Early Infancy: CognitionPiaget

• Jean Piaget (1896-1980)– Swiss Psychologist– Trained in Biology– Influenced by James Mark Baldwin, who

visited E. Claparede while Piaget worked with him in France

Piaget, cont’d• What is development?

– A self-regulating interaction between the child and the physical and social environment

• What develops?– Mental structures and schemes,which amount to

new forms of knowledge

• How does change occur?– Adaptation: assimilation and accomodation– Disequilibrium and equilibration– Internal organization

Piaget, cont’d• The Stages of Knowing in Infancy

– 1. Reflexive Schemes exercised and refined (B) (e.g., grasping, sucking, eye movements)

– 2. Primary Circular Reactions (1.5 mos) Schemes centered about the body become coordinated and repeated for sensory pleasure (e.g., kicking feet, blowing bubbles)

– 3. Secondary Circular Reactions (4 mos) Schemes that have an effect on the world out there repeated for joy of exploration (e.g., dropping toy off highchair, shaking rattle)

Piaget, cont’d• The Stages of Knowing in Infancy cont’d

– 4. Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions (8 mos) Now multiple schemes are coordinated and directed at objects in a goal directed way (e.g., push aside cloth to retrieve toy)

– 5. Tertiary Circular Reactions (12 mos) Active, purposeful exploration of the properties of objects and events, discovery of new means to old ends (e.g., pulling rug that toy is on in order to obtain it)

– 6. Mental Representation (18 mos) Ability to represent objects in their absence and invent new means of acting on objects through mental activity (e.g., deferred imitation, symbolic play, producing first drawing or first word)

Piaget, cont’d

• Object Permanence– Capacity to represent object or event in absence

of sensorimotor contact with it– First evidence comes around 8 mos when infant

will pull away a cloth covering an object hidden within view

– Infant still commits AnotB error - looks for object in previous place (A), even when she sees it hidden in a new place (B) -until 18 mos

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Recent Research on Infant Cognition

• Object Permanence: What do infants know about the world of objects?– Spelke

• Continuous movement implies single object moving across the field, discontinuous implies two objects

• 3-month-olds dishabituate to single rod when habituated to discontinuous movement, and to two rods when habituated to continuous movement

• Conclude infant considers continuous movement to signal 1 object moving through space

Recent Research on Infant Cognition

• Object Permanence, contd’– Baillargeon

• Infants view possible or impossible events

• 3 mo olds habituated to a rotating screen, then box placed behind screen and infant tested with possible (screen stops when it hits the box) or impossible (screen continues to rotate as if going through the box)

• Another version with tall, short carrots that appear or not in a gap in the screen

• Finds 3 mo olds dishabituate to the impossible event indicating they have knowledge of permanence of properties of an object

• Conclude infant may have knowledge before they can act on that knowledge

Recent Research on Infant Cognition

• Imitation– Meltzoff

• At issue is whether the imitation of a behavior requires representation, if so is Piaget underestimating the abilities of the infant?

• Imitation of basic body movements (tongue protrusion) at Birth (Meltzoff & Moore, 84) and after a 24 hr delay at 6 wks (Meltzoff & Moore, 94)

• Imitation of actions on novel toys after 24 hr delay at 9 mos (Meltzoff, 88)

• Imitation of intended actions at 2 years (Meltzoff, 95)

Intermodal Perception

Understanding Physics of Objects: Solidity

Understanding Physics of Objects: Gravity

Understanding Quantity

Implications of Recent Research for Piaget’s Theory

• Important cognitive abilities emerge in precursor form very early, even at Birth

• This competence may not be revealed in everyday behavior

• Full competence appears as suggested by Piaget• Knowledge construction is facilitated by motor

action but may also occur outside of that (as in perceptual learning and categorization)

Memory in Early Infancy

• Fagen reports gradual improvement in efficiency of habituation up to 5 mos

• Martin reports infants habituate more rapidly second day (3 mo-24 hr, 1 yr -1 wk)

• Rovee-Collier shows better recall in familiar environment, at 3 mo recall up to 2wk of contingency (e.g., kick for letters not numbers, or kick with left foot)

• Memory implies representation, but not full representation

Categorization in Early Infancy• Rovee-Collier’s memory experiment indicates

infants group together items with similar form

• Starkey, Spelke & Gelman habituated 1 mo olds to slides with 3 items, spatial arrangement and particular items varied, find dishabituate to change in number

• Ludemann shows categorization of pos/neg facial expressions from slides

• Quinn & Eimas show categorization of animal categories at 3-4 mos

Role of perceptual similarity in categorization

Understanding Intentional Action

Early Infant Cognition: Conclusions

• Infants are well equipped at Birth to construct a knowledge of the physical world as in imitation, perceptual categorization, intentional understanding and memory abilities

• A debate exists as to whether there exists innate knowledge as the Nativists suggest (Spelke), or whether this is constructed through action on the physical world as Piaget suggests.

• While there is considerable ability at B, there is also considerable refinement of ability through infancy

Social Bases of Cognition in Early Infancy

• Vygotsky– Social interaction the arena for cognitive

development

– Others scaffold the development of infants

– Scaffolding within reach (zone of proximal development)

Social Bases of Early Cognition: Language

• Traditional Debate Between Behaviorists (Skinner) and Nativists (Chomsky)– Behaviorism claims

• Language acquired through reinforcement

• Problem in explaining creative utterances

– Nativism claims • Universal, innate grammatical structure, LAD

• Problem: no empirical evidence for universals

Social Bases: Language, cont’d

• Social Interactionists (Bruner)– Children learn about language in everyday routines

• learn the pragmatics of conversation, turning-taking

– They already categorize and group the world • Associating words with these categories is then easy

– Learning how to use language consists of learning how to express communicatively about a world that is already organized in a non-linguistic way

Evidence for a Social Basis to Language

Contingency

• Trevarthan– Primary intersubjectivity (2 mos)– Secondary intersubjectivity (9 mos),

• Bigelow– Infants sensitive to contingency of live

interactions and respond negatively to delayed video interactions with mothers around 4 mos.

Social Bases of Language, Cont’d

• Tomasello– Joint Attention

• Attending to something outside of the dyad

– Tomasello & Farrar (83) • moms who had more joint attention with infants had

infants with higher vocabularies, follow-in better than directed conditions

– Baldwin (91) shows that the infant uses eye gaze to determine when to associate label with object

– Callaghan (99) show that joint attention episodes also facilitate the comprehension of visual symbols

Precursors to Verbal Communication

• Growth of intentionality– Both members of the dyad interact with the

intention to influence the other

• Greater flexibility of attentional capacity– Moving from dyadic to triadic interactions

• Ability to use symbols– Crossing the divide between the perceptual

world to the conceptual world

Precursors to Verbal Communication

• Topic Sharing– First communications occur in dyad (primary

intersubjectivity)– At 5-6 mos infant develops the manual skills to

explore objects and directs attention to objects more than people: attn to mom at 6 wks is 70%, at 26 wks is 30% (Fogel)

– At 9-10 mos infant begins to be able to coordinate attention to objects with a communicative partner (secondary intersubjectivity or joint attention)

Precursors to Verbal Communication

• Intentionality - beginning to understand that others have intentions toward you in communication and responding with your own intentions to influence the other

• Evidence for intentional understanding– Gaze alternation– Repair of failed messages– Ritualization of gestures

Precursors to Verbal Communication• Gestures

– Eg of pointing• Prior to 8 mos pointing occurs and is indicative of

interest in an object, an extension of reaching for the object, not yet communicative (Pointing-for-self)

• Pointing while gaze alternates between object and other (Pointing-for-others)

• By 2 yrs nonverbal gestures now used to symbolically represent objects, make requests, use of gestures deceases as verbal language increases to the language spurt of 18 mos

Scaffolding by Adults• Werker & McLeod show that

– infants prefer motherese or infant-directed speech, also occurs for deaf infants

• Nelson argues that – facilitative speech style of moms helps language acquisition, directive

style hinders it

• Tomasello shows that – labeling within joint attention episodes facilitates vocabulary acquisition

• Bruner suggests that – language learning is eased by the continuity between preverbal rule-based

activities and the demands of verbal communication

• All suggest that – language is greatly facilitated by social interaction and supports from

others