CHAPTER 4: THE EMERGENCE OF THOUGHT & LANGUAGE—COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN INFANCY AND EARLY CHILDHOOD

Erica Jordan, Ph.D., University of West Florida

Jaclynn Lawhon & Stephanie Miller

DEP 2004 & 2004H

GUIDING QUESTIONS

How do children think and understand?

How does children’s thinking change over time according to? Piaget Information processing theorists

Jean Piaget’s Perspectiveon Children’s Thinking Children desire to make sense of their

experiences.

Children construct their understanding of the

world

Children create theories like scientists Though these theories are incomplete, they make

the world seem more predictable.

Piaget’s Basic Principles of Cognitive Development

Schemes: Psychological structures that organize experience.

Assimilation: Taking in information that is compatible with what one already knows.

Accommodation: Changing existing knowledge based on new knowledge.

Equilibration: A process by which children reorganize their schemes to return to a state of equilibrium when that is broken.

Jean Piaget’sStages of Cognitive Development

Stage One: Sensorimotor Infancy (0-2 years)

Sensorimotor Period: First of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, which lasts from birth to approximately 2 years. Between 1-4 months: Modified by experience.

Accident that is liked Action that the child tries to recreate.

Between 1-2 months: Deliberate behavior directed towards a goal.

About 12 months: Active experimenters.

Object Permanence: Understanding that objects exist independently of oneself. 8-18 months.

Stage Two: Preoperational Preschool & Early Elementary (2-7 years)

Symbols are words and gestures that signify something else. 18 months.

balldog

snow

Issues with Symbols and Young Children: Egocentrism: Difficulty seeing the world

from another’s point of view.

Animism: Crediting inanimate objects with life and lifelike properties, such as feelings.

Issues with Symbols and Young Children: Centration: Narrowly focused type of thought.

Concentrating on one part of a problem, and ignoring other aspects.

Conservation:

Appearance as Reality What you see is all there is to know.

Criticisms of Piaget’s Theory Underestimates cognitive competence in

infants and young children. Overestimates cognitive competence in adolescents.

Vague with respect to processes and mechanisms of change.

Does not account for variability in children’s performance.

Undervalues the influence of the sociocultural environment on cognitive development.

Children’s Naïve Theories Core Knowledge Hypothesis: Infants are

born with rudimentary knowledge of the world, which is elaborated based on experiences.

Naïve Physics Renee Baillargeon

Infants are surprised to see ‘impossible’ events, which suggests that they have some understanding of basic physics.

Red box experiment. Unsupported box experiment.

Children’s Naïve Theories Naïve Biology

Movement: Children understand that animate objects move themselves, but inanimate objects must be moved.

Growth: Children understand that animate objects grow and become more complex, inanimate objects stay the same.

Internal Parts: Children understand that the insides of animate objects contain different material than the inside of inanimate objects.

Inheritance: Children understand that only animate objects have offspring that resemble their parents.

Illness: Children believe that lifelong illnesses are more likely to be inherited from parents, while temporary illnesses are more likely to be transmitted through contact with others.

Healing: Children understand that animate objects heal, while inanimate objects must be fixed.

CHILDREN’S THOUGHT FROM AN INFORMATION-PROCESSING PERSPECTIVE Thought involves mental hardware and

mental software

This combination allows children to complete a task

Mental hardware—built-in neural structures that allow the mind to operate

Mental software—mental “programs” that are the basis for performing particular tasks

• As children develop their mental software is more complex and efficient

• Development of thought is viewed as relatively continuous

• Cognitive processes such as attention, learning, and memory become more sophisticated as children develop

ATTENTION—PROCESSES THAT DETERMINE WHICH INFO. WILL BE PROCESSED FURTHER

Orienting Response--an individual views a strong or unfamiliar stimulus, and changes in heart rate and brain-wave activity occur

Makes us aware of dangerous situations and important events

Habituation--the diminished response to a

stimulus as it becomes more familiar

Helps us to preserve our cognitive resources

LEARNING

When an infant is born they already have the mechanisms that help them learn from experience

Some forms of learning are:-Habituation (mentioned earlier)-Classical Conditioning-Operant Conditioning-Imitation

CLASSICAL CONDITIONING

A form of learning that involves pairing a neutral stimulus and a response originally produced by another

Gives infants a sense of order

They learn that a certain stimulus is a signal for what is going to happen next

Infants more often show classical conditioning when the stimulus is associated with something good and less likely with something unpleasant

OPERANT CONDITIONING

Focuses on the relation between the consequences of behavior and the likelihood that the behavior will recur

When a child behaves a certain way and is met with a positive consequence for that behavior, the child will most likely act that way again

When the child’s behavior has an unpleasant consequence they are less likely to repeat what they did

IMITATION

Older children, adolescents, and young adults learn a lot just by watching others perform a task

There is even some evidence that infants may imitate facial expressions

MEMORY

Young babies can remember events for days or weeks at a time

In Rovee-Collier’s experiment shows that there are 3 important features exist at 2-3 months:

1.) an event from the past is remembered2.) over time, the event can no longer be recalled3.) a cue can serve to dredge up a memory that

seems to have been forgotten

MEMORY CONT’D

Toddlers remember more events than infants and remember them for longer periods of time

This could be due to growth in the brain regions that support memory

-Hippocampus and amygdala, which are responsible for initial storage of information, develop by age 6 months-Frontal cortex, responsible for retrieving stored memories, develops by the 2nd year-Part of the hippocampus is not mature until 20 - 24 months

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY Emerges in the preschool years Memories of the significant events and experiences of

one’s own life Helps individuals to construct a life history Helps socially by allowing people to relate to others

experiences As children acquire more component skills their

autobiographical memory increases. Infants and toddlers are able to remember past events, along with this are language skills and a sense of self

When parents talk to their children about things that happened in the past week or remind children about upcoming events their autobiographical memories are said to be richer

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY CONT’D Cultural differences in autobiographical

memory is associated with parent-child conversations Europeans and North Americans typically remember more

events from their childhood and in more detail than other cultures

As mentioned earlier a child’s autobiographical memory contributes to a their sense of self During the first two years of life infants sense that they exist

independently in space and time. This provides coherence and continuity in a child’s experiences

LEARNING NUMBER SKILLS Infants have basic number skills even before

they know the names of numbers. They experience variations in numbers everyday

-ex: They are playing with 2 number blocks and sees that another baby has 3

• An infant learns that quantity is one of the ways that their world differs

• Experiments have shown that babies can even perform simple addition and subtraction

LEARNING NUMBER SKILLS CONT’D

• Also infants have shown to be able to compare quantities

• 6 month olds are sensitive to ratio’s. When shown stimuli that features two blue circles for every yellow circle they will look longer when they are shown four blue circles for every yellow circle next

• When adults placed two crackers in one container and three crackers in the next, the baby reached for the one with three crackers

LEARNING TO COUNT By age two most infants have learned some

numbered words and begin to learn to count. Their counting, however, is full of mistakes and may skip numbers….1,4,7,9

Gelman and Meck found that by age 3 children have mastered three basic principles of counting for objects up to five:1.) One-to-one principle: there must be one and only one number name for each object counted2.) Stable-order principle: number names must be counted in the same order3.) Cardinality principle: the last number name differs from the previous ones in a counting sequence by denoting the number of objects

LEARNING TO COUNT CONT’D For children, learning number names beyond 9 is

easier because it is based on rules that combine decade number names with unit names

Learning numbers beyond 10 is harder in the English language than any other language

Examples are eleven and twelve. In the english language these are irregular numbers.

In the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages eleven and twelve are expressed and ten-one and ten-two. There is a direct relationship between number names and base-ten systems.