ch 5 Cognitive Development in Infancy

What is infantile or childhood amnesia? What causes infantile amnesia?

infantile or childhood amnesia - A condition most adult can remember little if anything from their 1st three yrs of life cause - the prefrontal lobes of the brain are immature during early yrs

What causes an infant to pay attention at sometimes and not others?

Dishabiuation = the increase in responsiveness after a change in stimulation

How infants learn, remember, and conceptualize in the process of their cognitive development?

Through conditioning, attention, memory, imitation, and concept formation & categorization.

Dishabituation

the increase in response after a change in stimulation. Variety may introduce dishabiuation

implicit memory vs explicit memory

implicit memory - w/out conscious recollection (e.g. piano skills & routine procedures) explicit memory - w/th conscious recollection (e.g. facts & experiences one knows and can state) - hippocampus & front lobes Until 6 months old, infants start to show explicit memory. Older infants can remember info they encountered 12 months earlier. vs. 6-month-olds: 24 hrs (Bauer, 2013)

Habituation

By natural instinct, animals need to response quickly to sudden appearance of potential predators. So if there's unfamiliar stimulus present, the animals will pay highly attentions to the stimulus unless the stimulus has been repeated without any harm. Habituation is the decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated presentations of the stimulus. This is when an infant becomes desensitized to stimuli and stops paying attention. Why? Habituation is a form of innate defensive behavior. This reduction of adaptive response is learned because the stimulus has became no longer biologically relevant to the child. e.g. Initially someone snores next to you affects your sleep. If the noise repeated, your body will learn to habituate the situation and not pay attention to the noise. As a result, you will fall asleep without any concerned of the snoring noise since your body will barely notice and react to the noise anymore. Habituation processes are adaptive, allowing animals to adjust their innate behaviors to changes in their natural world. If habituation is high, the child is learning. <cf> Opposite to habituation is sensitization. i.e. you will be extremely sensitive to the stimulus due to the potential danger it might cause harm to you.

Joint attention (JA)

Human beings have an exquisitely honed capacity to coordinate their attention with that of other people. JA is the shared focus of two individuals on an object. It is achieved when one individual alerts another to an object by means of eye-gazing, pointing or other verbal or non-verbal indications. For autism, it doesn't seem to occur to them that other people have points of you that can be shared. The ability for a child to initiate shared enjoyment about an object, a person, or an event depends on the child's ability to initiate joint attention skills. Joint attention ability affects infant's ability to learn from other people. JA is an early indicator of language development in older infants and toddlers. (Tomasello & Hamann, 2012) Studies show that caregivers and infants frequently engage in joint attention, infants say their 1st word earlier and develop large vocabulary. - JA helps infants learn new words (Beuker & others, 2013) and lower social and communicative difficulties (Frischen & others, 2007) Social-cognition coordination might affect human information processing ability as studies show that joint attention affects the cognitive development of long-term memory. (Kopp & Lingernberger, 2011) JA affects encoding of pictures and words in infancy Gaze and gaze contact can have on people's perception of the individuals they interact with. (Frischen, 2007)

Concepts & categorization

concepts = cognitive groupings of similar objects, event, people, or ideas Perceptual categorization - early - based on similar perceptual features of objects, such as size, color, and movement Conceptural categorization - 7-9 months old - bird/animals vs. airplane/vehicles

deferred imitation

deferred imitation occurs after a delay of hrs or days (Meltzoff, 2007) <cf> Piaget believes imitation occurs after 18 months old for infants

What are the cognitive processes Piaget developed?

scheme assimilation accommodation organization equilibrium equilibration

Attention

the parietal lobes are active when infants orient their attention Infants as young as 3 months old can engage in 5-10 seconds of sustained (a.k.a. focused) attention. The length of sustained attention increases from this age to the 2nd yr Sustained attention allows infants to learn about and remember characteristics of a stimulus as it becomes familiar.