Developmental Psychology

Chapter 5

1. Piagets Theory of Infant Development

COGNITIVE PROCESS Schemes -Actions or mental representations that organize knowledge -Piagets theory: behavioral schemes (physical activities) characterizes infancy and mental schemes (cognitive activities) develop in childhood -Sucking, looking, grasping and problem solving=schemes

Assimilation and Accommodation

-Assimilation: when children use their existing schemes to deal with new information or experiences -Accommodation: children adjust their schemes to take new information and experiences into account Organization -Grouping of isolated behaviors and thoughts into a higher-order system -Continual refinement of this organization is an inherent part of development Equilibration and Stages of Development -Children will experience cognitive conflict -Internal search of equilibrium creates motivation for change -Child assimilates and accommodates, adjusting old schemes, developing new schemes, and organizing and reorganizing the old and new schemes -Equilibration: mechanisms by which children shift from one stage of thought to the next -Cognition is qualitively different in one stage compared with another

Infancy

1. Piagets Theory of Infant Development

THE SENSORIMOTOR STAGE - Lasts from birth to about 2 years ago - Infants construct an understanding of the world by coordination sensory experiences -2 yr olds can produce complex sensorimotor patterns and use primitive symbols Substages (p149 Figure 5.1) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Simple reflexes First habits and primary circular reactions Secondary circular reactions Coordination of secondary circular reactions Tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and curiosity Internalization of schemes

Object Permanence - Problem: There is no differentiation between the self and the world; objects have no separate, permanent existence - By the end of the sensorimotor period, objects are both separate from the self and permanent - Object Permanence: understand that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched EVALUATING PIAGETS SENSORIMOTOR STAGE The A-not-B Error - Error that occurs when infants make the mistake of selecting the familiar hiding place (A) rather than the new hiding place (B) as they progress into substage 4 (coordination of secondary circular reactions) in Piagets sensorimotor stage - Only when the concept of object permanence is more complete, A-not-B error is not likely to be made - A-not-B error might be due to a failure in memory Perceptual Development and Expectations - Infants develop the ability to understand how the world works at a very early age - By 3 months old, they develop expectations about future events - 4 months: they expect objects to be solid and continuous - Expects object to be substantial (that other objects cant move through them) and permanent (object continues to exist even if hidden) - Infants see objects as bounded, unitary, solid and separate from their background much earlier than Piaget envisioned

Infancy

1. Piagets Theory of Infant Development

The Nature-Nurture Issue -Spelke: Core Knowledge ApproachI nfants are born with domain-specific innate knowledge systems -They are pre-wired to allow infants to make sense of their world -The Core Knowledge Approach argues that Piaget greatly underestimated the cognitive abilities of infants, especially young infants

Criticisms: -Infants in the number experiments are merely responding to changes in the display that violated their expectations -Infants that Spelke looked at have already accumulated thousands of experiences *Most developmentalists today agree that Piaget underestimated the early cognitive accomplishments of infants and that both nature and nurture are involved in infants cognitive development

Infancy

2. Learning, Remembering, and Conceptualizing

CONDITIONING -operant conditioning has helped researchers to determine what infants perceive ATTENTION -Focusing of mental resources on select information, improves cognitive processing on many tasks -Parietal lobes are active when infants orient their attention -Orienting/Investigative Process: involves directing attention to potentially important locations in the environment -Sustained Attention (Focused Attention): new stimuli typically elicit an orienting response followed by sustained attention. -Sustained attention allows infants to learn about and remember characteristics of a stimulus as it become familiar -3 months old engage in 5-10 seconds of sustained attention Habituation and Dishabituation -Habituation: decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated presentations of the stimulus -Dishabituation: is the increase in responsiveness after a change in stimulation -When object becomes familiar, attention becomes shorter, and infants become more vulnerable to distraction -Infants who were labeled short lookers because of the brief time they focused attention had better memory at 1 year of age than did long lookers who had more sustained attention -Habituation can also indicate whether infants recognize something they have previously experienced Joint Attention -Individual focus on the same object/ event Requires: 1. Ability to track anothers behavior (following the gaze of someone) 2. One persons directing anothers attention 3. Reciprocal interaction Increases infants ability to learn from other people When caregivers and infants frequently engage in joint attention, infants say their first word earlier and develop a larger vocabulary

Infancy

2. Learning, Remembering, and Conceptualizing

MEMORY -Attention plays an important role in memory as part of a process: Encoding process by which information gets into memory -Implicit Memory: memory without conscious recollection-memories of skills and routine procedures that are performed automatically -Explicit Memory: conscious memory of facts and experiences -Maturation of hippocampus and the surrounding cerebral context (especially frontal lobes) make the emergence of explicit memory possible -We cant remember our first birthday INFANTILE/ CHILDHOOD AMNESIA (early years, our prefrontal lobes of the brain are immature, therefore not able to store memory well IMITATION -Andrew Meltzeoff sees infants imitative abilities as biologically based because infants can imitate a facial expression within the first few days after birth -Concludes that infants dont blindly imitate everything they see and often make creative errors -Beginning at birth, there is an interplay between learning by observing and learning by doing -Deferred Imitation: occurs after a time delay of hours or days it occurs much earlier than what Piaget proposed (18 months) -Most common infant gestures: 1. extending the arm to show caregiver something the infant is holding 2. Pointing with the arm and index finger extended at some interesting object or event CONCEPT FORMATION AND CATEGORIZATION - Categories: they group objects, events, and characteristics on the basis of common properties - Concepts; ideas about what categories represent - Perceptual Categorization: categorizations based on similar perceptual features of objects (size, color, movement). Earlier age - Conceptual Categories: later age - Children develop an intense passionate interest in particular category of objects or activities

Infancy

3. Individual Differences and Assessment

MEASURES OF INFANT DEVELOPMENT Used to evaluate newborns: Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (NBAS) Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Network Neurobehavioral Scale (NNNS) Arnold Gesell developed a measure that helped sort out babies with normal functioning from ones with abnormal functioning 1. Motor 2. Language 3. Adaptive 4. Personal-social Developmental Quotient (DQ) combines subscores of above categories to provide an overall score. Bayley Scales of Infant Development: assess infant behavior and predict later development 1. Cognitive (administered to infants) 2. Language (administered to infants) 3. Motor (administered to infants) 4. Socioemotional (questionnaire to caregiver) 5. Adaptive (questionnaire to caregiver) Fagan Test of Infant Intelligence - Focuses on infants ability to process information in such ways as encoding the attributes of objects, detecting similarities and differences between objects, forming mental representations, and retrieving these representations PREDICTING INTELLIGENCE - Test scores on Gesell and Bayley scales do not correlate highly with IQ scores obtained in later childhood - Fagan test is correlated with measures of intelligence in older children - Habituation and dishabituation are linked to intelligence in childhood

Infancy

4. Language Development
DEFINING LANGUAGE -Form of communication -Infinite Generativity: ability to produce an endless number of meaningful sentences using a finite set of words of rules
LANGUAGES RULE SYSTEMS Phonology -Sound system of the language -Provides a basis for constructing a large and expandable set of words out of two or three dozen phonemes -Phoneme is the basic unit of sound in language Morphology -Refers to the units of meaning involved in word formation -Morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning, word or part of a word that cannot be broken into smaller meaningful parts - -erone who -Not all morphemes are words by themselves (pre-, -tion, -ing) -Morphemes have many jobs in grammar; marking tense and number Syntax -Involves the way words are combined to form acceptable phrases and sentences Semantics -Meaning of words and sentences -Some words like woman and girl may have same semantic features but differ in age -Semantic restrictions on how words can be used in sentences Pragmatics -The appropriate use of language in different contexts -Formal vs. informal

Infancy

4. Language Development
HOW LANGUAGE DEVELOPS
Recognizing Language Sounds -Long before infants begin to learn words, infants can make fine distinctions among the sounds of languages -Infants would need to fish out words from the nonstop stream of sound that makes up ordinary speech -Infants listen to familiar words for a second longer than new words Babbling and Other Vocalizations -Functions of these early vocalizations are to practice making sounds, to communicate, and to attract attention -Crying: signal distress and others -Cooing: usually express pleasure during interaction with the caregiver -Babbling: produce strings of consonant-vowel combinations Gestures -Some early gestures are symbolic -Pointing is considered by language experts as an important index of social aspects of language -Lack of pointing is a significant indicator of problems in the infants communication system -Parents in high socioeconomic status (SES) families were more likely to use gestures when communicating with their infants -14 months infants in high SES families are linked to larger vocabulary at 54 months First Words -Children understand their first word before they speak them -In infancy, receptive vocabulary (words that child understands)considerably exceeds spoken vocabulary (words the child uses) -Children often express various intentions with single words -Infants spoken vocabulary rapidly increases once the first word is spoken -18 month vocabulary spurt -Overextension: tendency to apply a word to objects that are inappropriate for the words meaning, dada to address father and all male figures -Underextension: tendency to apply a word too narrowly

Infancy

4. Language Development
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 verbs, and other connectives Mommy give ice cream
BIOLOGICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCES Biological Influences -Ability to speak and understand language requires a certain vocal apparatus and nervous system with certain capabilities -Particular regions of the brain are predispoed to be used for language Brocas area: left frontal lobe: produce words Wernickes area: brains left hemisphere involved in language comprehension -Damages to either of the above produces APHASIA: loss of impairment of language prccessing Noam Chomsky: Language Acquisition Device (LAD) biological endowment that enables the child to detect certain features and rules of language, including phonology, syntax and sematics Environmental Influences -Language represents nothing more than chains of responses acquired through reinforcement -Behaviorists view of language has several problems: 1. Does not explain how people create novel sentences 2. Children learn the syntax of their native language even if they are not reinforced for doing so - Therefore behavioral view is no longer considered a viable explanation of how children acquire language - BUT childrens environmental experiences influence their language skills - The support and involvement of caregivers and teachers greatly facilitate a childs language learning - Young children are intensely interested in their social world and their development , they can understand the intentions of other people - Michael Tomasello: Interaction View of language emphasize that children learn language in specific contexts - Maternal language and literacy skills + diversity in vocabulary is used to best predict childrens vocabulary development

Infancy

4. Language Development
-Child-directed Speech: language spoken in a higher pitch than normal with simple words and sentences (when we talk to baby) -Important function of capturing the infants attention and maintaining communication Other strategies: 1. Recasting: rephrasing something the child has said and turning it into a question or restating the sentence 2. Expanding: restating in a linguistically sophisticated form 3. Labeling: identifying the names of objects Children usually benefit when parents follow the childs lead, talking about things the child is interested in at the moment and when parents provide information that children can process

Storybook reading is beneficial to children when parents extend the meaning of the text by discussing it with children and encouraging them to ask and answer questions
AN INTERACTIONIST VIEW - Environmental influences are also very important in development competence in language - Emphasizes that both biology and experience contribute to language development How Parents can facilitate infants and toddlers language development INFANTS 1. Be an active conversational partner 2. Talk as if the infant understands what you are saying 3. Use a language style you are comfortable with TODDLERS 1. Continue to be an active conversational partner 2. Remember to listen 3. Use language style you are comfortable with but consider ways of expanding childs language abilities 4. Adjust to your childs idiosyncrasies instead of working against them 5. Avoid sexual stereotypes

Infancy