Cognitive development in infancy

Question 1

how do they learn the native language?

Answer 1

• Begin with a language-general capacity
  
  • Can discriminate differences between any 2 speech sounds from any of the world’s languages (unlike adults) …regardless of whether it’s a language they are learning or not
  • phonetic perception is universal
• Later develop language-specific speech perception
  
  • “hone in” on those speech contrasts in their native language

Question 2

what is the Universal phonetic perception: developmental change?

Answer 2

• 3 age groups: 6-8 mo, 8-10 mo and 10-12 mo old infants
• 3 languages: English-, Hindi- and Salish-learning infants
• Phoneme distinction: consonant contrasts (native vs non-native sounds)
• Conditioned head-turn procedure: Infants heard repeating background sound and were trained to turn their head to a visual reinforcer when there was a change in speech sound category

Question 3

Perceptual reorganisation is domain-general?

Answer 3

• Over age and with increasing experience with the native language infants become uniquely sensitive to other native language speech features:
  
  • Native language prosody
  • Native language stress patterns
  • Native language phonotactics (order of sounds)
• Perceptual narrowing is result of neuroplasticity, a domain-general, multisensory cognitive mechanism
  
  • e.g., also applies to face perception: native and non-native race

Question 4

Learning that Human Faces are Special?

Answer 4

• Pascalis, de Haan & Nelson (2002): 6-month olds discriminate between two human faces or two Macaque monkey faces equally well
• 9-month-olds and adults: discriminate only between human faces
• Tuning into relevant discriminations

Question 5

what is Object Permanence according to Piaget?

Answer 5

• < 1 month: only look at objects in front of them
• 1-4 months: dropped objects not looked for
• by 4 months: visually searching for fallen object. Search for partially visible object, not an entirely hidden one.
• 8-12 months: search for entirely concealed objects.
• 12-18 months: permanence of invisible objects; visual tracking of moving objects, search for disappeared object.
• 18-24 months: full object permanence acquired;
  understands object as existing independent of sensory motor action

Question 6

what is the The A not B error?

Answer 6

• A not B task requires an infant to search for a hidden object
  
  • Infants below 8 months will not search for the object at all
  • Piaget interpreted this as lack of object permanence
• Infants between 9 - 12 months will search, but usually in the wrong location (in A)

Question 7

Object permanence: Violation of Expectation?

Answer 7

• VoE paradigm was developed to investigate object permanence in infants younger than 9 months:
  
  • Infants are shown an event and then two new events, one of which is consistent with everyday reality (possible), and the other inconsistent (impossible)
  • Infants will typically look longer at the impossible event – assuming they have sensitivity/ representation of the event

Question 8

what is the big question?

Answer 8

• Looking time (as used in VoE paradigm) studies suggest that infants much younger than 8 months (as early as 2.5) might already have object permanence and be able to represent that objects can be hidden from sight and do not cease to exist
• But if so, why do infants younger than 8 months not even search for hidden objects and between 9 and 12 months they search in the wrong location?

Question 9

what are the Possible explanations of A not B error?

Answer 9

• Lack of inhibition/response perseveration:
  
  • Searching for the object repeatedly at location A makes location A part of the object identity
  • Researchers (Butterworth, 1974; Evans, 1973;
    Landers, 1971) have tried the A not B task with purely observational trials, and yet the error occurs
• Memory deficiency:
  
  • Infants might struggle to remember where the object actually is to keep track of its location
  • This is unlikely because the error occurs even when the containers are transparent and the infant can actually see the object (Butterworth, 1977; Bremner & Knowles, 1984)

Question 10

what is the Integrative executive functioning explanation?

Answer 10

• Frontal cortex immaturity: involved in planning and guiding actions – executive functions (Diamond, 1988).
• The frontal cortex matures very slowly and is involved in both maintaining the representation of a hidden object and in the inhibition of incorrect response.
• To succeed in the A not B task, the frontal cortex has to accomplish two different tasks at the same time, but it’s immaturity does not allow that.

Question 11

what is the Dynamic Systems Theory explanation?

Answer 11

• The two locations are in competition with each other in the child’s mind (Smith & Thelen, 2003)
  
  • Repeatedly hiding the object in location A highlights the importance of location A.
  • When the object is unexpectedly hidden in location B, this new visual cue initially competes with the memory of location A, but it decays after the object is hidden - and the memory of location A wins!
  • If infants can immediately search without delay, they indeed reach for location B (Wellman, Cross, Bartsch & Harris, 1986).

Question 12

how do we Highlight differences in locations?

Answer 12

• If searching at location B is made sufficiently qualitatively different from searching at location A, the memory of A will have less influence:
  
  • when infants were sitting during trials A and standing during trials B, they were correctly searching in location B!

Question 13

what are the Content of early memories?

Answer 13

• Birth of sibling Hospitalisation/accident?
• Increase in remembering depending on the age when event occurred: those who had just turned two (24 - 27 months) recalled less than those who were slightly older (28 – 31 months)
• When re-questioned one year later, memories proved quite stable but this was less true of those who had only just turned two at the time

Question 14

what are “Mobile contingency” experiments?

Answer 14

• 3-month-olds can remember how to make a mobile move by kicking it one week after receiving training /conditioning
• By 6 months, remember the same task two weeks later

Question 15

what are the explanations of Infantile amnesia?

Answer 15

• How to reconcile that infants clearly have a memory for events and people, yet most of us do not have memories of our very early childhood?
  
  • Brain development: can’t form memories due to hippocampus not fully mature until 3-4 years; frontal lobe growth changes that allow for explicit or conscious memories
  • Linguistic development: can’t form memories /encode events without language
  • Emotional development: can’t form memories without emotion schemes

Question 16

what are the Profound memory limitations?

Answer 16

• Infants can develop long-term memories for causal events!
• But: when tested in a different crib that presents different visual cues, can no longer remember how to make the mobile move, even after short delays (Boller et al., 1995)
• A not B error: infants rarely made errors if they were allowed to search immediately for the hidden object at B, with interference occurring between memory of object at A location and at new location (Harris, 1973)

Question 17

Long-term recall – reactivating reminders?

Answer 17

• Infants at 6.5 months took part in a study of auditory localization where they reached in the light and dark for a sounding object – single exposure
• When retested at 2.5 years old in same procedure, those who had experience of reaching in the dark (compared to control group), and those who were given leading instructions (compared to uninstructed procedure), reached and grasped the sounding object significantly more
  = remembered the actual experience?

Question 18

Long-term recall – emotional interpersonal
interaction?

Answer 18

• Anomalous social condition
• When presented with a photo of a person who did the “still-face” experiment with them when they were 5 months, 20-mo-olds could remember it (Bornstein et al., 2004)

Question 19

Memories can be scaffolded?

Answer 19

• Role of guiding questions and comments-
  Vygotskian account
• Recollection is the type of conversation children first engage with the other, before being able to reminisce independently
• Elaboration vs repeating the same question or request

Question 20

what is Procedural vs Conceptual memories?

Answer 20

• Memories specific to situation in which the initial event occurs
  
  • embodied
  • even slight differences may disrupt the memory
• Rooted in verbal descriptions, dependent on semantic knowledge and adults’ scaffolding