine procedures that
are performed
automatically
• Explicit memory:
Conscious
remembering of facts
and experiences
• Childhood amnesia

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 Imitation
• Involve flexibility and adaptability
• Deferred imitation: Occurs after a delay of
hours or days

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Concept Formation
and Categorization
• Concepts: Cognitive groupings
of similar objects, events,
people, or ideas
• Perceptual categorization
• Conceptual categorization

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 Individual Differences and Assessment
• Measures of infant development
• Predicting intelligence

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 Measures of Infant Development
• Developmental quotient (DQ): Score that
combines subscores in:
– Motor, language, adaptive, and personal-social
domains in the Gesell assessment of infants

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 Measures of Infant Development
• Bayley Scales of Infant Development: Used to
assess infant behavior and predict later
development
– Current version has three components:
• Mental scale
• Motor scale
• Infant behavior profile
• Fagan Test of Infant Intelligence evaluates an
infant’s ability to process information

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 Predicting Intelligence
• Tests for infants contain items related to
perceptual-motor development
– Include measures of social interaction

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 Language Development
• Defining language
• Language’s rule systems
• How language develops
• Biological and environmental influences
• An interactionist view

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 Defining Language
• Language: Form of communication
– Spoken, written, or signed
– Based on a system of symbols
– Consists of the words used by a community and
the rules for varying and combining them
• Infinite generativity: Ability to produce an
endless number of meaningful sentences
using:
– Finite set of words and rules
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 The Rule Systems of Language

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 How Language Develops
• Recognizing language sounds
• Babbling and other vocalizations
– Crying, cooing, babbling
• Gestures
– Showing and pointing
• First words
– Receptive vocabulary considerably exceeds spoken
vocabulary
– Vocabulary spurt

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 How Language Develops
– Overextension - Applying a word to objects that
are inappropriate for the word’s meaning
– Underextension - Applying a word too narrowly
• Two-word utterances
– To convey meaning, child relies on gesture, tone,
and context
– Telegraphic speech: Use of short and precise
words without grammatical markers such as
articles, auxiliary verbs, and other connectives

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 Variation in Language Milestones

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 Biological Influences
• Regions involved in language
– Broca’s area: Region in the brain’s left frontal lobe
that is involved in speech production
– Wernicke’s area: Region in the brain’s left
hemisphere that is involved in language
comprehension

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 Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area

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 Biological Influences
• Language acquisition device (LAD): Chomsky’s
term that describes a biological endowment
enabling the child to:
– Detect the features and rules of language,
including phonology, syntax, and semantics

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 Environmental Influences
• Behaviorist view of language learning has several
problems
• Interaction view - Children learn language in specific
contexts
• Vocabulary development is linked to:
– Family’s socioeconomic status
– Type of talk that parents direct to their children
• Child-directed speech: Higher pitch than normal,
with simple words and sentences

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 Environmental Influences
• Three strategies to enhance child’s acquisition
of language:
– Recasting
• Rephrasing something child has said
– Expanding
• Restating something child has said
– Labeling
• Identifying names of objects

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 Interactionist View
• Biology and experience contribute to language
development
– Ex: Wild boy of Aveyron and Genie

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