Cognitive Development Theories and Concepts

Theories and Concepts

• Domain General (Global): Cognitive abilities are interconnected, facilitating learning across different tasks.
• Domain Specific (Local): Cognitive abilities are specialized, with varying competence levels among individuals.
• Qualitative Changes: Focus on the nature of cognitive processes.
• Quantitative Changes: Focus on the amount of information processed, occurring in stages.
• Innate: Development occurs early, similarly across individuals, cultures, and contexts.
• Acquired: Development is extended, shaped more by environmental influences and varying across contexts.
• Empiricism: Knowledge arises from experiences and environment (Locke).
• Nativism: Knowledge is based on genetics and biological factors (Descartes).
• Working Memory Model: The central executive controls the visuo-spatial sketchpad, episodic buffer, and phonological loop.
  • Adults show the word length effect and use phonological interference.
  • Children develop these abilities around 5-6 years old.
  • Development is discontinuous and qualitative.

Research Methods

• Longitudinal Studies: Investigation involves the same participants over time to determine causal relations.
• Panel Studies: Examination of a single group without cohort effects.
• Multiple Cohort Studies: Rule out cohort effects by studying multiple groups experiencing different events.
• Intervention Studies: Considered optimal for determining causality.
• Cross-Sectional Studies: Participants of different ages studied simultaneously, lacks predictability
• Sequential Studies: Participants of different ages studied over time, considering age and cohort effects.

Attachment Theory

• Strange Situation Procedure (Ainsworth and Bell, 1970): Conducted on 12–20-month-olds to assess exploratory and attachment behaviors in a lab setting.
  • Frequency and intensity of behaviors like proximity seeking, contact maintaining, avoiding, resisting contact, and searching are observed.
• Attachment Q Sort: Used for children aged 12 months to 4/6 years involving natural observation for 1.5–2 hours to identify individual differences.
  • Researchers compare child behavior against a secure child prototype using rating cards and calculate a correlation score.
• Attachment Styles (Va IJzendoorn et al, 1998):
  • Secure: Child's distress reduces with caregiver; reacts positively upon reunion.
  • Avoidant: Child treats caregiver and stranger alike, avoids caregiver upon reunion and displays no distress upon separation.
  • Resistant: Contact with caregiver doesn't reduce distress, resists contact upon reunion, and shows marked distress upon separation.
  • Disorganized: Child may react with fear or disorientation, demonstrating inconsistent behavior upon reunion and separation.
• Adult Attachment Interview (16+ years): A standardized interview to assess attachment representation.
  • Analyzes how recollections are formed/content to identify individual differences.
  • Transcripts are scored for reflection and coherence.
• Attachment Styles Identified:
  • Secure: Individuals easily discuss relationships, are coherent, consistent, and understand difficulties.
  • Dismissive (Avoidant): Individuals dismiss the importance of relationships, difficulty remembering past.
  • Preoccupied (Resistant): Excessive attention to memories.
  • Unresolved (Disorganized): Traumatic experiences faced, focus remains on past unresolved issues.
• Universality of Attachment: Attachment behavior and preferential bonds with caregivers are universal to all infants.
• Normativity: The majority of infants exhibit secure attachment.
• Continuity: Attachment patterns are stable across the lifespan, where stable circumstances result in consistent attachment styles.
• Lawful Discontinuity: Attachment security can change from insecure to secure (or vice versa) due to life circumstances and parental sensitivity.
• Competence: Secure attachment promotes positive outcomes, allowing for autonomy and exploration.
• Sensitivity Hypothesis (Ainsworth): Parental sensitivity greatly influences a child's attachment security.
  • Parental Sensitivity: Involves accurately perceiving and responding promptly to infant signals.
  • Highly Insensitive Caregivers: Caregivers are geared to their own needs, interactions are prompted by their needs.
  • Highly Sensitive Parents: Respond to minimal cues from their children.
• Child-Driven Effect - Temperament: Individual differences in reactivity and self-regulation.
  • Tendency to approach or avoid stimuli
  • Lability/Stability of mood
  • May influence type of insecure attachment infants have with insensitive CG
• Attachment: A strong, affectionate bond, with a desire proximity/contact with an individual
• Attachment Behaviour: Actions aimed to attain or maintain this proximity.

Attachment - Related Issues

• Experience with parents influences ability to form bonds later (Bowlby 1977).
  • Explored through SSP and AAI.
• Attachment security is linked to greater social competence and fewer externalizing vs internalizing problems, attachment is related to mental health.
• Parental sensitivity may not be the primary determinant of attachment (disproved hypothesis).

Perception and Understanding in Infants

• Timeline: Visual preference (VP) is found in newborns, around 1 week old.
  • Infants show greater attention to faces over random patterns or colors.
  • Newborns can discriminate shapes (Salter et al 1983).
• Violation of Expectation (VoE): Observed in 3.5-month-olds, as they looked longer at impossible events.
• Measuring Techniques:
  • Visual preference (Fantz, 1961)
  • Preferential tracking (Johnson et al, 1991)
  • Visual habituation (Fantz, 1966)
  • Fixed-trial familiarization (Slater, 1983)
  • Violation of expectation (Baillargeon et al, 1985)
  • Eye tracking.
• Object Permanence: Infants understand objects exist even when hidden and relates to core knowledge, expanded at T6
  • Tested with violation of expectations
  • Habituated babies look at a rod moving behind a block.
    • Conditions of complete rod vs broken rod (moves in 2 directions)
• Facial Preferences in Utero:
  • 30-minute-old babies prefer tracking faces (Johnson et al, 1991)
  • Newborns prefer direct eye contact (cross-cultural) (Farroni et al, 2002)
  • Foetuses oriented towards upright face vs inverted face
• Auditory Perceptions in Utero: - Foetuses startle in response to loud noises. - Non-nutritive sucking: newborns suck more when perceiving something pleasant
  • 3-day-old infants differentiate mothers' voices through non-nutritive sucking (Decasper and Fifer, 1980).
  • Newborns preferred hearing their mother read a familiar story vs a stranger.
• Olfactory Senses in Utero:
  • The senses of smell and taste begin to develop early
    • Newborns orient towards pads with their mother's amniotic fluid (Schaal et al, 1998).
    • Newborns orient to pads with their mother's own milk
    • Infants weaned onto carrot juice-mixed cereal preferred it if their mothers consumed carrot juice during pregnancy (Menella et al, 2001).
• Trans-natal Chemosensory Continuity Hypothesis (Schaal, 2015): Prenatal exposures shape preferences after birth.
  • Uterine chemosensory environment prepares infant for postnatal sensory world.
• Touch/Tactile in Utero:
  • Different movements directed towards twin vs uterine wall (Castiello et al, 2010) use twins 14-18 weeks gestation.
• Multisensory Perception: Infants use all senses together, even arriving at differing times and spatial forms.
  • Cross-modal minding exists, sensory systems are not yet well-developed in infants.
  • Multisensory development is inspired by the Intersensory Redundancy Hypothesis
    • Infants identify information better when presented across senses versus only one sense.
  • Amodal info: Information available across modalities early in development.
  • Arbitrary correspondences: Learned associations between distinct information sources.

Memory Development

• Sensory Memory/Register: Where sensory information first enters the cognitive system before moving to working memory
  • Short-lived: 1 second for visual and 5 seconds for auditory information.
• Iconic Memory: (Blaser and Kaldy 2010) - 6-month-olds vs adults
  • Participants viewed 2-10 colored stars; after 1 second, two neighboring stars disappeared and reappeared, with one having changed color.
  • Eye-tracking identified which star was looked at longer; fixating on changed stars indicated memory of the old star and proven to exist
  • Estimated memory capacity is 5 items for kids, while adults can remember 5.75 items
• Implicit Memory: Recognition under Long-Term Memory (LTM). The ability to recognize stimuli and events as familiar. Usually stays out of conscious awareness and Unintentional.
  • 3-5-year-old implicitly memorize event at adult-level.
  • Recognition of Causal Events (Rovee-Collier et al, 1980)
    • 3 month olds attached ribbon to foot, measured baseline kick rate. Visit 2: attached ribbon to a stand to test long-term retention, memory was retained over 2-8 days.
    • Recognition of Words (Ungerer et al, 1978)
    • 14 days. Mom asked to repeat 2 words 60 times a day for 2 weeks. Tested recognition of these words vs own name 14hours and 28hours later. Recognition was better for these words vs name.
• Episodic Memory: The ability to remember specific events, studied via deferred or elicited imitation.
  • Model event for child
  • Test immediate recall
  • Test long-term retention
• Autobiographical Memories: Supported by factors arising post-3 years of age:
  • Development of narrative skills
  • Social sharing of memories and explicit rehearsal of past events
  • Understanding of time
• Strategies for Remembering:
  • Memory strategies: Explicit techniques to remember
  • Rehearsal: Repeating information helps transfer from working memory to long-term memory
  • Organization: Structuring information using categorical or hierarchical relationships.
• Metamemory: Involves understanding one's own memory capabilities.

Core Knowledge

• Theory of Core Knowledge: proposes there are many reason systems to gain knowledge about the world. Innate and species-generalizable.
• Object Core Knowledge: How infants analyse observed events, guides learning and exploration.
  • Methods:
    • Violation of expectation (VOE) via looking-time tasks
    • Habituation/familiarization followed by an unexpected/expected scenari
• Unity (Kellman and Spelke, 1983): 4 months - Infer boundaries of partly hidden objects by analysing movement (rod behind box)
  • Infants shown a rod moving back and forth behind a box
    • Infants surprise decreases if visible ends moved together in sync, as single, continuous object inferred
    • Surprise indicates if ends moved opposite direction.

Object Movement and Reaction

• Continuity (Spelke, 1995): Tested at 4 months, looks at how babies see movement behind a screen.

  • Babies expect objects exist in a continuous path, infants shown moving objects behind a screen. Surprise reaction is indicative of continuous object movement
  • When unexpected two seperate objects appear after continuous motion, babies suggest that they expected a single object.

• Solidity (Baillargeon, 1986 &Stahl &Feigenson, 2015): Car on a track at 6 and 8 months

  • Infants expect objects to prevent objects from move through them.
    • Objects are tested to move through each other and should show violate understanding of solidity.
  • Stahl &Feigenson shows how violations of physical expectations increases infant learning.

• Contact and Inertia (Muentener & Carey, 2010): 8 months looks at how infants needs to be touch to have interaction

  • Babies understand 2 key principles of physical interactions; Contact: object needs to touch to move and Inertia: Objects do not move on their own
    • Babies watched a toy train move box to cause it to move, assumed train's contact caused the cause
    • Showed to recognize objects require to exert force.

Object Understanding

• Gravity & Support (Needham & Baillargeon, 1993): 4 month looks if object can remain untouched
  • Infants are expected unsupported objects to fall.
    • Infants was shown a box placed on a ledge, with support.
    • Findings say when infants are surprise it remains in air. By months, understand basic principle of require visible support for sustainability.

Space

• Frames of reference for representing space
  • egocentric (viewer-dependent): objects relative to own body
  • Landmark based (viewer independent): relative to landmarks
  • Allocentric/ absolute (viewer-independent): relative to landscape/celestial constancies
• Newcombe (1999)-5m found that children use geometric properties to locate objects thru hiding in a sandpit study and show violation of expectations.
• Kaufman and Needham (2011-6.5m- how infant position change affect
• Infant habituated to pig in corner of table. 4 conditions (infant and/or display position changed or unchanged: infants/pig pig/infant move moves pig moves egocentric allocentric infants isdis- habiruantes when*

Numerical Cognition - Cardinality Principles

Numerical word can be applied to set, number represents all in set and ability to tell relations between numbers- Approximations of larger sets of values :Spelke & Xu (2000) 6mbabies habituated to 8/16 dots and test shown either same .1 diff dots * Reacted to number change therefore has numerosity:izard et al (2009) newborns: visually shown babies can matcharrays across .ynn (1992) watch screen cover toy show ablittyt to track . with precise representations ,tracks exact number crackers. Babies does look/searched looking for a boxes

Language and Thought

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• Miller et al (1995): tested for math ofus different to of11to