Cognitive development in Infancy

Sensorimotor period

Infants understand the world through their direct experiences

Schema

Basic building blocks of how we understand the world: Direct physical experience involves reasoning and symbolic thought

Assimilation

Process of fitting the outer world into what we are currently capable of understanding

Accommodation

Process of gradually adapting/advancing how we think based on new information.

Primary circular reactions

Repetitive actions centered on the infant’s own body ( up to 4 months)

Secondary circular reactions

repetitive actions centered on the outside world ( 4-8 months)

Tertiary circular reactions

flexible actions undertaken to make sense of the world ( 12-18 months)

Object permanence

Knowing that people and things exist even when they cannot be seen (8 to 12 months)

A-not-B error

Infants look for an object where it usually is, even though they have seen it move

Scale error

Misperception of the relative sizes of objects

Information processing

identify how individuals take in, use, and store information

Encoding

Process by which information is initially recorded

Storage

process of placing information into memory

Retrieval

information is located, brought to awareness and used

Habituation

learning where repeated exposure to a stimulus reduces or stops attention to the stimulus.

Phonology

Knowing the sounds that make up words

Lexicon

Knowing words and their meanings

Simultaneous bilingual

Children who learn two languages from birth

Phonemes

The sounds of a language that distinguish one word from another

Cooing

Long vowel sounds

Babbling

Repeated consonant- vowel combinations

First words

People, things, and activities that toddlers encounter often

Vocabulary spurt

Vocabulary starts to grow very rapidly

telegraphic speech

2–4-word requests or declarative sentences

Infant-directed speech

Exaggerated and sing-song cadence that adults use when speaking with infants.