Psych 170 Module 5: Cognitive

Development in Infancy
Concept Code
Introductory concepts Concept Description
Piaget’s theory of - Just as physical bodies have structures that enable us to
infant development adapt to the world we build mental structures that help
(in general) us to adapt to the world
- Children actively construct their own image of the world
- Infants are the starting point of exploration of cognitive
development
Adaptation - Involves adjusting to new environmental demands
Cognitive processes - Referred generally to schemes, assimilation,
accommodation, organization, equilibrium and
equilibration
Piaget’s cognitive Concept Description
processes Schemes - Actions or mental representation that organize
knowledge
Behavioral schemes - Physical activities (characterize infancy)
Mental schemes - Cognitive activities (develop in childhood)
Assimilation - Piagetian concept of using existing schemes to deal with
new information or experiences
- Children use existing schemes to deal with new
information or experiences
Accommodation - Piagetian concept of adjusting schemes to fit new
information or experiences
- Children adjust schemes to take new information and
experiences into account
Assimilation and - Toddler who was learned the word car to identify the
accommodation family’s car
example - The toddler might call all moving vehicles on roads as
—“car”; the child may call a motorcycle as a “car”
- Child soon learns that motorcycles and trucks are not
cars and fine tunes the category to exclude motorcycles
and trucks
 - Sucking: assimilate all sorts of objects into their sucking
scheme; learn about taste, texture and shape; learn how
fingers and mother’s breast can be sucked while fuzzy
blankets cannot be sucked
Organization - Piaget’s concept of grouping isolated behaviors and
thoughts into a higher-order—more functioning cognitive
system
Organization example - A boy who has only a vague idea about how to use a
hammer may also have a vague idea about how to use
other tools
Disequilibrium - Cognitive conflict
- Child constantly faces counterexamples to his or her
existing schemes and inconsistencies
Equilibrium - Occurs when a child assimilates and accommodates
adjusting old schemes, developing new schemes and
organizing and reorganizing the old and new schemes
Least squares - Mechanism proposed by Piaget to explain how children
shift from one stage of thought to the next
- New form of organization = new way of thinking
Cognition as - Qualitatively different in one stage compared with
qualitatively different another
- The way children reason at one stage is different from
the way they reason at another stage
Sensorimotor stage Concept Description
Sensorimotor stage - First of Piaget’s stages which lasts from birth to about
two years of age
- Infants construct understanding of world by coordinating
sensory experiences with motoric actions
Simple reflexes - Substage of sensorimotor stage which involves
coordination of sensation and action through reflexive
behaviors
- Examples:
 Rooting
 Sucking
 Grasping
 Newborns suck reflexively when lips are sucked
Birth to 1 month - Age interval for simple reflexes substage
First habits and - Substage of sensorimotor stage which involves
primary circular coordination of sensation and schemes (habits and
reactions primary circular reactions)
-
Habit - Scheme based on reflex that has become completely
separated from its eliciting stimulus
Circular reaction - Referred to a repetitive action
Primary circular - Scheme based on the attempt to reproduce an event
reaction that initially occurred by chance
- Example:
 Repeating a body sensation first experienced by
chance
 Infants accommodate actions by sucking their
thumb differently and how they suck on a nipple
Secondary circular - Third sensorimotor substage which develops from 4-8
reaction months
- Infants become object-oriented and move beyond self-
preoccupation
- Repeat actions that bring pleasurable results
- Example:
 Infant coos to make a person stay near
Coordination of - Occurs 8-12 months
secondary circular - Coordination of vision and touch, schemes and
reactions intentionality
- Example: Infant manipulates a stick to bring an attractive
toy to reach
Tertiary circular - Piaget’s fifth sensorimotor substage which develops
reactions, novelty between 12 and 18 months of age
and curiosity - Infants become intrigued by the many properties of
objects and only become intrigued by the many
properties of objects and by the many things that they
can make happen to objects
- Example: block can be made to fall, spin, hit another
object
Internalization of - Piaget’s sixth sensorimotor stage
schemes - Develops between 18-24 months of age
- Infant develops ability to use primitive symbols
Object permanence - Understanding that objects continue to exist even when
they cannot directly be seen, heard or touched
- Studied by watching an infant’s reaction when an
 interesting object disappears—if infants search for the
object it is assumed that they believe it continues to
exist
Evaluating Piaget’s Concept Description
sensorimotor stage A-not-B error - Error that occurs when infants make the mistake of
selecting the familiar hiding place rather than the new
hiding place as they progress into “coordination of
secondary circular reactions” (substage 4) in Piaget’s
sensorimotor stage
- Does not show up consistently
- Sensitive to delay
- May be due to failure in memory or the tendency of
infants to repeat a previous motor behavior
Eleanor Gibson and - Argue that infants’ perceptual abilities are highly
Elizabeth Spelke developed very early in development
Elizabeth Spelke - Concludes that young infants interpret the world as
having predictable occurrences
- Contends how could infants grasp the complex world in
which they live if they didn’t come into the world
equipped with core sets of knowledge
- Infants can distinguish between different numbers of
objects, actions and sounds
Marshall Haith - Presented pictures to infants in either a regular
alternating sequence or an unpredictable sequence
- When sequence is predictable 3-month-old infants begin
to anticipate the location of the picture looking at the
side on which it was expected to appear
Renee Baillargeon - documented infants (3-4 months) expects objects to be
substantial and permanent
Substantial objects - objects that cannot move without an infant’s capacity/
action
Permanent objects - objects that continue to exist when they are hidden
Andrew Meltzoff’s - argue that Spelke’s and Baillargeon’s research relies on
criticism how long infants look at unexpected events and thus
assess infants’ perceptual expectations about where and
when objects will reappear rather than tapping
knowledge about where the objects are when they are
out of sight
6-8 months old - age interval when infants learn to perceive gravity and
 support
Core-knowledge - states that infants are born with domain-specific innate
approach knowledge systems
- argues that Piaget underestimated cognitive ability of
infants
Domain-specific - involve space, number sense, object permanence and
knowledge systems knowledge systems
Mark Johnson’s - infants assessed by Spike have already accumulated
criticism to Elizabeth many hours of experience in grasping what the world is
Spelke’s number about which gives considerable room for the
sense environment’s role in the development of infant
cognition
- infant came into the world with soft biases to perceive
and to attend to different aspects of the environment
Learning, remembering Concept Description
and conceptualizing Skinner’s operant - argue how consequences of a behavior changes in the
conditioning probability of the behavior’s occurrence
- helpful to researchers in their efforts to determine what
infants perceive
Attention - focusing of mental resources on select information which
improves cognitive processing on many tasks
Orienting/ - dominates attention in first year of life
investigative process - involves directing attention to potentially important
locations in the environment and recognizing objects and
their features
Sustained attention - new stimuli typically elicit an orienting response followed
(focused attention) by sustained attention
- allows infants to learn about and remember
characteristics of a stimulus as it becomes familiar
Habituation - decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated
presentations of the stimulus
Dishabituation - increase in responsiveness after a change in stimulation
Joint attention - process that occurs when individuals focus on the same
object and an ability to track another’s behavior is
present
- one individual directs another attention and reciprocal
interaction is present
memory - pertains to all situations in which an individual retain
information over time
 Implicit memory - memory without conscious recollection involves skills
and routine that are automatically performed
Explicit memory - memory of facts and experiences that individuals
consciously known and can state
Andrew Meltzoff - sees infants initiative abilities as biologically based,
because infants can imitate a facial expression within the
first few days after birth
- emphasizes that the infant’s initiative abilities do not
resemble a hardwired response but rather involve
flexibility and ability
Deferred limitation - limitation that occurs after a time of hours or days
categories - grouping of objects, events and characteristics on the
basis of common properties
concepts - ideas about what categories represent or said another
way
Perceptual - categorization based on similar perceptual features of
categorization objects—size, color, and movement
7-9 months - age interval according to Mandler on which infants form
conceptual categories rather than just making perceptual
discrimination between different categories
Key takeaway - infant’s advances in processing information is much
richer, more gradual and les stage-like and occurs earlier
than was envisioned by Piaget
Individual differences and Concept Description
assessment Gessell scale - measure that helped sort out babies with normal
functioning from one with abnormal functioning
Development - overall score that combines subscores in motor,
quotient (DQ) language, adaptive and personal-social domains in the
Gessell assessment of infants
- do not correlate in late childhood
Bayley Scales of - developed by Nancy Bayley which is used in infant
Infant Development development assessment
- has three components: mental scale, motor scale and
infant behavior profile
- do no correlate in late childhood
Fagan test of infant - focuses on the infant’s ability to process information in
intelligence such ways as encoding the attributes of objects forming
mental representations and retrieving these
representations
 - correlated with measures of intelligence in older children
Key takeaway - do not think how connections between cognitive
development in early infancy and latter cognitive
development are so strong that no discontinuity takes
place
Language development Concept Description
Language - form of communication whether spoke, written or signed
that is based on a system of symbols; consists of words
used by a community and the rules for varying and
combining them
Infinite generativity - ability to produce endless number of meaningful
sentences using a finite set of words and rules
Phonology - sound system of a language

Phoneme - smallest unit involved in word formation

Morphology - system of meaningful units in word formation
syntax - system that involves the way words are combined to
form
semantics - system that involves the meaning of words and
sentences
pragmatics - system of using appropriate conversation and knowledge
of how to effectively use language in context
How language - recognizing language sounds
develops - babbling and other vocalizations
- gestures
- first words
- two-word utterances
Recognizing language - infants can make first distinctions among the sounds of
sounds language
Babbling and other - infants speak recognizable words which function to
vocalizations practice making sounds to communicate and to attract
attention
Gestures - utilized by infants (showing and pointing) at about 8 to
12 months of age
First words - understand their first words earlier than they speak
- as early as five months infants recognize their name
when someone says it
Receptive vocabulary - words the child understand
Spoken vocabulary - words the child uses
Two-word utterances - convey meaning with just two words
- child relies heavily on gesture, tone and context
Telegraphic speech - use of short and precise words without grammatical
markers such as articles, auxiliary webs and other
connectives
Broca’s area - area in brain’s left frontal lobe involved in speech
production
Wernicke’s area - area in brain’s left hemisphere involved in language
comparison
Aphasia - loss or impairment of language ability caused by brain
damage
Language acquisition - Chomsky’s term that describes biological endowment
device enabling the child to detect features and rules of
language
Crying - Visible at birth which signals distress of babies
Cooing - First coo is about 2-4 months; gurgling sounds that are
made in back of the throat and usually express pleasure
during interaction with the caregiver
bubbling - Middle of the first year
- Produce strings of consonant-vowel combinations
Two-word utterances - Convey meaning with just two words
- The child relies heavily on gesture, tone and context
Problems in the - Does not explain how people create novel sentences
behaviorist view of - Children learn the syntax of their native even if they are
language not reinforced for doing so
- Language is not learned in a social vacuum—most
children are bathed in language from a very early age
Michael Tomasello’s - Emphasizes that children learn language in specific
interactionist view of contexts
language - Emphasizes that biology and experience contribute to
language development
- Both biological capacity and relevant experiences are
necessary
Child-directed speech - Language spoken in a higher pitch than normal with
simple words and sentences
Expanding - Restating in a linguistically sophisticated form what a
child has said
labeling - Identifying the names of objects
Psych 170 Module 7: Cognitive
Development in Early Childhood
Concept Code
Cognitive changes Concept Description
Preoperational stage - Piaget’s second stage lasting from 2-7 years of age
- Children begin to represent the world with words, images
and drawings
- Symbolic thought goes beyond simple connections of
sensory information and physical action
- Stable concepts are formed
- Mental reasoning emerges
- Egocentrism is present and magical beliefs are
constructed
Preoperational - Emphasizes that a child does not yet perform operations
thought
Operations - Reversible mental actions that allow children to do
mentally what they formerly did physically
Symbolic function - Piaget’s first substage of preoperational thought, in
substage which a child gains the ability to mentally represent an
object that is not present that is not present (between
about 2 and 4 years of age)
Egocentrism - Inability to distinguish between one’s own perspective
and someone else’s (salient feature of the first substage
of preoperational thought)
Animism - The belief that inanimate objects have life-like qualities
and are capable of action
Intuitive through - Piaget’s second substage of preoperational thought in
substage which children begin to use primitive reasoning and want
to know the answers to all sorts of questions (between 4
and 7 years of age)
Centration - Focusing of attention on one characteristic to the
exclusion of all others
Conservation - In Piaget’s theory, awareness that altering an object’s or
a substance’s appearance does not change its basic
 properties
Developmental - Education that focuses on typical developmental
appropriate practice patterns of
Vygotsky’s theory Concept Description
Zone of proximal - Vygotsky’s term for range of tasks that are too difficult
development for the child to master alone but that can be learned with
guidance and assistance of adults or more skilled-
children
- Captures the child’s cognitive skills that are in the
process of maturing and can be accomplished only with
the assistance of a more skilled person
Lower limit of the - Level of skill reached by a child when working
zone of proximal independently
development
Upper limit of the - Level of additional responsibility the child can accept
zone of proximal with the assistance of an able instructor
development
Scaffolding - Changing the level of support
Accommodation - Piagetian concept of adjusting schemes to fit new
information or experiences
- Children adjust schemes to take new information and
experiences into account
Private speech - Use of language for self-regulation (Piaget)
- Important tool of thought during the early childhood
years since it causes one to develop independently of
each other and then merge
Organization - Piaget’s concept of grouping isolated behaviors and
thoughts into a higher-order—more functioning cognitive
system
Organization example - A boy who has only a vague idea about how to use a
hammer may also have a vague idea about how to use
other tools
Disequilibrium - Cognitive conflict
- Child constantly faces counterexamples to his or her
existing schemes and inconsistencies
Equilibrium - Occurs when a child assimilates and accommodates
adjusting old schemes, developing new schemes and
organizing and reorganizing the old and new schemes
Least squares - Mechanism proposed by Piaget to explain how children
 shift from one stage of thought to the next
- New form of organization = new way of thinking
Cognition as - Qualitatively different in one stage compared with
qualitatively different another
- The way children reason at one stage is different from
the way they reason at another stage
Sensorimotor stage Concept Description
Sensorimotor stage - First of Piaget’s stages which lasts from birth to about
two years of age
- Infants construct understanding of world by coordinating
sensory experiences with motoric actions
Simple reflexes - Substage of sensorimotor stage which involves
coordination of sensation and action through reflexive
behaviors
- Examples:
 Rooting
 Sucking
 Grasping
 Newborns suck reflexively when lips are sucked
Birth to 1 month - Age interval for simple reflexes substage
First habits and - Substage of sensorimotor stage which involves
primary circular coordination of sensation and schemes (habits and
reactions primary circular reactions)
-
Habit - Scheme based on reflex that has become completely
separated from its eliciting stimulus
Circular reaction - Referred to a repetitive action
Primary circular - Scheme based on the attempt to reproduce an event
reaction that initially occurred by chance
- Example:
 Repeating a body sensation first experienced by
chance
 Infants accommodate actions by sucking their
thumb differently and how they suck on a nipple
Secondary circular - Third sensorimotor substage which develops from 4-8
reaction months
- Infants become object-oriented and move beyond self-
preoccupation
- Repeat actions that bring pleasurable results
 - Example:
 Infant coos to make a person stay near
Coordination of - Occurs 8-12 months
secondary circular - Coordination of vision and touch, schemes and
reactions intentionality
- Example: Infant manipulates a stick to bring an attractive
toy to reach
Tertiary circular - Piaget’s fifth sensorimotor substage which develops
reactions, novelty between 12 and 18 months of age
and curiosity - Infants become intrigued by the many properties of
objects and only become intrigued by the many
properties of objects and by the many things that they
can make happen to objects
- Example: block can be made to fall, spin, hit another
object
Internalization of - Piaget’s sixth sensorimotor stage
schemes - Develops between 18-24 months of age
- Infant develops ability to use primitive symbols
Object permanence - Understanding that objects continue to exist even when
they cannot directly be seen, heard or touched
- Studied by watching an infant’s reaction when an
interesting object disappears—if infants search for the
object it is assumed that they believe it continues to
exist
Evaluating Piaget’s Concept Description
sensorimotor stage A-not-B error - Error that occurs when infants make the mistake of
selecting the familiar hiding place rather than the new
hiding place as they progress into “coordination of
secondary circular reactions” (substage 4) in Piaget’s
sensorimotor stage
- Does not show up consistently
- Sensitive to delay
- May be due to failure in memory or the tendency of
infants to repeat a previous motor behavior
Eleanor Gibson and - Argue that infants’ perceptual abilities are highly
Elizabeth Spelke developed very early in development
Elizabeth Spelke - Concludes that young infants interpret the world as
having predictable occurrences
- Contends how could infants grasp the complex world in
 which they live if they didn’t come into the world
equipped with core sets of knowledge
- Infants can distinguish between different numbers of
objects, actions and sounds
Marshall Haith - Presented pictures to infants in either a regular
alternating sequence or an unpredictable sequence
- When sequence is predictable 3-month-old infants begin
to anticipate the location of the picture looking at the
side on which it was expected to appear
Renee Baillargeon - documented infants (3-4 months) expects objects to be
substantial and permanent
Substantial objects - objects that cannot move without an infant’s capacity/
action
Permanent objects - objects that continue to exist when they are hidden
Andrew Meltzoff’s - argue that Spelke’s and Baillargeon’s research relies on
criticism how long infants look at unexpected events and thus
assess infants’ perceptual expectations about where and
when objects will reappear rather than tapping
knowledge about where the objects are when they are
out of sight
6-8 months old - age interval when infants learn to perceive gravity and
support
Core-knowledge - states that infants are born with domain-specific innate
approach knowledge systems
- argues that Piaget underestimated cognitive ability of
infants
Domain-specific - involve space, number sense, object permanence and
knowledge systems knowledge systems
Mark Johnson’s - infants assessed by Spike have already accumulated
criticism to Elizabeth many hours of experience in grasping what the world is
Spelke’s number about which gives considerable room for the
sense environment’s role in the development of infant
cognition
- infant came into the world with soft biases to perceive
and to attend to different aspects of the environment
Learning, remembering Concept Description
and conceptualizing Skinner’s operant - argue how consequences of a behavior changes in the
conditioning probability of the behavior’s occurrence
- helpful to researchers in their efforts to determine what
 infants perceive
Attention - focusing of mental resources on select information which
improves cognitive processing on many tasks
Orienting/ - dominates attention in first year of life
investigative process - involves directing attention to potentially important
locations in the environment and recognizing objects and
their features
Sustained attention - new stimuli typically elicit an orienting response followed
(focused attention) by sustained attention
- allows infants to learn about and remember
characteristics of a stimulus as it becomes familiar
Habituation - decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated
presentations of the stimulus
Dishabituation - increase in responsiveness after a change in stimulation
Joint attention - process that occurs when individuals focus on the same
object and an ability to track another’s behavior is
present
- one individual directs another attention and reciprocal
interaction is present
memory - pertains to all situations in which an individual retain
information over time
Implicit memory - memory without conscious recollection involves skills
and routine that are automatically performed
Explicit memory - memory of facts and experiences that individuals
consciously known and can state
Andrew Meltzoff - sees infants initiative abilities as biologically based,
because infants can imitate a facial expression within the
first few days after birth
- emphasizes that the infant’s initiative abilities do not
resemble a hardwired response but rather involve
flexibility and ability
Deferred limitation - limitation that occurs after a time of hours or days
categories - grouping of objects, events and characteristics on the
basis of common properties
concepts - ideas about what categories represent or said another
way
Perceptual - categorization based on similar perceptual features of
categorization objects—size, color, and movement
7-9 months - age interval according to Mandler on which infants form
 conceptual categories rather than just making perceptual
discrimination between different categories
Key takeaway - infant’s advances in processing information is much
richer, more gradual and les stage-like and occurs earlier
than was envisioned by Piaget
Individual differences and Concept Description
assessment Gessell scale - measure that helped sort out babies with normal
functioning from one with abnormal functioning
Development - overall score that combines subscores in motor,
quotient (DQ) language, adaptive and personal-social domains in the
Gessell assessment of infants
- do not correlate in late childhood
Bayley Scales of - developed by Nancy Bayley which is used in infant
Infant Development development assessment
- has three components: mental scale, motor scale and
infant behavior profile
- do no correlate in late childhood
Fagan test of infant - focuses on the infant’s ability to process information in
intelligence such ways as encoding the attributes of objects forming
mental representations and retrieving these
representations
- correlated with measures of intelligence in older children
Key takeaway - do not think how connections between cognitive
development in early infancy and latter cognitive
development are so strong that no discontinuity takes
place
Language development Concept Description
Language - form of communication whether spoke, written or signed
that is based on a system of symbols; consists of words
used by a community and the rules for varying and
combining them
Infinite generativity - ability to produce endless number of meaningful
sentences using a finite set of words and rules
Phonology - sound system of a language

Phoneme - smallest unit involved in word formation

Morphology - system of meaningful units in word formation
Syntax - system that involves the way words are combined to
form
Semantics - system that involves the meaning of words and
sentences
Pragmatics - system of using appropriate conversation and knowledge
of how to effectively use language in context
How language - recognizing language sounds
develops - babbling and other vocalizations
- gestures
- first words
- two-word utterances
Recognizing language - infants can make first distinctions among the sounds of
sounds language
Babbling and other - infants speak recognizable words which function to
vocalizations practice making sounds to communicate and to attract
attention
Gestures - utilized by infants (showing and pointing) at about 8 to
12 months of age
First words - understand their first words earlier than they speak
- as early as five months infants recognize their name
when someone says it
Receptive vocabulary - words the child understand
Spoken vocabulary - words the child uses
Two-word utterances - convey meaning with just two words
- child relies heavily on gesture, tone and context
Telegraphic speech - use of short and precise words without grammatical
markers such as articles, auxiliary webs and other
connectives
Broca’s area - area in brain’s left frontal lobe involved in speech
production
Wernicke’s area - area in brain’s left hemisphere involved in language
comparison
Aphasia - loss or impairment of language ability caused by brain
damage
Language acquisition - Chomsky’s term that describes biological endowment
device enabling the child to detect features and rules of
language
Crying - Visible at birth which signals distress of babies
Cooing - First coo is about 2-4 months; gurgling sounds that are
made in back of the throat and usually express pleasure
during interaction with the caregiver
bubbling - Middle of the first year
- Produce strings of consonant-vowel combinations
Two-word utterances - Convey meaning with just two words
- The child relies heavily on gesture, tone and context
Problems in the - Does not explain how people create novel sentences
behaviorist view of - Children learn the syntax of their native even if they are
language not reinforced for doing so
- Language is not learned in a social vacuum—most
children are bathed in language from a very early age
Michael Tomasello’s - Emphasizes that children learn language in specific
interactionist view of contexts
language - Emphasizes that biology and experience contribute to
language development
- Both biological capacity and relevant experiences are
necessary
Child-directed speech - Language spoken in a higher pitch than normal with
simple words and sentences
Expanding - Restating in a linguistically sophisticated form what a
child has said
labeling - Identifying the names of objects
-