Developmental Psychology Lecture 5: Infant Perceptual, Cognitive, and Language Development PDF

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Dr. L. Monique Ward...

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Lecture 5: Infant Perceptual, Cognitive, and Language Development Perceptual Development in Infancy: A Focus on Vision ● Vision is the last sense to reach full capacity ● Rapid maturation of eyes’ & brain’s visual centers ● Visual acuity reaches near-adult level by 6 months. ● Depth Perception: The ability to judge the distance of objects from one another and from ourselves ○ Begin to acquire this skill as soon as they can focus on objects at different distances -- at around 2-3 months of age ○ Motion provides much information about depth ○ Independent movement (ex. crawling) plays a vital role in its refinement ■ Crawling may promote a new level of brain organization by strengthening certain synaptic connections ○ Gibson and Walk (1960) visual cliff demonstrations ■ Tested 36 crawling infants ages 6.5-14 months ■ Children would not crawl across the “deep” side - only 3 of 36 tested would ■ Concluded that by the time that infants crawl, most distinguish deep and shallow surfaces and avoid drop offs that look dangerous ● Pattern Perception ○ Prefer patterned and complex stimuli over plain ○ Contrast Sensitivity: Principle that if babies can detect a difference in contrast between two patterns, they will prefer the one with more contrast ● Face Perception and Preferences ○ Fantz developed a looking chamber and tested infants 10 hours old to 6 months ○ Infants show a clear preference for the human face ○ Some believe we are born with a “template” of the human face to aid our survival ○ Others argue for role of early experiences ● Intermodal Perception ○ We make sense of these running streams of light, sound, tactile, odor, and taste information, perceiving them as integrated wholes ○ Infants perceive input from different sensory systems in a unified way by detecting amodal sensory properties--information that overlaps two or more sensory systems Piaget’s Cognitive-Developmental Theory ● Sensorimotor stage: Infants “think” and learn about the world through their 5 senses and their motor skills ● Schemes: Psychological structures that organize experience ● How does cognitive change take place? ● Adaptation: Process of building schemes through direct interaction with the environment ○ Assimilation: External world is interpreted through existing schemes

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Accommodation: New schemes are created or old ones are adjusted to better fit the environment Organization: Internal process of rearranging and linking schemes

The Sensorimotor Stage ● A principle component is the circular reaction (CR): Means by which infants build schemes by trying to repeat chance events caused by their own motor activity ● Substage 1: Reflexive schemes (birth to 1 month) ○ Exercising reflexes, the building blocks of sensorimotor intelligence ● Substage 2: Primary circular reactions (1-4 months) ○ Circular reactions oriented towards infant’s own body ● Substage 3: Secondary circular reactions (4-8 months) ○ Repeat interesting or novel events in the environment ● Substage 4: Coordination of secondary circular reactions (8-12 months) ○ Can engage in goal-directed behavior ○ See beginnings of Object Permanence: The understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched ○ Problems with A-not-B task ● Substage 5: Tertiary circular reactions (12-18 months) ○ Experimenting, repeating acts with variation ● Substage 6: Mental Representation (18 months-2 yrs) -- the final goal ○ Represent the world in a symbolic, conceptual manner ○ Able to create Mental Representations: Internal images of objects, actions, and events ○ Using words and gestures as symbols ○ Deferred Imitation: Ability to reproduce the behavior of models no longer present ○ Changes in nature of play from functional to pretend (make-believe) ○ Video Deficit Effect: Poorer performance after viewing a video than a live demonstration ● Updated Perspectives on Infant Cognition ○ Recent research indicates that infants display certain cognitive abilities earlier than Piaget believed ○ Perhaps Piaget relied too heavily on their displaying knowledge through movement ○ Cognitive development is likely gradual, continuous, uneven ○ Piaget needed to expand methods ■ A new technique is the violation-of-expectation method: Using infant’s heightened attention to or surprise at deviations to infer underlying beliefs Vygotsky’s approach to infant cognition ● Complex mental activities have their origins in social interaction; Through joint activities with more mature members of their society, children master activities and think in ways that have meaning in their culture

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Zone of Proximal (or Potential) Development: A range of tasks that the child cannot yet handle alone but can do with the help of more skilled partners Private Speech: Children’s self-directed speech for self-guidance; Used more when tasks are challenging, after they make errors, or when they are confused about how to proceed Scaffolding: Adjusting the support offered during a teaching session to fit the child’s current level of performance

Infant Processing ● Memory ○ Recognition: Noticing when a stimulus is identical or similar to one previously experienced (simplest form of memory) ○ Recall: Involves remembering something not present (more challenging) ○ Have distinct short-term and long-term memories ● Categorization: Grouping similar objects and events into a single representation ● Infantile Amnesia: Most of us can retrieve few, if any, events that happened to us before age 2 to 3 ○ Possibly due to the hippocampus continuing to add new neurons into existing neural circuits, disrupting already stored early memories ○ Infants relying heavily on nonverbal memory techniques, preventing long-term retention of early experiences ○ Infants are not fully self-aware Theories of Language Development ● Behaviorist Perspective ○ Language acquired through operant conditioning (reward & reinforcement) and through imitation ○ Problem: Unique verbal creations and errors ● Nativist Perspective ○ All children possess an innate, biologically-based system for language acquisition called the language acquisition device (LAD) ○ LAD contains a set of rules common to all languages ○ Support: ■ Newborns prefer speech sounds & human voice ■ Universal sequence of language milestones ■ Evidence of sensitive periods ■ Observations of deaf children ○ Problems ■ Can’t identify a single, underlying grammar system ■ Early word combinations do not follow grammatical rules ■ No anatomical evidence ● Interactionist Perspective ○ Language achievements emerge through an interaction of innate abilities and environmental influences

How Parents Facilitate Language Development ● Six Characteristics of Infant-Directed Speech ○ A high-pitched, exaggerated expression ○ Short sentences and phrases ○ Simplification ■ Concrete, simple vocabulary. Labeling. ■ Simplified words ■ Avoidance of pronouns ■ Talking about the here and now ○ High proportion of questions and commands ○ Repetition ○ Expansions ● Interactive activities that facilitate language development ○ Joint attention, turn-taking, preverbal gestures How Infants Communicate: Early Communication ● Components of early communication ○ Cooing (vowel sounds) then babbling (with consonants) then intonation (changes in pitch) ○ Language universalists (can distinguish & make all human sounds) then language specialists ● Nature of First Words ○ Common types ○ Receptive language/comprehension > productive language ○ Holophrastic speech: One-word power plays ○ Overextension: Defining a word too broadly ○ Underextension: Defining a word too narrowly ○ Vocabulary spurt between 18 & 24 months ■ Vocabulary (or naming) explosion – some but not all infants ○ Telegraphic speech: Two-word utterances...