the developing child denise g. boyd helen l. bee

The Developing ChildDenise G. Boyd Helen L. Bee

Thirteenth Edition

The Developing Child Boyd Bee Thirteenth Edition

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ISBN 10: 1-292-02080-6ISBN 13: 978-1-292-02080-8

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Cognitive Development I: Structure and Process

expressions to see if they will trigger mom’s smile or try moving his hand dif erently or in new directions in order to make the mobile move in new ways. At this stage, the baby’s behavior has a purposeful, experimental quality. Nonetheless, Piaget thought that even in substage 5 the baby does not have internal symbols to stand for objects. h e development of such symbols is the mark of substage 6 and a sign that the infant has become capable of learning from symbolic sources of information (see Technology and the Developing Child ).

Piaget’s descriptions of this sequence of development, largely based on remarkably de-tailed observations of his own three children, provoked a very rich array of research, some that coni rms the general outlines of his proposals and some that does not. Research results , along with other research on infant memory and imitation, point to the conclusion that in a number of important respects, Piaget underestimated the ability of infants to store, remember, and organize sensory and motor information.

Challenges to Piaget’s View of Infancy

Although research has generally supported the sequence of cognitive development discov-ered by Piaget, there are many i ndings that challenge his view. Research by Elizabeth Spelke and Renée Baillargeon, among others, has given us a more detailed account of infants’ un-derstanding of objects than Piaget’s studies did. h eir work suggests that infants have a much more sophisticated understanding of objects than Piaget concluded. Likewise, research exam-ining infants’ memory functioning and their capacity for imitation also suggests that Piaget may have underestimated their capabilities.

MEMORY One hint that infants are capable of greater feats of memory than Piaget proposed is research showing that habituation and dishabituation are already present at birth . A sec-ond source of evidence that quite young babies can remember specii c events over periods

Learning Objective 5 What have researchers discovered about infants’ ability to remember and to imitate others’ actions?

Three-month-old Andrea may be showing a

secondary circular reaction here, shaking her

hand repeatedly to hear the sound of the rattle.

A learning theorist would say that the pleasure

she experiences from hearing the sound is

reinforcing her hand-shaking behavior.

© Elizabeth Crews/h e Image Works

Table

1 SUBSTAGES OF PIAGET’S SENSORIMOTOR STAGE

Substage Age Piaget’s Label Characteristics

1 Birth–1 month Rel exes Use of built-in schemes or rel exes such as sucking or looking; no imitation; no ability to integrate information from several senses

2 1–4 months Primary circular reactions

Accommodation of basic schemes (grasping, looking, sucking), as baby practices them endlessly. Beginning coordination of schemes from different senses, such as looking toward a sound; baby does not yet link bodily actions to some result outside the body.

3 4–8 months Secondary circular reactions

Baby becomes much more aware of events outside his own body and makes them happen again, in a kind of trial-and-error learning. Imitation may occur, but only of schemes already in the baby’s repertoire. Beginning understanding of the “object concept.”

4 8–12 months Coordination of secondary schemes

Clear intentional means-ends behavior. The baby not only goes after what she wants, but may combine two schemes to do so, such as knocking a pillow away to reach a toy. Imitation of novel behaviors occurs, as does transfer of information from one sense to the other (cross-modal transfer).

5 12–18 months Tertiary circular reactions

“Experimentation” begins, in which the infant tries out new ways of playing with or manipulating objects. Very active, very purposeful trial-and-error exploration.

6 18–24 months Beginning of representational thought

Development of use of symbols to represent objects or events. Child understands that the symbol is separate from the object. Deferred imitation i rst occurs at this stage.

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of time comes from a series of clever studies by Carolyn Rovee-Collier and her colleagues (Rovee-Collier & Cuevas, 2009). In her most widely used procedure, Rovee-Collier uses an ingenious variation of an operant conditioning strategy. She i rst hangs an attractive mobile over a baby’s crib and watches to see how the baby responds. In particular, she is interested in how ot en the baby normally kicks her legs while looking at the mobile. At er 3 minutes of this “baseline” observation, she attaches a string from the mobile to the baby’s leg, as you can see in Figure 1 , so that each time the baby kicks her leg, the mobile moves. Babies quickly learn to kick repeatedly in order to make this interesting new thing happen (what Piaget would call a secondary circular reaction). Within 3 to 6 minutes, 3-month-olds double or triple their kick rates, showing that learning has clearly occurred. Rovee-Collier then tests the baby’s memory of this learning by coming back some days later and hanging the same mobile over the crib, but not attaching the string to the baby’s foot. If the baby remembers the previous occasion, she should kick at a higher rate than she did when she i rst saw the mobile, which is precisely what 3-month-old babies do, even at er a delay of as long as a week.

Such studies show that the young infant is cognitively a whole lot more sophisticated than developmentalists (and Piaget) had once supposed. At the same time, Rovee-Collier’s work also of ers some support for Piaget’s views, since she observes systematic gains over the months of infancy in the baby’s ability to remember. A 2-month-old can remember the kick-ing action for only 1 day; a 3-month-old can remember for over a week; and by 6 months, a baby can remember for more than 2 weeks. Rovee-Collier has also found that all these early infant memories are strongly tied to the specii c context in which the original experience occurred. Even 6-month-olds do not recognize or remember the mobile if the inves-tigator makes even a very small change, such as hanging a dif erent cloth around the crib

FIGURE 1 Rovee-Collier’s Studies of Infant

Learning

This 3-month-old baby in one of Rovee-Collier’s memory experiments will quickly learn to kick her foot in order to make the mobile move. And several days later, she will remember this connection between kicking and the mobile.

( Source: Rovee-Collier, 1993, p. 131. Rovee-Collier, C. (1993), “The capacity for long-term memory in infancy.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2.)

TECHNOLOGY AND THE DEVELOPING CHILD

What Infants Learn from

Television

Perhaps you are familiar with the ongoing controversy over the effects of the Baby

Einstein video series and others like it on cognitive development. Researchers have found that watching such videos actually reduces infants’ rate of vocabulary acquisition (Zimmerman, Christakis, & Meltzoff, 2007). Moreover, the more babies watch them, the less they interact with other people. (Pempek, Demers, Hanson, Kirkorian, & Anderson, 2011).

Developmentalists point out that researchers have long known infants in substages 1–5 of Piaget’s sensori-motor stage are unlikely to learn anything of value from watching videos because they have not yet acquired the ability to process symbolic information (Troseth & DeLoache, 1998). In one study, researchers compared 6-, 12-, 18-, and 24-month old infants’ pat-terns of looking at two kinds of videos: one of computer-generated geometric patterns (nonsymbolic stimulus) and another of a chil-dren’s movie called Follow That Bird (sym-

bolic stimulus). The two youngest groups showed no differences in their patterns of attention to the two videos, an indication that they were unable to discern the mean-ings embedded in symbolic information. By contrast, 18- and 24-month-olds appeared to discriminate between the two videos, an indication that they were aware of the dif-ferent types of information each presented (Richards & Cronise, 2000).

Given these i ndings, parents should prob-ably keep in mind that for infants younger than 18 months or so, many so-called “edu-cational” or “brain-stimulating” videos that target infant audiences may serve as no more than reinforcement for the behavior of watching television. Recall that a reinforcer is any consequence that causes the behavior that it follows to increase. Most infant vid-eos consist of rapidly changing arrays of the sorts of visual stimuli that infants are known to prefer–shapes, patterns, toys, faces, and so on–accompanied by music that is also at-tractive to them. Thus, when the infant looks at the television screen, she is rewarded with infant-friendly visual and auditory stimulation. In response, she increases the behavior of

looking at the screen and learns to expect to be rewarded with attractive sensory stimuli whenever she does so. This makes her likely to look at the screen whenever the television is on, regardless of what type of program that is on. Thus, the primary thing that infants learn from watching television is the behavior of watching television itself.

F IND OUT MORE

Use your Internet search skills to answer these

questions.

1. You can search for the AAP’s statement about television at www.aap.org. What rationale does the organization give for its recommendations?

2. How has the research of Jane Healy, PhD, raised awareness about the pos-sible impact of media on early brain development?

Learning Objective 4a What are infants in the various sensorimotor substages likely to learn from watching television?

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in which the child was originally tested. Thus, babies do re-member far more than Piaget believed—but their memories are highly specific. With age, their memories become less and less tied to specific cues or contexts (DeFrancisco & Rovee-Collier, 2008; Hsu & Rovee-Collier, 2006; Learmonth, Lamberth, & Rovee-Collier, 2004).

IMITATION Another active area of study has been the ability of the infant to imitate. If you look again at Table 1 you’ll see that Piaget thought that the ability to imitate emerged quite gradually over the early months. In broad terms, Piaget’s proposed sequence has been supported. For example, imitation of someone else’s hand movements or their actions with objects seems to improve steadily during the months of infancy, starting at 1 or 2 months of age; imitation of two-part actions develops only in toddlerhood, perhaps at 15 to 18 months (Poulson, Nunes, & Warren, 1989). In two areas, however, Piaget may have been wrong about infants’

imitative abilities. First, although Piaget thought babies could not imitate other people’s facial gestures un-

til about substage 4 (8–12 months), quite a lot of research now shows that newborns are able to imitate at least some facial gestures, particularly tongue protrusion (Nagy & Molnar, 2004), as shown in the photo in Figure 2 . Nevertheless, newborns’ capacity for imitation ap-pears to be quite limited. Researchers have found that neonates imitate tongue-protrusion but not mouth-opening (Anisfeld et al., 2001). Taken together, studies of imitative behavior in newborns indicate that Piaget was probably wrong in his assertion that very young infants are incapable of imitation. However, it seems likely that he was accurate in his view that imi-tation is not a general strategy infants use for developing their understanding of the world until they are a bit older.

Piaget also argued that deferred imitation , in which a child sees some action and then imitates it at a later time when the model is no longer visible, became possible only in sub-stage 6 (at about 18 months of age), since deferred imitation requires some kind of internal representation. Once again, more recent research points to earlier development of this ability (Jones & Herbert, 2009). Some studies show that babies as young as 6 months can defer their imitation for as long as 24 hours. By 14 months, toddlers can recall and later imitate some-one’s actions over a period of 2 days (Hanna & Meltzof , 1993). h is i nding makes it clear that children of this age can and do learn specii c behaviors through modeling, even when they have no chance to imitate the behavior immediately.

The Preschool Years

Piaget’s theory and research i ndings suggest that preschoolers’ ability to use symbols such as words signii cantly enhances their ability to understand and act on the world around them. But their ability to reason about the world is still fairly poor.

Piaget’s View of the Preoperational Stage

Piaget saw evidence of symbol use in many aspects of the behavior of children aged 2 to 6. For example, children this age begin to pretend in their play. Such symbol use is also evident in the emergence of language and in the preschooler’s primitive ability to understand scale models or simple maps (DeLoache, 1995). h us, children’s i gurative schemes grow by leaps and bounds during this stage. By contrast, operative schemes develop slowly. As a result, the fragmentary, “in-progress” nature of preschoolers’ operative schemes usually prevents them from generating valid conclusions to logical problems.

Other than symbol use, Piaget’s description of the preoperational stage fo-cused on all the other things the preschool-aged child still cannot do, giving an oddly negative tone to his description of this period. Piaget saw the preschooler’s

Learning Objective 6 What are the characteristics of children’s thinking during the preoperational stage?

FIGURE 2 Imitation

Although researchers still disagree on just how much young infants will imitate, everyone agrees that they will imitate the gesture of tongue protrusion. © Ericka McConnell/Getty Images

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thinking as rigid, captured by appearances, insensitive to inconsistencies, and tied to her own perspective—a quality Piaget (1954) called egocentrism . h e child is not being seli sh; rather, she simply thinks (assumes) that everyone sees the world as she does. Watch at MyDevelopmentLab

Figure 3 illustrates a classic technique used to measure this egocentrism. The child is shown a three-dimensional scene with mountains of dif erent sizes and colors. From a set of drawings, she picks out the one that shows the scene the way she sees it. Most pre-schoolers can do this without much dii culty. h en the examiner asks the child to pick out the drawing that shows how someone else sees the scene, such as a doll or the examiner. At this point, pre-schoolers have dii culty. Most ot en, they again pick the drawing that shows their own view of the mountains (Gzesh & Surber, 1985). In Piaget’s view, for a child to be able to succeed at this task, she must shit from using herself as the only frame of reference to see-ing things from another perspective. Piaget thought that preschool children could not yet do this.

h e preschool child’s focus on the appearance of objects is an equally important part of Piaget’s description of this period, evi-dent in some of the most famous of his studies, those on conser-vation (see Figure 4 ). Conservation is the understanding that the quantity of a substance remains the same even when its ap-pearance changes. Piaget’s measurement technique involved i rst showing the child two equal objects or sets of objects, getting the child to agree that they were equal in some key respect, such as weight, quantity, length, or number, and then shifting, chang-ing, or deforming one of the objects or sets and asking the child if they were still equal. Next, Piaget asked how the child knew the answer was correct. Chil-dren who were using preoperational schemes would give justii cations, such as “the sausage has more clay because it is longer now.” h is kind of thinking rel ects the child’s tendency to think of the world in terms of one variable at a time, a type of thought Piaget called cen-

tration . By contrast, concrete operational thinkers are capable of decentration , a process in which multiple dimensions are considered. h us, the older child says, “the sausage looks like more because its longer now, but you didn’t add any clay or take any away so it must still be the same.” Piaget insisted, based on his evaluations of both children’s solutions and their reasoning, that children rarely exhibit a true understanding of conservation before age 5 or 6. Watch at MyDevelopmentLab

Challenges to Piaget’s View of Early Childhood

Studies of conservation have generally coni rmed Piaget’s predictions (e.g., Desrochers, 2008). Although younger children can demonstrate some understanding of conservation if the task is made very simple, most children cannot consistently solve conservation problems until age 5 or 6 or later (e.g., Andreucci, 2003). Nevertheless, evidence suggests that preschoolers are somewhat more cognitively sophisticated than Piaget thought.

EGOCENTRISM AND PERSPECTIVE TAKING Children as young as 2 and 3 appear to have at least some ability to understand that another person sees things or experiences things dif er-ently than they do. For example, children of this age will adapt their play or their speech to the demands of their companions. h ey play dif erently with older and younger playmates and talk dif erently to a younger child (Brownell, 1990; Guralnick & Paul-Brown, 1984).

However, such understanding is clearly not perfect at this young age. Developmental psychologist John Flavell has proposed two levels of perspective-taking ability. At level 1, the child knows that another person experiences something dif erently. At level 2, the child de-velops a whole series of complex rules for i guring out precisely what the other person sees or

Watch the Video The Preschool Years:

Egocentrism at MyDevelopmentLab

Watch the Video Concrete Operational

Thinking at MyDevelopmentLab

Learning Objective 7 How has recent research challenged Piaget’s view of this period?

FIGURE 3 Piaget’s Three Mountains Task

The experimental situation shown here is similar to one Piaget used to study egocentrism in children. The child is asked to pick out a picture that shows how the mountains look to her, and then to pick out a picture that shows how the mountains look to the doll.

conservation The understanding that the quantity or amount of a substance remains the same even when there are external changes in its shape or arrangement.

decentration Thinking that takes multiple variables into account.

centration The young child’s tendency to think of the world in terms of one variable at a time.

egocentrism A cognitive state in which the individual (typically a child) sees the world only from his own perspective, without awareness that there are other perspectives.

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experiences (Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1990). Two- and 3-year-olds have level 1 knowledge but not level 2 knowledge; the latter only begins to emerge in 4- and 5-year-olds. For example, a child of 4 or 5 understands that another person will feel sad if she fails or happy if she succeeds. h e preschool child also begins to i gure out that unpleasant emotions arise in situations in which the relationship between desire and reality is unequal. Sadness, for example, normally occurs when someone loses something or fails to acquire some desired object (Harris, 1989).

Does each of these two cows have

the same amount of grass to eat?

Is there the same amount

of dough in each ball?

Is there the same amount

of juice in each glass?

Is there the same number

of marbles in each circle?

Original presentationConservation

task

Conservation

of Number

Conservation

of Liquid

Conservation

of Mass

Conservation

of Area

Now does each cow have the same amount

of grass to eat, or does one cow have more?

Now does each piece have the same

amount of dough, or does one have more?

Now is there the same amount of juice

in each glass, or does one have more?

Now is there the same number of marbles

in each circle, or does one circle have more?

Transformation

A

B

AB

A B

A

B

8–10

6–7

6–7

6–7

Typical age of

acquisition (years)

FIGURE 4 Piaget’s Concrete Operational Tasks

Piaget’s research involved several kinds of conservation tasks. He classii ed children’s thinking as concrete operational with respect to a particular task if they could correctly solve the problem and provide a concrete operational reason for their answer. For example, if a child said, “The two circles of marbles are the same because you didn’t add any or take any away when you moved them,” the re-sponse was judged to be concrete operational. Conversely, if a child said, “The two circles

are the same, but I don’t know why,” the response was not classii ed as concrete operational.

Watch at MyDevelopmentLab Watch the Video Conservation of Liquids

at MyDevelopmentLab

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the developing child denise g. boyd helen l. bee

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