Sensorimotor

• Pleasurable behaviors that first occur by chance

  • Begin to coordinate sensory information and grasp objects
  • They turn towards the sounds
• Secondary Circular Reactions (4-8 months)

  1. Repeat actions that brings interesting results

  2. Learns about causality
• Coordination of Secondary Schemes (8-12 months)

  1. Coordinate previously learned schemes and use previously learned behaviors to attain their goals

  2. Can anticipate events
• Tertiary Circular Reactions (12-18 months)

  1. Purposefully vary their actions to see results

  2. Actively explore the world

  3. Trial and error in solving problems
• Mental Combinations


  1. Can think about events and anticipate consequences without always resorting action

  2. Can use symbols such as gestures and words, and can pretend

  3. Transition to Pre-operational stage

  4. Learns about numbers
• Schemes


  Actions or mental representations that can be performed on objects
• Assimilation


  Occurs when children use their existing schemes to deal with new information
• Accommodation


  Occurs when children adjust their schemes to take new information and experiences into account
• Organization


  Grouping of isolated behaviors and thoughts into higher-order system
• Disequilibrium


  Cognitive conflict
• Children constantly assimilate and accommodate as they seek equilibrium
• Equilibration


  Children shift from one stage of thought to the next
• Representational Ability


  The ability to mentally represent objects and actions in memory, largely through symbols such as words, numbers, and mental picture
• Infants develop the abilities to think and remember
• Visible Imitation


  • Uses body parts that babies can see, develops first
• Invisible Imitation


  • Involves with parts of the body that babies cannot see
• Piaget believed that children under 18 months could not engage in Deferred Imitation
• Deferred Imitation


  Reproduction of an observed behavior after the passage of time
• Children lacked the ability to retain mental representations
• Object Permanence


  The realization that something continues to exist when out of sight
• Infants under the age of about 8 months act as if an object no longer exists once it is out other line of sight
• Until about 15 months, infants use their hands to explore pictures as if they were objects
• By 19 months, children are able to point at a picture of an object while saying its name, demonstrating an understanding that a picture is a symbol of something else
• Dual Representation Hypothesis


  Proposal that children under age of 3 have difficulty grasping spatial relationships because of the need to keep more than one mental representation in mind at the same time
• Habituation


  A type of learning in which repeated or continuous exposure to a stimulus, reduces attention to that stimulus
• Dishabituation


  If a new sight or sound is presented, the baby's attention is generally captured once again, and the baby will reorient toward the interesting stimulus and once again sucking slows
• Visual Preference


  Tendency to spend more time looking at one sight rather than another
• Visual Recognition Memory


  Ability that depends on the capacity to form and refer to mental representations
• Babies like to look at new things
• Senses are unconnected at birth and are only gradually integrated through experience
• Cross-Modal Transfer


  The ability to use information gained from one sense to guide another – as when a person negotiates a dark room by feeling for the location of familiar objects
• During the second half of the first year, the prefrontal cortex and associated circuitry develop the capacity of working memory (short-term storage of information the brain is actively processing)
• Working memory may be responsible for the slow development of object permanence
• Cooing


  • Starts at 6-3 months
• Babbling


  • Starts at 6-10 months
• Gestures


  • Starts at about 7-15 months
• As early as 5 months, infants recognize their name
• Receptive Vocabulary


  Words that the child understand
• Spoken Vocabulary


  Words the child expresses/uses
• Overextension


  Tendency to apply a word to objects that are inappropriate for the word's meaning by going beyond the set of referents an adult would use (e.g. "Dada" not only for her Dad but also to other male strangers)