PYC2602_Summaries_updated.

Infancy Infants progress from reflexive responding and they increasingly understand objects and start using symbols such as words and gestures. Piaget’s Theory a) Sensorimotor stage Infants who obtain their information through sensory input and motor activities. They gradually develop the ability to coordinate information, this mainly occurs through circular reaction, where the infant repeats pleasurable or interesting situations.  Substage 1: Reflexes (birth – 1 month). They respond to whatever stimuli are available. E.g grasping or sucking.  Substage 2: Primary Circular Reactions (1-4 months). The coordination between listening and looking, looking and reaching, reaching and sucking, ie exploring the world, and this is done through repetition.  Substage 3: Secondary Circular Reactions (4-8 months). Infants begin to repeat an action intentionally to trigger a response in the environment. It’s similar to operant conditioning – if the action receives positive feedback, it is repeated, e.g shaking a rattle and mom gets excited, then baby does it again.  Substage 4: Coordination of Secondary Reactions (8-12 months). It is purposeful behaviour where there is a means to an end, e.g. push something out the way to get a toy. They modify and coordinate different schemas to find one that works. It is the beginning of understanding the cause and effect relationships.  Substage 5: Tertiary Circular Reactions (12-18 months). Infants vary their circular reactions to discover new methods of meeting challenges. They start to walk at this age, which makes exploring their environment easier.  Substage 6: Mental Representation (18-24 months). It is the beginning or insight and real creativity, the infant develops the ability to use mental symbols such as words, numbers or images to represent objects, events or actions. b) Cognitive skills in the sensorimotor stage  The sensorimotor stage is object permanence – the understanding that objects or people continue to exist when they cannot be seen anymore.  If you hide a baby’s toy under container A where he or she will discover it several times, then before his/her eyes hide it under container B, the infant usually looks for it under container A, this is called A-not-B error or perseverating search.  Even in Substage 5, infants can still have problems with object permanence  Substage 4 is the development of imitation, the ability to copy someone else’s behaviour.  A more developed form of imitation is developed in Substage 6 and is called deferred imitation – to imitate behaviour after they have been exposed to it. c) Evaluating Piaget’s view point  Piaget’s sample was too small and thus not representative (his observation was on his three children)  His methods were too simplistic  Measurement of brain activity was not available Information Processing Theory  Information processing theorists contend that their skills develop week by week or even day by day in the first year of their life, which contrasts with the six Substages proposed by Piaget.  Information processing researcher use sensitive technology, as well as the infant’s habituation and visual and auditory processing abilities to explore infants’ informationprocessing capabilities.  Habituation occurs when babies are exposed to the same stimulus repeatedly and gradually start showing less interest in it (they become habituated).  Dishabituation occurs when new stimulus appears and they start paying attention to this.  Visual preference refers to infants’ tendencies to spend more time looking at one object rather than another, while visual recognition refers to the ability to discriminate between a familiar and unfamiliar object .  Auditory discrimination refers to the ability to differentiate between sounds. Memory  Refers to the acquisition, storing and retrieval of information.  Short-term memory (STM) refers to the temporary storage of immediate information and thus includes the working memory.  Long-term memory (LTM) refers to the permanent or semi-permanent storage or episodic (memories of events), semantic (memory of facts and general knowledge), procedural (memory on how to do things and includes procedural, motor and cognitive activities).  Implicit memory refers to memories of which one is not necessarily aware e.g. habits and routines and explicit memory refers knowledge required through conscious effort, such as words and concepts.  Memory is tested by recognition and recall. Recall memory becomes possible usually around nine months, when brain structures in the middle temporal lobes become functional.  Distributed learning is more effective for babies – three 6-minutes sessions.  Infants’ visual recognition memory seems to be related to various cognitive measures, including IQ scores, in later childhood. Language development a) Phases of language development  Receptive language (understanding language) precedes productive language (the ability to speak it)  However, before babies speak intelligible words, they go through several phases of vocalisation (called prelinguistic speech)  Babies of nine months can possess an elementary receptive vocabulary.  First 6 months of productive language is relatively slow (12-18 months)  Between the ages 16-24 months the learning of words increases rapidly, thus a vocabulary spurt occurs. Early Childhood In early childhood their thinking becomes more sophisticated, organised and elaborated. Piaget’s Theory: the preoperational stage The term operation indicated an action or mental representation carried out through logical thinking. Preoperational thinking refers to illogical thinking, which means they are not yet ready to engage in logical mental operations. The preoperational stage lasts from the ages two – seven and is generally subdivided into the symbolic or preconceptual period (characterised by the increasingly complex use of symbols or mental representations and is between the ages two – four) and the intuitive period (where children begin to use primitive reasoning and what they know to answer all kinds of questions, and is between the ages four –seven). a) Advances of preoperational thought A major development during this stage involves symbolic or mental representation.  Deferred imitation - Refers to the ability to repeat the behaviour of a model that is no lo