Introduction

Cognitive development in infancy refers to development in the way a baby thinks. This
includes his/her language, communication, and exploration skills. Examples of cognitive
activities include paying attention, remembering' learning to talk, interacting with toys, and
identifying faces.

Sensorimotor stage

· An analysis of the 6 substages of the sensorimotor stage of Piaget's cognitive development

shows that development begins from reflexive behaviors to more refined and more coordinated
activities. Cognitive development of infants evolves in orientation from becoming focused on
themselves to becoming object or world-oriented, from one that is action-based to one that is
mentally based, from one that does not involve much coordination of schemes to one involving
intentionality, novelty, and curiosity and from thinking that is purely sensorimotor to a symbolic
one.

· Piaget's substages are termed circular because the adaptive behavior to the world involves
repeated actions. Circular reactions are attempts: to repeat an event that the baby likes. Circular
reactions serve as the building blocks for intelligence (Pasek, P, and Golinkoff, R, 2003).

· Primary circular reactions are oriented toward the infant's own body, whereas secondary circular
reactions are aimed toward the environment including others. Here is an example of a primary
circular reaction: At first, by accident, the baby gets her thumb in her mouth. But she doesn't
know how to do it again. She waves her hand around and, after many attempts, eventually
succeeds in doing it again. Gradually, she learns how to do it at will (Pasek, K, and R. Golinkoff,
2003).

· Secondary cirçular reactions are repetitive actions that involve recreating events that 4-10-
month-old babies observe outside of their bodies, such as making their mobile crib shake by
kicking their legs (Pasek, K, and R.Golinkoff, 2003).

· Tertiary circular reactions, seen from approximately 10 to 18 months, are when a baby does
things over and over again, just a little differently each time. e.g. When a baby seems to enjoy
dropping the spoon over and over again in many different ways, a proof of the creation of novel
variations in events. Piaget described the baby at this stage as "the scientist." When parents
don't understand their child's behavior, they see this act as abusive and get frustrated.

· From dropping the spoon many times in many different ways, the baby discovers a pattern
"objects fall - not up." They create the patterns with their repetitive actions and then evaluate
them. Babies are born pattern seekers (Pasek, K, and R. Golinkoff, 2003).

· Acquiring the sense of object permanence is one of the infant's most important
accomplishments, according to Piaget." Object permanence is the understanding that objects
continue to exist even when the objects are not immediately perceptible through the senses.
Before the infant acquires the sense of object permanence, the principle that applies is "out of
sight, out of mind."

There are some criticisms of Piaget's theory on cognitive development. One criticism
from other developmental theorists is his fundamental assumption that cognitive
development occurs in a fixed sequence of discontinuous spurts across task domains, tasks,
and contexts. Many theorists (e.g. Brainerd, 1978) believe that cognitive development
occurs as a continuous process rather than in discontinuous stages of development. Recent
studies in the cognitive development of infants support the view that Piaget underestimated
young infants' cognitive ability. Furthermore, Piaget's methods of research were said to be
quite loose, the fact that he simply observed his three children and a few others which were
limited only to European children.

Learning and Remembering

Do infants learn and remember?

Yes! Pavlov's classical conditioning and Skinner's operant conditioning have been
proven to apply to infants. We'll ask you to research that proves this.
All of us experience infantile amnesia, the inability to recall events that happened when
we were very young (Spear, 1979). Generally, we can remember little or nothing that has
happened to us before the age of about 5 years, and it is extremely rare for someone to
recall many memories before age 3 years. Reports of childhood memories usually involve
memories of significant events (e.g. birth of a sibling or the death of a parent; Fivush and
Hammond, 1991). For example, some adults have recalled their hospitalization or the birth
of a sibling as far back as age 2 years, and the death of a parent or a family move may be
recalled from as far back as age 3 years (Usher and Neisser, 1993).
I have vivid memories of my childhood as early as age 3. I remember the deaths of a
baby brother and a baby sister in a row. Before age 3, I have a vivid picture of my father
carrying me home in his arms after he was informed that I was chilling due to a very high
fever in my grandmother's house.

Language Development

From day one, infants appear to be programmed to tune in to their linguistic environment
with the specific goal of acquiring language. Infants have remarkably acute language learning
abilities even from an early age (Marcus, Vijayan. Bandi Rao and Vishton, 1999; Pinker, 1997,
1999 cited by Sternberg, Robert, 2003).

Within the first years of life, we humans seem to progress through the following stages in
producing language (Sternberg, 2003):

1. Cooing, which comprises largely vowel sounds

 2. Babbling, which comprises consonant as well as vowel sounds; to most people's ears,
the babbling of infants growing up among speakers from different language groups sounds very
similar

3. One-word utterances; these utterances are limited in both the vowels and the
consonants they utilize (Ingram, 1999 cited by Sternberg, 2003)

4. Two-word utterances and telegraphic speech

5. Basic adult sentence structure (present by about age 4 years) with continuing
vocabulary acquisition

The infant utters his /her first word- followed by one or two more, and soon after, yet a
few more. The infant uses these one-word utterances termed holophrases to convey intentions,
desires, and demands. Usually, the words are nouns describing familiar objects that the child
observes (e.g. book, ball, baby) or want (e.g. Mama, Dada)

By 18 months of age, children typically have a vocabulary of 3 to 100 words (Siegler,

1986). Because the young child's vocabulary is very limited at this point in the development
process, the child overextends the meaning of words in his/her existing lexicon to cover things
and ideas for which a new word is lacking. For example, the general term for any kind of four-
legged animal may be "doggie." In linguistics, this is called overextension error. Gradually
between 1.5 and 2.5 years of age, children start combining single words to produce two-word
utterances. These two-word or three-word utterances with the rudimentary syntax but with
articles and prepositions missing are referred to as telegraphic speech.

Vocabulary expands rapidly, more than tripling from about 300 words at about 2 years of
age to about 1,000 words at about 3 years of age. At about 4 years, incredibly children acquire
the foundations of adult syntax and language structure (Sternberg, 2003).

It is clear that no toddler blossoms all of a sudden into one capable of telegraphic
speech. As the 5 stages above show, the acquisition of language comes in stages beginning
with cooing, then babbling, to one-word utterances, to two or three-word utterances, or even
more but without articles and prepositions thus called telegraphic speech.

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Noam Chomsky (1965, 1972), a noted linguist, claims that humans have an innate
language acquisition device (LAD). This LAD is a "metaphorical organ that is responsible for
language learning. Just as a heart is designed to pump blood this language acquisition device is
preprogrammed to learn the language, whatever the language community children find
themselves in."

This means that we, humans seem to be biologically preconfigured to be ready to

acquire language. Indeed, children seem to have a knack for acquiring an implicit understanding
of the many rules of language structure, as well as for applying those rules to new vocabulary
and new contexts. This may partly explain why children are said, to learn a language fast.

Professor Laura-Ann Petito of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and her
colleagues conducted a recent study that concluded that "by 5 months of age, babies are
already specializing by using the left side of their brains for language sounds and the right side
for expression emotion... We all speak out from the right side of our mouths...Babies babble out
from the right side of their mouths."

The right side of the body is controlled by the left side of the brain while the left side of
the body is controlled by the right side of the brain (connections in the brain are contralateral or
crossed). Babies use the right side of their mouths for babbling, then babbling is a language
function controlled by the left side of the brain.