First Three Years - Cognitive Development

P 123
MASTERY IN THEORIES OF PERSONALITY/DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

Cognitive Development during the First Three Years
Learning Outcomes:
At the end of the lesson, you should be able to:
 Identify the six approaches to study of cognitive development.

 Explain the theory of Piaget in cognitive development
 Describe the development of language in infancy
I. Studying Cognitive Development:

Six Approaches
 Behaviorist approach: studies the basic mechanics of learning

o how behavior changes in response to experience
 Psychometric approach: measures quantitative differences in abilities
 Piagetian approach: looks at stages in the quality of cognitive functioning
o concerned with how the mind structures its activities and adapts to the
environment
 Information-processing approach: focuses on perception, learning, memory, and
problem solving.
o how children process information from the time they encounter it to the time
they use it
 Cognitive neuroscience approach: seeks to identify what brain structures are involved
in specific aspects of cognition.
 Social-contextual approach: focus on environmental influences, particularly parents
and other caregivers.
II. Behaviorist Approach: Basic Mechanics of Learning
Babies are born with the ability to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, along with some ability
to remember what they learn
 Classical and Operant Conditioning

 Classical conditioning: a person learns to make a reflex response to a
stimulus that did not originally evoke a response.
 Operant conditioning: the consequences of behaviors and how they
affect the likelihood that they will happen again
o Reinforcement vs. punishment
Infant memory:
 Infantile amnesia: Inability to remember early events

 Abilities develop as they become useful for adapting to the environment
 Researchers have determined that the length of time a conditioned response lasts,
increases with age
 Infant memory processes- retention time is shorter and memory is more dependent on
encoding cues
○Memory can be aided by reminders
III. Psychometric Approach: Developmental and Intelligence Testing
 Intelligence enables people to acquire, remember, and use knowledge to understand

concepts and relationships and to solve everyday problems
 Intelligent behavior: goal oriented (exists for the purposes of attaining a goal) and
adaptive (helps an organism adjust to the varying circumstances of life
 IQ (intelligence quotient) test: shows how much of the measured abilities a person has
by comparing that person’s performance with norms established by a large group of
test-takers
Testing Infants and Toddlers
 Impossible to measure intelligence, so development tests are used to test functioning

 based off “the average baby”
 Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development: scores indicated a child’s compete
ncies in each of five developmental areas (cognitive, language, motor, social-
emotional, adaptive behavior
Early Intervention
 Early intervention: providing services to help families meet young children’s
developmental needs
 Findings prove that early educational intervention can help offset environmental risks
and provide significant benefits
 Most effective early intervention- enrolling in preschool that is highly time-intensive, is
center based (direct educational experiences) and is tailored to individual differences
and needs and taking a comprehensive approach (health, family counseling, social
services)
IV. Piagetian Approach: The Sensorimotor Stage
To Piaget, cognitive development among children has four phases. Children generally
move through these different stages of mental development. Each stage describes how
children acquire knowledge and the nature of intelligence.
 Sensorimotor Stage: (Birth to age 2)

The main achievement during this stage is object permanence - knowing that an
object still exists, even if it is hidden. It requires the ability to form a mental
representation (i.e., a schema) of the object.
 Preoperational Stage. (From age 2 to age 7)
During this stage, young children can think about things symbolically. This is the ability
to make one thing - a word or an object - stand for something other than itself.
Thinking is still egocentric, and the infant has difficulty taking the viewpoint of others.
 Concrete Operational Stage. (From age 7 to age 11)
Piaget considered the concrete stage a major turning point in the child's cognitive
development because it marks the beginning of logical or operational thought. This
means the child can work things out internally in their head (rather than physically try
things out in the real world). Children can conserve number (age 6), mass (age 7), and
weight (age 9). Conservation is the understanding that something stays the same in
quantity even though its appearance changes.
 Formal Operational Stage. (Age 11+ - adolescence and adulthood)

The formal operational stage begins at approximately age eleven and lasts into
adulthood. During this time, people develop the ability to think about abstract
concepts, and logically test hypotheses.
V. Information-Processing Approach
 Habituation: Type of learning in which familiarity with a stimulus reduces, slows or stops
a response.
Habituation can assist a child in focusing on other important activities by allowing them to
operate in a dynamic environment. After a child has become familiar with a certain type
of environment, they will stop concentrating on it or pay less attention to it. They will now
start paying attention to another type of environment.
 Dishabituation: Increase in responsiveness after presentation of a new stimulus.

VI. Cognitive Neuroscience Approach
Piaget’s assumption that neurological maturation is a major factor in cognitive
development.
 Implicit memory: Unconscious recall, generally of habits and skills; sometimes called
procedural memory. Explicit memory is the intentional and conscious memory,
generally of facts, names and events. Information that people don't purposely try to
remember is stored in implicit memory, which is also sometimes referred to as
unconscious memory or automatic memory. This kind of memory is
both unconscious and unintentional. Implicit memory and explicit memory are both
types of long-term memory.
Example: Knowing how to ride a bike or read a book relies on implicit memory. Consciously
recalling items on your to-do list involves the use of explicit memory.
VII. Social-Context Approach
 Guided participation refers to mutual interactions with adults that help structure
children’s activities and bridge the gap between a child’s understanding and an
adult’s. This concept was inspired in Vygotsky’s view of learning as a collaborative
process.
VIII. Language Development
Sequence of Early Language Development
 Prelinguistic Speech: Forerunner of linguistic speech; utterance of sounds that are not
words. Includes crying, cooing, babbling and accidental and deliberate imitation of
sounds without understanding their meaning. Babies typically say their first word
around the end of the 1st year, and toddlers begin speaking in sentences about 8
months to a year later.
 Early Vocalization: Crying is a newborn’s first means of communication.
 Babbling: Repeating consonant vowel strings, such as “ma-ma-ma-ma” occurs
between ages 6 and 10 months.
 Gestures: Before babies can speak, they point. Symbolic gestures, such as head nod,
hand waves, often emerge around the same time as babies say their first words.
First Words: By 13 months, most children understand that a word stands for a specific thing or
event, and they can quickly learn the meaning of a new word. Additionally, they may use a
simple syllable to mean more than one thing, "one word = one sentence" pattern, this is what
you called as holophrase. For example, “Da!” may mean “Where is Daddy?”
First Sentences: A toddler puts two words together to express one idea. Generally, children
do this between 18 and 24 months. A child’s first sentences typically deal with everyday
events, things, people, or activities.
 Telegraphic speech: early form of sentence use consisting of only a few essential
words. Example: “Damma deep” this might mean “Grandma is sweeping the floor”.
Classic Theories of Language Acquisition:
 Skinner maintained that language learning is based on experience and learned

associations. Children learn language through the process of operant conditioning.
For example, Lila is babbling “da”. Her parents hear her and provide her with smiles,
and attention for the sound. Lila is thus reinforced and continues to say “da”.
 Noam Chomsky’s Nativism emphasizes the active role of the learner. He believes that
the basic concepts of language are innate and are influenced by language
environments.
Language acquisition device (LAD): In Chomsky’s terminology, an inborn mechanism
that enables children to infer linguistic rules from the language they hear.
For example, children growing up in England would hear English and therefore learn
English. He suggests that a child's predisposition to learn a language is triggered when
they hear speech and that their brains begin to interpret what is heard based on
underlying structures and principles it already 'knows'.
References:
Papalia, D., & Matorell, G. (2021) Experience human development. USA: McGraw-Hill

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P 123

MASTERY IN THEORIES OF PERSONALITY/DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

At the end of the lesson, you should be able to:

 Identify the six approaches to study of cognitive development.

I. Studying Cognitive Development:

 Behaviorist approach: studies the basic mechanics of learning

 Classical and Operant Conditioning

 Infantile amnesia: Inability to remember early events

 Intelligence enables people to acquire, remember, and use knowledge to understand

 Impossible to measure intelligence, so development tests are used to test functioning

 Sensorimotor Stage: (Birth to age 2)

 Formal Operational Stage. (Age 11+ - adolescence and adulthood)

 Dishabituation: Increase in responsiveness after presentation of a new stimulus.

VII. Social-Context Approach

 Skinner maintained that language learning is based on experience and learned

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