Cognitive Development

What is Cognition?

  • Thinking, including language, learning, memory, and intelligence

  • Jean Piaget (1896) was a pioneer in studying cognitive development in humans

Sensorimotor Intelligence

  • Piaget’s term for the way infants think by using their senses and motor skills, during the first period of cognitive development

    • Infants are active learners

    • Adaptation is the core of intelligence

    • Cognition develops in four distinct periods

  • Assimilation

    • Type of adaptation in which new experiences are interpreted to fit into, or assimilate with, old ideas

      • Red ball bounces like blue ball

  • Accommodation

    • Type of adaptation in which old ideas are restructured to include, or accommodate, new experiences

      • Red tomato doesn’t bounce like red ball

Affordances

  • Visual Cliff

    • Experimental apparatus that gives the illusion of a sudden drop-off between one horizontal surface and another

    • Infant performance depends on past experience, including social context

  • All babies are attracted to things that move and people

  • Infant memory is fragile, but can be activated with reminders, repetition, and retrieval cues

  • Implicit memory →     

  • Explicit memory → Easy to retrieve

Language

  • Listening and responding

    • Before birth: Language learning via brain organization and hearing; may be innate

    • Newborn: Preference for speech sounds and mother’s language; gradual selective listening

    • ~6 months: Ability to distinguish sounds and gestures in own language