Psychology
Cognitive Development in Infants
Cognitive development in infants refers to the growth and progression of mental processes such as perception, attention, memory, and problem-solving abilities. During the first year of life, infants rapidly develop cognitive skills through experiences and interactions with their environment, laying the foundation for future learning and understanding of the world around them.
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11 Key excerpts on "Cognitive Development in Infants"
- Mary Gauvain(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
1 Introduction Human beings live in many different environments and have done so for a very long time. The capacity of humans to thrive in various settings is rooted in cognition, the mental activity through which we acquire and use knowledge. Cognition includes many mental faculties and processes that enable us to access, examine, retain, use, and communicate information. Put differently, cognition is how we think and what we think about, the ability to solve problems on our own and with others, and the capacity to create, understand, and use symbolic and material resources to support intelligent action. The knowledge and cognitive skills that a person needs in a particular environment are not present at birth. They emerge and are shaped by the experiences of life. Cognitive development is the term used to describe the mental changes that occur as children acquire the knowledge and intellectual skills that enable them to understand and act effectively in everyday life. In this Element, I describe cognitive development in infancy and childhood. Early life is a period of tremendous cognitive change. Infants and children acquire a vast array of knowledge and cognitive skills, and they learn to use them to guide action. This Element begins by describing the main theories that guide research in cognitive development. Then I turn to the how and the what of cognitive development. The how is about cognitive change over time. In most contemporary theories, cognitive development is seen as emerging from the dynamic interplay of biological factors and experience with the natural, mater- ial, and social world. Studies of what develops focus on changes over time in mental capacities, knowledge, and skills. This Element describes the develop- ment in a wide range of aspects of cognition: attention, language, social cogni- tion, memory, metacognition and executive function, and problem-solving and reasoning. Cognitive development is simultaneously universal and context-specific.
eBook - PDF- Olivia Saracho, Bernard Spodek(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Information Age Publishing(Publisher)
Domain-general cognitive processes, such as attention, memory, and problem solving, are adapted to problems at hand (Bjorklund & Pelle-grini, 2002). For this type of learning to occur in an effective and efficient way, learners need to capitalize on available resources and one critical resource is found in the social context. Certain species-level characteristics, specifically the immaturity of the infant brain, the vast learning potential of the organism, and the long period of dependence on mature members, ensure that infants and chil-dren will have extensive contact with, and therefore opportunities to learn from, people who already know much of what a child needs to learn and who are invested in the child physically and emotionally (Bjorklund & Pel-ligrini, 2002). Over development, more experienced and knowledgeable partners facilitate children’s learning and development through the sup-port, guidance, modeling, and other forms of assistance they provide. Learning in social situations with more experienced partners is not simply a process of transmitting knowledge and skills to the less experienced part- Cognitive Development in Social Context 81 ner. It is a socially constructed process and even young infants play an active role in learning in social context, as evident in the socially related biases of the human neonate toward patterns in human faces, speech, and social interaction (Gauvain, 2001). From the vantage of evolutionary psy-chology, cognitive development is inseparable from the social context in which it occurs. The social context is a particularly fertile source for cognitive develop-ment. It includes information about unique social aspects of the develop-mental context as well as information about culturally valued skills—the type of skills children need to obtain competence in their community.
eBook - PDF- Spencer Rathus(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
91 CHAPTER 5: Infancy: Cognitive Development 5-2 INFORMATION PROCESSING The information-processing approach to cogni-tive development focuses on how children manipulate or process information coming in from the environ-ment or already stored in the mind. Infants’ tools for processing information include their memory and imitation. 5-2a INFANTS’ MEMORY Many of the cognitive capabilities of infants— recognizing the faces of familiar people, developing object permanence, and, in fact, learning in any form— depend on one critical aspect of cognitive development: their memory (Bauer et al., 2010). Even neonates dem-onstrate memory for stimuli to which they have been exposed previously. For example, neonates adjust their rate of sucking to hear a recording of their mother read-ing a story she had read aloud during the last weeks of pregnancy, as discussed in Chapter 2 (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980). Memory improves dramatically between two and six months of age and then again by 12 months (Pelphrey et al., 2004; Rose et al., 2011). The improve-ment may indicate that older infants are more capable than younger ones of encoding (i.e., storing) informa-tion, retrieving information already stored, or both (Patel et al., 2013). A fascinating series of studies by Carolyn Rovee-Collier and her colleagues (Giles & Rovee-Collier, 2011; Rovee-Collier, 1993) illustrates some of these developmental changes in infant memory. As shown in Figure 5.2, one end of a ribbon was tied to a brightly colored mobile suspended above the infant’s crib. The other end was tied to the infant’s ankle, so that when the infant kicked, the mobile moved. Infants quickly learned to increase their rate of kicking. To measure memory, the infant’s ankle was again fastened to the mobile after a period of one or more days had elapsed. In one study, two-month-olds remembered how to make the mobile move after delays of up to three days, and three-month-olds remembered for more than a week (Greco et al., 1986).
eBook - PDF- James Kalat, , , (Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
1 3 9 Development 5 MODULE 5.1 Cognitive Development in Infancy and Childhood Research Designs for Studying Development The Fetus and the Newborn Infancy Jean Piaget’s View of Cognitive Development Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage Piaget’s Preoperational Stage Piaget’s Stages of Concrete Operations and Formal Operations In Closing: How Grown Up Are We? MODULE 5.2 Social and Emotional Development Erikson’s Description of Human Development Infancy and Childhood Social Development in Childhood and Adolescence Adulthood Old Age The Psychology of Facing Death In Closing: Social and Emotional Issues through the Life Span MODULE 5.3 Diversity: Gender, Culture, and Family Gender Influences Culture and Ethnicity The Family In Closing: Many Ways of Life Liderina/Shutterstock.com Copyright 2022 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 1 4 0 / C H A P T E R 5 D E V E L O P M E N T S uppose you buy a robot. When you get home, you discover that it does nothing useful. It cannot even maintain its balance. It makes irritating, high-pitched noises, moves its limbs haphazardly, and leaks. The store you bought it from refuses to take it back, and it is illegal to disconnect or discard this robot. So you are stuck with it. A few years later, your robot walks and talks, reads and writes, draws pic-tures, and does arithmetic. It follows your directions (usually) and sometimes does useful things without being told. It beats you at memory games. How did all this happen? After all, you know nothing about how to pro-gram a robot.
eBook - PDFChildhood and Adolescence
Voyages in Development
- Spencer Rathus(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 192 PART 3 INFANCY Information Processing The information-processing approach to cognitive development focuses on how chil-dren manipulate or process information coming in from the environment or already stored in the minds (Reed, 2013). What Is the Capacity of the Memory of Infants? Many of the cognitive capabilities of infants—recognizing the faces of familiar peo-ple, developing object permanence, and, in fact, learning in any form—depend on one critical aspect of cognitive development: memory (Kibbe & Leslie, 2014). Even neonates demonstrate memory for stimuli to which they have been exposed previ-ously. As mentioned earlier, neonates adjust their rate of sucking to hear a record-ing of their mother reading a story she had read aloud during the last weeks of pregnancy (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980; DeCasper et al., 2011). Remember, too, that neonates who are breastfed are able to remember and show recognition of their mother’s unique odor (Cernoch & Porter, 1985). Memory improves dramatically between 2 and 6 months of age and then again by 12 months (Pelphrey et al., 2004; Rose et al., 2011). The improvement may indi-cate that older infants are more capable than younger ones of encoding (i.e., storing) information, retrieving information already stored, or both (Patel et al., 2013). A series of studies by Carolyn Rovee-Collier and her colleagues (Giles & Rovee-Collier, 2011; Rovee-Collier, 1993) illustrates some of these developmental changes in infant memory (see Figure 6.3 ■ ). One end of a ribbon was tied to a brightly colored mobile suspended above the infant’s crib. The other end was tied to the infant’s ankle, so that when the infant kicked, the mobile moved. Infants quickly learned to increase their rate of kicking. To measure memory, the infant’s ankle was again fastened to the mobile after a period of 1 or more days had elapsed.
- Stephen F. Davis, William Buskist, Stephen F. Davis, William F. Buskist(Authors)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
They are also highly attentive to the human voice and at birth show preferences, based on exposure, for their mother’s voice, their native language, and even for familiar book passages (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980; DeCasper & Spence, 1986; Moon, Cooper, & Fifer, 199). Young infants also show remarkable discrimination abilities for a range of qualities in human speech (e.g., prosody, phonemic catego-ries; Aslin, Jusczyk, & Pisoni, 1998). Their capacity to dis-tinguish sounds in any language is initially better than that of adults. Such speech perception skills appear to prime neonates for learning any needed languages. However, at around 8 months, infants begin to specialize in detecting the sounds of their culture’s language, and by 1 months have abilities similar to those of the adults around them (Aslin et al., 1998; Werker & Desjardins, 1995). Cognitive Development Piaget’s Viewpoint The theory that originally inspired psychologists’ understanding of infants’ and children’s thinking is that of Jean Piaget. Piaget’s (1950, 195, 1964, 1970) constructiv-ist viewpoint (Flavell, 196) argues that individuals of all ages create knowledge on their own initiative, in response to experiences rather than direct instruction. Piaget pro-posed that the basic units of knowledge are schemes or mental models created to represent and interpret experi-ences. Using an existing scheme to interpret experience is known as assimiliation , whereas modifying or creating schemes in order to adapt to new experiences is referred to as accommodation (Beilin, 199). Further, the human tendency to organize knowledge into structures pro-motes discontinuous developmental stages that represent qualitatively different yet coherent forms of understand-ing. Although the latter two processes propel cognitive advancement, Piaget’s depiction of the shared features of each stage, as well as their invariant sequencing, sug-gests that maturation also plays a role in ushering in major developmental shifts.
eBook - PDF- Alan Slater, J. Gavin Bremner, Alan Slater, J. Gavin Bremner(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- BPS Blackwell(Publisher)
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Case, R. (1985). Intellectual development: Birth to adulthood. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Case, R. (1992). The mind’s staircase. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Case, R. (1998). The development of central structures. In D. Kuhn & R. Siegler (Eds.) Handbook of child psychology: Vol 2. Cognition, perception, and language (5th edn; pp. 745–800). New York: Wiley. Ceci, S.J., & Roazzi, A. (1994). The effects of context on cognition: Postcards from Brazil. In R.J. Sternberg (Ed.) Mind in context (pp. 74–101). New York: Cambridge University Press. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 337 Chen, Z., & Siegler, R.S. (2000). Across the great divide: Bridging the gap between understanding of toddlers’ and older children’s thinking. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 65(2, Serial No. 261). Chiandetti, C., & Vallortigara, G. (2011). Intuitive physical reasoning about occluded objects by inexperienced chicks. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 278, 2621–2627. Csibra, G., & Gergely, G. (2011). Natural pedagogy as evolutionary adaptation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 366, 1149–1157. DeLoache, J.S. (2000). Dual representation and young children’s use of scale models. Child Development, 71, 329–338. Desrochers, S. (2008). From Piaget to specific Genevan developmental models. Child Development Perspectives, 2, 7–12. De Vries, R. (1969). Constancy of generic identity in the years three to six. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 34(3, Serial No. 127). Donaldson, M. (1978). Children’s minds. London: Fontana. Duncan, R.M., & Cheyne, J.A. (2002). Private speech in young adults. Task difficulty, self-regulation, and psychological predication. Cognitive Development, 16, 889–906. Fahrmeier, E.D. (1978). The development of concrete operations among the Hausa. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 9, 23–44. Farah, M.J., & Rabinowitz, C.
eBook - PDF- Ronald Comer, Elizabeth Gould, Adrian Furnham(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
If babies had no memory or no idea of external objects, they would not be able to become bored by repeated presentations. Habituation has therefore become a crucial research tool for measur- ing infant perceptions of colours, sounds, faces and other such abilities that we may otherwise find very difficult to measure. Beyond what we may perceive as basic cognitive pro- cesses, the information-processing approach has even been able to demonstrate that babies may have some concept of mathematics! Psychologist Karen Wynn conducted a series of studies in which she showed five-month-old babies a sequence of events in which one doll is put in a case behind a screen followed by another doll (McCrink & Wynn, 2004; Wynn 2002, 1992). She found that when the screen was dropped, the babies expressed surprise and looked longer if object permanence an infant’s realization that objects continue to exist even when they are outside the infant’s immediate sensory awareness. information- processing theory developmental theory focusing on how chil- dren take in and use information from their environment. habituation the proc- ess in which individu- als pay less attention to a stimulus after it is presented to them repeatedly. CHAPTER 3 BIOLOGICAL AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 60 many aspects of development are still in progress. For example, although our coordination improves and we can work the buttons and zips necessary to dress ourselves, that does not necessarily mean that we can select the appropri- ate clothes for the day ahead. As children move from early into middle childhood, around age six, things begin to gather pace again. Children ’s motor abilities improve dramatically as they gain coordina- tion, agility and strength (Drummond, 2011). At the same time, the first major distinctions between boys and girls begin to appear. Girls experience a growth spurt in height and weight during their 10th or 11th year, while boys have to wait a couple of years more for their spurt.
eBook - PDF- Jennifer Tanner, Daniel Bellack, Colleen MacQuarrie(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
Indeed, adults and even young children auto- matically change their language when speaking to an infant, using high-pitched, simple language called infant-directed speech. Use of this speech may help the infant learn language (Trainor & Desjardins, 2002). language acquisition device (LAD) The name given by Noam Chomsky to a theoretical structure possessed by all humans that prewires us to learn language and grammar rules. infant-directed speech A way of speaking to infants that is higher in pitch, simpler, and more repetitive than speech directed at adults or children. It seems to be used automatically when in the presence of an infant. 1. How does thinking evolve during infancy, according to Piaget? 2. What can infants remember? 3. What do theorists and researchers believe about how we learn language? All the Systems Working Together LEARNING OBJECTIVES 1. Describe the development of the five senses during infancy. 2. Explain how infants perceive depth and pain. 3. Discuss the MMR vaccination controversy. 4. List the benefits of breastfeeding for mother and child. 5. Discuss what is known about sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). e have just explored some of the key as- pects of physical and cognitive development during the first two years of the lifespan. Interactions between these developmental domains produce various changes, most notably in sensa- tion, perception, health, nutrition, and sleep. Sensation Parents, health professionals, and developmentalists all share an interest in infants’ sensory capacities. What can a baby see at birth? Does a child’s hearing get better with age? How does touch affect an infant’s experiences in the W 102 CHAPTER 3 Physical and Cognitive Development in Infancy: The First Two Years To understand why newborns have poor visual acuity, let us imagine for a moment a newborn boy trying to see his father’s face.
eBook - PDFVisualizing
The Lifespan
- Jennifer Tanner, Amy Warren, Daniel Bellack(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
Interac- tions between these developmental domains produce various changes, most notably in sensation, per- ception, health, nutrition, and sleep. Sensation Parents, health professionals, and developmental scien- tists all share an interest in infants’ sensory capacities. What can a baby see at birth? Does a child’s hearing get better with age? How does touch affect an infant’s W 96 CHAPTER 3 Physical and Cognitive Development in Infancy: The First Two Years To understand why newborns have poor visual acuity, let us imagine for a moment a newborn boy trying to see his father’s face. As he looks at his father, the very small muscles of his eyes (called ciliary muscles) work to move each eyeball and change the shape of each eye’s lens. These muscular changes aim to focus an image of the fa- ther on the retina. From there, the optic nerve transports the information to the brain’s occipital lobe. It is here that visual processing of the image actually takes place. In newborns, however, two primary issues affect the pro- cess: The ciliary muscles are not mature, and the vision center in the brain is not fully developed (Snowden et al., 2006). Thus, the newborn boy can make out his father’s face, but not all that clearly, especially if he is more than a foot away. With regard to color vision, infants as young as 2 weeks old can discriminate between colors, though not nearly as well as adults can (Snowden et al., 2006). By about 4 months, though, infants appear to have fully developed color perception (Okamura, Kanazawa, & Yamaguchi, 2007). Why the delay? Because the neurons in the retina that respond to color, called cones, are still developing in the months after birth. Finally, an infant’s ability to scan the environment also changes over the first few months. Immediately after birth, newborns prefer to look at the contours of faces and objects, suggesting that they find areas with the most contrast interesting.
eBook - PDF- Phillip T. Slee, Marilyn Campbell, Barbara Spears(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Jerome Bruner and cognitive development The North American psychologist Jerome Bruner has written extensively on the nature of children’s cognitive development. Like that of Piaget, Bruner’s theory involves a series of stages. Bruner has been greatly influenced by the thinking of Piaget and the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky. While Bruner’s theory is similar to Piaget’s in many respects, it also differs in crucial aspects. For Bruner, language is intimately related to a child’s cognitive growth. In his view, thinking would not be possible without language. Bruner ( 1987 ) has also argued that the competencies of children are greater than Piaget’s theory leads us to believe. He places great emphasis on the child as a social being whose competencies ‘are interwoven with the competencies of others (Bruner 1987 , p. 11). Bruner ( 1966 ) has identified three major themes in understanding cognitive growth and the conditions that shape it. 176 Part 3 Infancy 1. The first theme relates to how humans organise and represent their experience of the world. Bruner argues that as children develop they pass through three stages or three modes of representing their world: enactive, iconic and symbolic. Each of these three modes enables the child to represent the world in unique ways (Bruner 1987 ). 2. A second theme in his theory relates to the impact of culture on growth. Bruner notes that cognitive growth is shaped as much ‘from the outside in as the inside out’ (Bruner 1966 , p. 13). 3. A third major theme in Bruner’s view relates to the evolutionary history of humans. Bruner believes that humans are particularly suited to adapting to their environment by social means rather than by morphological means (Bruner 1986 ). Enactive representation According to Bruner ( 1966 ), the first way that infants understand their world is through their actions. The stage of enactive representation is equivalent to Piaget’s sensori-motor period.
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