• Cognition underlies perception and interpretation of experiences. Three themes:
1. Orderly nature of cognitive development.
2. Infants are active participants in their own development.
3. Infant cognitive development is marked by both advances and limitations:
• Basic understanding of the physical world.
• Ability to use basic cognitive tools (e.g., categorization).
• Ability to combine actions into sequences to achieve desired ends.
• More powerful and flexible memory abilities.
• Emphasize perceptual information and action as sources of knowledge of the world.
• Absence of language and related symbolic abilities.
• Limited flexibility in many emerging cognitive abilities.
• Limited memory capacity.

Piaget's Theory of Infant Cognitive Development

• Piaget's conclusions about infant cognition based on systematic observations have powerfully influenced the field of infancy research; many developmentalists disagree with Piaget.
• Assumptions about the Nature of Infants
• Sensorimotor period - infants' awareness of the world is limited to what they know through sensory processes and motor acts. Based on motor and mental activity.
• Processes of Developmental Change
• Two key mechanisms:
• Adaptation - process by which children change to function more effectively in their environment, occurs due to the joint product of two processes.
1. Assimilation - involves applying an existing capability without modifications to various situations.
2. Accommodation - the process of modifying an existing strategy or skill to meet a new demand of the environment.
• Infants' skills reflect underlying cognitive structures called schemes (e.g., sucking, grasping, looking), which are sensorimotor during infancy.
• The theory also includes a mechanism to keep cognitive development moving forward, equilibration, which is a self-regulatory process producing increasingly effective adaptations. When the infant functions adaptively, he is in a state of equilibrium (balance) but sometimes an infant will encounter new skill situations and will experience disequilibrium.
• Sensorimotor Stages
1. The sensorimotor period is divided into six substages.
2. Three important points to remember:
• Piaget was describing the most advanced level of performance for each stage.
• The age ranges are only approximate. What is important is the sequence of stages.
• Piaget's stages are only one way of describing infant cognitive development.
3. Stage 1: Reflexes (Birth to 1 Month) - infants operate on the basis of reflexes. These built-in responses are the building blocks for later development.
4. Stage 2: Primary Circular Reactions (1 to 4 Months) - A circular reaction is a behavior that produces an interesting event (initially by chance) and so is repeated. Infants begin to show primary circular reactions, involving their own bodies (e.g., thumb sucking).
5. Stage 3: Secondary Circular Reactions (4 to 8 Months) - Infants produce secondary circular reactions, in which they actively experience the effects their behaviors have on external objects (association between behaviors and sensory consequences).
6. Stage 4: Coordination of Schemes (8 to 12 Months) - infants put actions together into goal-directed chains of behavior, coordination of schemes. Can anticipate future consequences of motor actions.
7. Stage 5: Tertiary Circular Reactions (12 to 18 Months) - As with primary and secondary circular reactions, a tertiary circular reaction begins when some action accidentally leads to an interesting sensory consequence. But rather than just repeating the same behavior, the infant "experiments" and varies it in a purposeful, trial-and-error way.
8. Stage 6: Beginnings of Representational Thought (18 to 24 Months) - marks the start of the transition from sensorimotor to symbolic or representational thought. The child becomes capable of deferred imitation and is able to start to solve certain types of problems mentally without having to go through the physical actions involved.

• Piaget's descriptions of infant behavior were quite accurate but his explanations have been challenged regarding the following:
1. Timetable for the emergence of cognitive skills. He underestimated the skills of infants at various ages. He credited infants with a skill only when it was well developed.
2. Existence of qualitatively distinct developmental stages. Simultaneous progress of skills is assumed with Piaget's theory. Yet, there is inconsistency in infant's achievements (Piaget called it dècalage). Many argue that cognitive development is the acquisition of separate skills.
3. Range of innate abilities. Piaget argued that infants are born only with a set of reflexive behaviors while others, neo-nativists, argue that babies have a relatively broad range of innate abilities and knowledge (specific learning mechanisms to guide development).
4. Source of infants' cognitive limitations. Abilities are limited by sensorimotor cognitive structures and lack of representational abilities. Others argue that it is a limit in their working memory.

Infants' Understanding of the Physical World

• Infants develop increasingly flexible strategies for exploring and manipulating their environment. They must construct this knowledge over time. Neo-nativists contend that a basic understanding of physical reality is built into babies at birth or is developed shortly thereafter.
• Concept of Objects
1. Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight. Piaget's account of this ability is as follows:
• In stages 1 and 2, infants appear to not have any understanding of object permanence.
• Stage 3 infants show that a partial view of something is now enough to remind them of the whole (need perceptual cues of existence of objects).
• Stage 4 infants will search for hidden objects, yet show the A-not-B error.
• Stage 5 infants will search for a hidden object wherever it disappeared last from sight, yet do not understand invisible displacements.
• Stage 6 infants have a mature understanding of object permanence.
2. Further Research on Infants' Understanding of Objects
• Earlier ages for reaching object permanence milestones have been noted. An age limitation of Piaget's tasks is the need for manual search and memory. Some have used habituation, as discussed in Chapter 4, to minimize search and memory constraints. Less stringent criteria are used in research presently.
3. Perception of Partially Hidden Objects
• Some, using variants of a habituation technique, have shown that 3.5- to 4.5-month-olds show some knowledge of object properties when the objects are partially hidden.
4. Evidence of Object Permanence in Stage 3 Babies
• 4- to-8-month-olds have some understanding of object permanence (research by Baillargeon is presented). Object permanence seems to develop before the ability to mentally represent a hidden object's size and location.
5. Explaining Infants' Search Behavior
• Infants may have trouble with the means-ends behavior required to search for hidden objects-lifting a cloth to allow retrieval of a toy under it.
• The A-not-B error may be due to memory limitations.
• The A-not-B error may be due to the inability to inhibit the reinforced response.
6. Summarizing research on the object concept
• Piaget was accurate about the sequence in which the object concept is acquired but underestimated the rate of acquisition.
• Basic understanding of object permanence emerges sometime between 3 and 5 months of age.
• Object search behavior lags considerably behind object-related looking behavior.
• The use of research methods that catch more subtle signs of understanding than Piaget's methods are still emerging.
• Causality and Other Relations Between Objects
• Infants need to understand relations between objects to make sense of the stream of perceptual information they receive from the world around them, such as with understanding causality.
• Infants begin understanding causal connections between simple, specific events at about 6 to 7 months of age.
• Older infants show increasing understanding of the specifics of physical support.
• Number
1. Awareness of number is an important tool for understanding the physical world, which appears to be minimally available to infants younger than 7 months.
2. Spelke and her colleagues found that babies remember and match a more abstract concept of number, not just the physical characteristics of stimuli.
3. Some (e.g., Wynn) have found that babies detect changes in number (early arithmetic).
• Categorization
• Categories allow infants to group things in the world together and to treat the members of a group as similar.
• Category formation on the basis of specific perceptual characteristics has been noted in young infants (3 months). This ability is not concept-based.
• From 6 to 12 months, infants begin to form conceptual categories that cover larger domains and include greater perceptual variability.
• By 14 months infants apply categories in their behavior with objects, which become increasingly more specific to subcategories around 18 months.

• Piaget believed that infants are capable of recognition memory -- simply perceiving a particular stimulus as familiar (could be based on sensorimotor information and schemes).

• Piaget believed that infants were not capable of recall memory, actively retrieving information from memory, until they have the capacity for mental representation. Infants start to use mental representations earlier than Piaget believed.

1. Newborns have some memory capabilities (see Chapter 4).
2. Until after 3 months, babies have trouble storing information about even simple relationships between visual stimuli.
3. Recognition memory is durable, lasting several weeks, for infants at about 3 months of age (e.g., Rovee-Collier's mobile kicking studies in which there is evidence of a form of cued-recall in young infants).
4. Memory in the first six months seems to be highly context-bound and depends on immediate perceptual cues.

• Memory in Later Infancy

1. Between 6 and 18 months, infants show evidence of the ability to hold information in working memory briefly before using it to initiate some action. Clearest evidence of this is the gradual mastery of object permanence.
2. Older infants retain memories and engage in recall. Deferred imitation has been shown in 9-month-old infants over a 24-hour delay, in 11-month-olds over a 3-month delay, and with 16-month-olds over an 8-month delay. Spontaneous recall has been noted from diary studies (Ashmead and Perlmutter's research).

• Memory covers several rather different processes that emerge at different points in infancy and develop on different timetables.

• There is a distinction made between explicit (declarative) memory, conscious memory of ideas or representations of images, and implicit (procedural) memory, unconscious memory for skills or procedures.

• Memory in the first 6 months depends mainly on implicit memory and is under the control of the cerebellum (motor) and hippocampus (new memories)

• After 6 months, the development of memory functions is explicit in nature and is under the control of higher brain centers such as the cerebral cortex (and its connections to other centers such as the hippocampus).

• The above helps explain infantile amnesia-adults' inability to recall memories from infancy.

• Piaget stated that the role of the environment was to provide an overall context for children to explore, leading to cognitive growth. Cross-cultural research has found striking similarities across cultures in the process of sensorimotor development.

• Information-processing psychologists see the environment as providing more specific pieces of information or contexts for practicing more specific skills.

• Those working from a sociocultural perspective (based on Vygotsky) argue that adults structure the environment to foster the kind of learning they deem most important for children (e.g., more cognitive and linguist advances in middle class children than in those of lower SES).

1. Infants are more like guided tourists than like explorers as they develop cognitively.
2. In some cases, infants can learn more rapidly from adults and in other cases are only able to learn things with substantial support from adults.
3. The skills that children learn from adults are almost always highly valued within those adults' social context or culture.

• Tests have been devised to measure individual differences in infant behavior (e.g., Bayley Scales of Infant Development, the Gesell Developmental Scale, and the Cattell Intelligence Tests for Infants and Young Children).

• Researchers investigate whether performance on infant tests is predictive of a child's performance on cognitive tests. Scores on developmental tests in infancy and toddlerhood do not appear to be predictive of later IQ. Issue of differences in what is being measured in infant tests and what is being measured in older child IQ tests. A correlation of .40 has been noted between cognitive abilities in infancy and cognitive skills in later childhood (issues of group results vs. individual results).

• Information-processing factors such as duration of time to habituate is predictive of IQ as late as age 11 or 12.

• Two variables measured in the newer infant IQ tests is particularly important for predicting future IQ: speed of information processing and capacity of working memory.

• As Piaget noted, infants gradually make the transition from a reflexive organism to a reflective organism. This helps prepare the infant for the verbal world of toddlerhood.

• Infants make major leaps in development at about 3 to 4 months and again at 7 to 8 months, occurring with changes in brain structure and function.

• A stimulating physical and social environment is important for the underlying brain changes.

• Advances are made yet there are many limits in infant cognition. Their skills are fragile and not very generalizable, long-term memory capacities are limited, and symbolic activities (i.e., language) are just beginning.