Cognitive Development in Infants

• Cognitive development occurs during the first three years of life.
• Explain and differentiate various approaches in understanding cognitive development.
• Learn various techniques and child-rearing practices that facilitate cognitive development.
• Identify appropriate tests to assess a toddler’s developmental and IQ.
• Learn the importance of social context in the development of intelligence and executive function.

Infant Memory

• Infantile amnesia refers to the inability to recall events before 2 years old.
• Piaget theorized the brain is underdeveloped to recall before 2 years old.
• Freud suggested memories from before 2 years old, are stored but repressed because they are emotionally troubling.
• Young infants' memory of a behavior seems to be linked with original cue.
  • The absence of a cue may not stimulate the memory of an infant.

Approaches

• Behaviorist approach focuses on basic mechanics of learning, examining how behavior changes in response to experience.
• Psychometric approach deals with quantitative differences in abilities, using tests to indicate/predict abilities.
• Piagetian approach is centered on the quality of cognitive functioning and how the mind structures its activities to adapt to environment.
• Information-processing approach studies perception, learning, memory, and problem-solving, focusing on how information is processed from when it is encountered until used.
• Cognitive neuroscience approach examines the structures of the brain to determine which part of the brain is involved in cognition.
• Social-contextual approach emphasizes the roles of environment, caregivers, and peers in affecting learning.

Behaviorist Approach

• Classical conditioning involves learning a reflex or involuntary response to a stimulus that originally does not elicit such a response.
• Extinction happens when a conditioned response is not reinforced by repeated association.
• Operant conditioning: The likelihood of a behavior to occur or disappear is influenced by the consequences of the behavior itself.
  • Reinforcement strengthens behavior.
  • Punishment weakens behavior.

Psychometric Approach

• Intelligence enables people to acquire, remember, and utilize knowledge.
• Intelligence behavior is goal-oriented and adaptive.
• IQ tests seek to measure intelligence by comparing test-takers to standardized norms.

Testing Infants and Toddlers

• IQ tests for adults are equivalent to development tests for infants/toddlers.
• Bayley's Scale of Infant and Toddler Development is administered from 1 month to 3 1/2 years.
• Developmental areas assessed include cognitive, language, motor, socio-emotional, and adaptive behavior.
  • A developmental quotient is provided for early detection of emotional disturbance, sensory and neurological issues.

Early Home Environment

• HOME (Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment) is used to measure the influence of the home environment on an infant’s cognitive growth.
• A key factor is the quality of the home environment, assessing whether there is enough cognitive stimulation.

Piagetian Approach

• Sensorimotor stage involves learning about themselves through sensory and motor experience.
• Circular reaction causes the majority of cognitive growth.
• Circular reaction includes learning and reproducing behavior discovered by chance.

Sub-Stages of Sensorimotor Stage

• Use of reflex (0-1 month) involves exercising inborn reflexes without coordinating information from the senses, with infants not grasping objects they are not looking at.
• Primary Circular Reactions (1-4 months) involve the repetition of pleasurable behaviors that occurred by chance.
• Secondary Circular Reactions (4-8 months) involve the repetition of behaviors with interesting results, intentional but not goal-directed actions.
  • Includes shaking a rattle, and they may do intentional actions without goals.
• Coordination of Secondary Schemes (8-12 months) entails deliberate and intentional behaviors, anticipating future events.
  • Crawling towards something they want applies.
• Tertiary Circular Reactions (12-18 months) display curiosity and experimentation of actions to produce different results, including trial-and-error.
  • Involves playfully varying actions to see results.
• Mental Combinations (18-24 months) entails anticipating consequences without actual action, demonstrating insight.
  • It involves capacity to store mental images and symbols of objects.

Key Developments of the Sensorimotor Stage

• Imitation occurs at a later age.
• Deferred imitation is the reproduction of imitated behavior after some time like 18 months.
  • Infants are not capable of deferred imitation due to the lack of mental representations.
• At 8 months, infants act as if an object no longer exists if it is out of sight.
• Object permanence at 18-24 months occurs when objects continue to exist even if they are out of sight.
• At age 2, a picture is recognized as both an object and a symbol.
• Scale error is a momentary misperception of the relative sizes of objects.
• Dual representation hypothesis: A child (age 3) has difficulties with spatial relations.
  • It involves the inability to keep more than one mental representation in mind simultaneously.