Infant Cognitive Development

Study Notes

Infants remember some information because without memory, they would be unable to speak, recognize others, and show cognitive development.
Serve and return interactions shape brain architecture, which provides the foundation for all future learning, behavior, and health.

The development of a child's brain architecture provides the foundation for all future learning, behavior, and health.
Children's emotional development is built into the architecture of their brains.

Jean Piaget suggests that infants learn by doing, and knowledge is the product of direct motor behavior.
Piaget's approach to cognitive development occurs in an orderly fashion, with children passing through a series of universal stages in a fixed order.
The quantity of information acquired in each stage increases, and the quality of knowledge and understanding grows too.

Piaget believed that infants have mental structures called schemes, which refer to mental patterns, operations, and systems.
Schemes are an organized pattern of sensorimotor functioning that adapt and change with mental development.
Schemes are displayed by the way an infant reacts when given a new object, such as a cloth book.

Assimilation is the process in which people understand an experience in terms of their current stage of cognitive development and way of thinking.
Accommodation is a change in existing ways of thinking that occurs in response to meet with new stimuli or events.
Assimilation occurs when a stimulus or event is acted on, perceived, and understood in accordance with existing patterns of thought.
Accommodation takes place when existing ways of behaving, thinking, and understanding become altered to fit or match new experiences.

The sensorimotor period is the primary stage of cognitive development, which can be broken down into 6 substages.
Substage 1: Simple Reflexes (first month of life) - the infant's interactions with the world are centered around reflexes.
Substage 2: First Habits and Primary Circular Reactions (1-4 months) - infants begin to coordinate what were separate actions into single, integrated activities.
Substage 3: Secondary Circular Reactions (4-8 months) - infants take major steps in shifting their cognitive horizons beyond themselves and begin to act on the outside world.
Substage 4: Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions (8-12 months) - infants begin to use more calculated approaches to producing events, coordinating several schemes to generate a single act.
Substage 5: Tertiary Circular Reactions (12-18 months) - infants develop what Piaget regards as the on-purpose variation of actions that bring desirable consequences.
Substage 6: Beginning of Thought (18 months to 2 years) - the major achievement of this stage is the capacity for mental representation or symbolic thought.### Cognitive Development: Substage 5 - Tertiary Circular Reactions
Infants can mentally represent unseen directions of objects, allowing them to predict where an object will emerge if it rolls under a piece of furniture.
They can imagine where objects might be, even if they cannot see them.
Piaget believed that by this stage, infants can create internal representations of objects and events.

Children can create mental representations of past events or objects, which improves their understanding of causality.
They can plot in their head the unseen direction of objects.
Piaget's observation of his son Laurent's efforts to open a garden gate illustrates the beginning of thought in infants.

Provide infants with opportunities to explore the world and investigate their environment.
Be responsive to infants on both a verbal and nonverbal level, speaking with them and listening to their responses.
Ensure the environment contains a variety of toys, books, and other sources of stimulation.
Read to infants, even if they don't understand the meaning of words, as it creates a lifelong reading habit and provides intimacy.
Don't push infants too hard or expect too much too soon, allowing them to reach their potential in a warm and nurturing environment.
Infants learn through cuddling, listening to language, experimenting with sounds, moving their bodies, and exploring their environment.
Healthy brain development is achieved through nurturing and responsive care for a child's body and mind.