Chapter 6 - Developmental Psychology PDF

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Chapter 6: The First Two Years: Cognitive Development I. Sensorimotor Intelligence: Piaget’s term for the way infants think- by using their senses and motor skills- during the first period of cognitive development A. Primary Circular Reactions: First of 3 types of feedback loops in sensorimotor intelligence this one involving the infants own body. The infant senses motion, sucking, noise, and other stimuli and tries to understand them. 1. Stage 1 (birth-1 month): reflexes include sucking, grasping, staring, listening 2. Stage 2 (1-4 months): First acquired adaptations accommodation and coordination of reflexes Ex: bottle different than nipple B. Secondary Circular Reaction: second of 3 feedback loops involving people and objects. Infants respond to other people, toys, and to any other object they can touch or move 1. Stage 3 (4-8 months): making interesting events last: responding to people and objects Ex: Clap at patty cake 2. Stage 4 (8-12 months): new adaptation and anticipation: becoming more purposeful in responding to people and objects Ex: putting moms hands together to initiate patty cake 3. Pursuing a goal: babies work hard to achieve their goals i.e. they indicate when they are hungry. Cognitive advances benefit from new motor skills 4. Object Permanence: realization that objects still exist when they can no longer be seen touched or heard a. Basic experiment shows: infants younger than 8 months do not search for object when placed under cloth, At 8 months infants search immediately but not if they wait a few seconds, 18 months can find the object easily but not if hiding spot is changed (A not B), 2 years child has fully developed object permanence. C. Tertiary Circular Reaction: 3rd feedback loop involving active exploration and experimentation. Explore a range of new activities varying their responses as a way to learn about the world. 1. Stage 5 (12-18 months): New means through active experimentation: experiments and creativity create the little scientist Ex: flushing a stuffed animal down the toilet a. Little scientist: stage 5 toddlers who experiment without anticipating the results using trial and error in active and creative exploration 2. Stage 6 (18-24 months): New means through mental combinations: thinking before doing, new ways of achieving a goal without resorting to trial and error. Ex: before flushing stuffed animal think about it because of previous toilet overflowing and mothers anger. a. Deferred imitation: a sequence in which a infant first perceives something done by someone else and then performs the action hours or even days later D. Piaget and Modern Research: many developmental scientists believe object permanence exists before 8 months and that Piaget was incorrect 1. Sample too small: based on his own infants, direct observation of only 3 children is just a start. Immense variability in babies

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2. Methods too simple: researchers now use statistics, improved research design, sample sizes, and strategies that Piaget did not have available to him a. Habituation: process of becoming accustomed to an object or event through repeated exposure to it and thus becoming less interested in it. Using this as a research strategy to see if babies notice a difference between habituated stimuli and new stimuli. Technology was unavailable to Piaget 3. Brain activity unseen: can now measure infant cognition and brain activity through a. fMRI: measuring technique in which electrical excitement indicates activation anywhere in the brain, helps researchers locate neurological responses to stimuli. b. Mirror neurons: discovered through brain scans. Cells in an observers brain that respond to an action performed by someone else in the same way they would if the observer were actually performing that action. Lead to exciting discoveries about infant cognition Information Processing: this perspective ties together many aspects of infant cognition. Memory concerns brain organization and output i.e. storage and retrieval A. Affordance: an opportunity for perception and interaction that is offered by a person place or object in the environment. Selective perception of affordances depends on age, motivation, context, and culture. 1. Research on Early affordance: visual cliff: an experimental apparatus that gives the illusion of a sudden drop off between 2 surfaces. Visual cliff hazard depends on experience 2. Movement: babies are attracted to things that move, as soon as they can they move their bodies in any way they can B. Memory: infant amnesia refers to the belief that infants remember nothing until about age 2. Memory is fragile the first months of life. They have difficulty storing memories. Adults cannot access early memories because they did not have words to solidify them. Can remember memories if: Motivation is high, Retrieval is strengthened by reminders and repetition 1. Experiment with infant kicking mobiles: one week later, kick immediately, a few weeks later they forgot what they had learned. 2. Reminders and Repetition: reminder session is a perceptual experience that helps a person recollect an idea, a thing or an experience. Repeated reminders seem to more important and context is crucial 3. A little older a little more memory: towards the end of the first year more kinds of memories are apparent. a. Implicit memory: unconscious or automatic memory usually stored via habits, emotional responses, routine procedures, and various sensations. Begin before birth. Repeated exposure uncovers these memories b. Explicit memory: memory that is easy to retrieve on demand. Consciously learned words, data and concepts. Depends on hippocampus development which doesn’t mature until 5 or 6. Language what develops in the first 2 years: A. The universal sequence: language development sequence is the same worldwide

1. Listening and responding: language learning happens before birth. Familiar with rhythm sounds and cadence. Infants attend to voices more than mechanical sounds. Ability to distinguish sounds in language they hear improves and hear sounds in other languages deteriorates. Like rhymes repetition and rhythm and varied pitch a. Child directed speech: high pitched simplified and repetitive way adults speak to infants and children (motherese and baby talk) 2. Babbling: an infants repetition of certain syllables such as bababa that begins when babies are between 6 and 9 months. Towards the end of the first year babbling begins to sound like native language. Pointing is well developed by 12 months (nonverbal communication) B. First Words: at age 1 the average baby will utter a few words understood by the caregiver and possibly strangers. 1. Gradual beginnings: vocab increases gradually, one word a week but meanings are learned rapidly. Initially speak words that are about familiar things. Accompanied by tone and cadence. a. holophrase: a single word that is used to express a complete meaningful thought b. intonation is reduced at about 1 year so the baby can organize their vocalization from universal to language specific 2. The naming explosion: a sudden increase in infants vocabulary especially in the number of nouns that begins at about 18 months of age. C. Cultural differences: cultures differ in how much child directed speech each child hears. 5 months babies prefer adults with child directed speech. Seek to learn language. 1. Parts of speech: ratio of nouns to verbs to adjectives varies in every place. Consider entire social context and how people respond to one another. Young children are also sensitive to sound. Ex: English does not have onomatopoeic verbs so verb learning is difficult 2. Putting words together: a. Grammar: all the methods-word order, verb forms, and so on- that languages use to communicate meaning, apart from the words themselves. Obvious between 18 and 24 months b. Mean length of utterance (MLU): the average number of words in a typical sentence. MLU is often used to indicate how advanced a child’s language development is. D. Theories of language learning: behaviorism, sociocultural theory, evolutionary theory. 1. Theory 1 Infants Need to be Taught: essential idea is that language is acquired through association and reinforcement a. Parents are expert teachers b. Frequent repetition is instructive c. Well taught infants are well spoken children 2. Theory 2 Social Impulses Foster Infant Language: (social pragmatic) communication is the reason for language development. Seek to join the social world.

3. Theory 3 Infants Teach Themselves: language learning is genetically programmed to begin at a certain age. a. Noam Chomsky believes language is too complex to learn by conditioning. Language acquisition device Chomsky’s term for a hypothesized mental structure that enables humans to learn language including the basic aspects of grammar vocabulary and intonation. 4. A hybrid theory: one theory at one age, and another theory at another. Parents need to talk to their infants (theory 1) encourage social interaction (theory 2) and appreciate the innate abilities (theory 3)...