Piaget’s theory
Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget took the intellectual functioning of adults as the central phenomenon to be explained and wanted to know how an adult acquired the ability to think logically and to draw valid conclusions about the world from evidence. Piaget’s theory rests on the fundamental notion that the child develops through stages until arriving at a stage of thinking that resembles that of an adult. The four stages given by Piaget are: (1) the sensorimotor stage from birth to 2 years, (2) the preoperational stage from 2 to 7 years, (3) the concrete-operational stage from 7 to 12 years, and (4) the stage of formal operations that characterizes the adolescent and the adult. One of Piaget’s fundamental assumptions is that early intellectual growth arises primarily out of the child’s interactions with objects in the environment. For example, Piaget believed that a two-year-old child who repeatedly builds and knocks down a tower of blocks is learning that the arrangement of objects in the world can be reversed. According to Piaget, children organize and adapt their experiences with objects into increasingly sophisticated cognitive models that enable them to deal with future situations in more effective ways. The older child, for instance, who has learned the concept of reversibility, will be able to execute an intelligent and logical search for a missing object, retracing steps, for example, in order to determine where he or she may have dropped a set of keys. As children pass through successive stages of cognitive development, their knowledge of the world assumes different forms, with each stage building on the models and concepts acquired in the preceding stage. Adolescents in the final developmental stage, that of formal operations, are able to think in a rational and systematic manner about hypothetical problems that are not necessarily in accord with their experience. Piaget’s theory is treated in greater detail below in the sections on cognitive development in infancy and childhood.
Learning theory
A more distinctively American theoretical view focuses primarily on the child’s actions, rather than on his emotions or thinking. This point of view, called learning theory, is concerned with identifying those mechanisms that can be offered to explain differences in behaviour, motives, and values among children. Its major principles stress the effects of reward and punishment (administered by parents, teachers, and peers) on the child’s tendency to adopt the behaviour and values of others. Learning theory is thus directed to the overt actions of the child, rather than to inner psychological states or mechanisms.
Learning is any relatively permanent change in behaviour that results from past experience. There are two generally recognized learning processes: classical and instrumental conditioning, both of which use associations, or learned relations between events or stimuli, to create or shape behavioural responses. In classical conditioning, a close temporal relation is maintained between pairs of stimuli in order to create an association between the two. If, for example, an infant hears a tone and one second later receives some sweetened water in the mouth, the infant will make sucking movements to the sweet taste. After a dozen repetitions of this sequence of the tone followed by the sweet water, the infant associates the sounding of the tone with the receipt of the sweetened water and will, on subsequent repetitions, make sucking movements to the tone even though no sugar water is delivered.
Instrumental, or operant, conditioning involves creating a relationship between a response and a stimulus. If the experiment described above is changed so that after the tone is heard, the infant is required to turn his or her head to the right in order to receive the sweetened water, the infant will learn to turn the head when the tone sounds. The infant learns a relation between the response of turning the head and the subsequent receipt of the sweet taste. This set of relations is referred to as instrumental conditioning because the child must do something in order to receive the reward; the latter, in turn, makes the infant’s head-turning response more likely in future occurrences of the situation. Rewards, such as praise and approval from parents, act as positive reinforcers of specific learned behaviours, while punishments decrease the likelihood of repeating such behaviours. Scientists who believe in the importance of these principles use them to explain the changing behaviour of children over the course of development.
Development in infancy
Conception occurs when the sperm from the male penetrates the cell wall of an egg from the female. Human development during the 38 weeks from conception to birth is divided into three phases. The first, the germinal period, lasts from the moment of conception until the time the fertilized egg is implanted in the wall of the uterus, a process that typically takes 10 to 14 days. A second phase, lasting from the second to the eighth week after conception, is called the embryonic period and is characterized by differentiation of the major organs. The last phase, from the eighth week until delivery, is called the fetal period and is characterized by dramatic growth in the size of the organism.
Prenatal development is extremely rapid; by the 18th day the embryo has already taken some shape and has established a longitudinal axis. By the ninth week the embryo is about 2.5 centimetres (one inch) long; face, mouth, eyes, and ears have begun to take on well-defined form, and arms, legs, hands, feet, and even fingers and toes have appeared. The sex organs, along with muscle and cartilage, also have begun to form. The internal organs have a definite shape and assume some primitive function. The fetal period (from about the second month until birth) is characterized by increased growth of the organism and by the gradual assumption of physical functions. By the 20th week the mother can often feel the movements of the fetus, which is now about 20 centimetres long. By the 32nd week the normal fetus is capable of breathing, sucking, and swallowing, and by the 36th week it can show a response to light and sound waves. The head of the fetus is unusually large in relation to other parts of its body because its brain develops more rapidly than do other organs. The seventh month is generally regarded as the earliest age at which a newborn can survive without medical assistance.
The newborn infant
By definition, infancy is the period of life between birth and the acquisition of language approximately one to two years later. The average newborn infant weighs 3.4 kilograms (7.5 pounds) and is about 51 centimetres long; in general, boys are slightly larger and heavier than girls. (The period of the newborn covers the first five to seven days, which the infant normally spends recovering from the stresses of delivery.) During their first month, infants sleep for about 16–18 hours a day, with five or six sleep periods alternating with a like number of shorter episodes of wakefulness. The total amount of time spent sleeping decreases dramatically, however, to 9–12 hours a day by age two years, and, with the cessation of nocturnal feedings and morning and afternoon naps, sleep becomes concentrated in one long nocturnal period. Newborns spend as much time in active sleep (during which rapid eye movements occur) as in quiet sleep, but by the third month they spend twice as much time in quiet as in active sleep, and this trend continues (at a much slower rate) into adulthood.
At birth the infant displays a set of inherited reflexes, some of which serve his very survival. An infant only two hours old typically will follow a moving light with his eyes and will blink or close them at the sudden appearance of a bright light or at a sharp, sudden sound nearby. The newborn infant will suck a nipple or almost any other object (e.g., a finger) inserted into his mouth or touching his lips. He will also turn his head toward a touch on the corner of his mouth or on his cheek; this reflex helps him contact the nipple so he can nurse. He will grasp a finger or other object that is placed in his palm. Reflexes that involve sucking and turning toward stimuli are intended to maintain sustenance, while those involving eye-closing or muscle withdrawal are intended to ward off danger. Some reflexes involving the limbs or digits vanish after four months of age; one example is the Babinski reflex, in which the infant bends his big toe upward and spreads his small toes when the outer edge of the sole of his foot is stroked.
The newborn baby can turn his head and eyes toward and away from visual and auditory stimuli, signaling interest and alarm, respectively. Smiling during infancy changes its meaning over the first year. The smiles that newborns display during their first weeks constitute what is called reflex smiling and usually occur without reference to any external source or stimulus, including other people. By two months, however, infants smile most readily in response to the sound of human voices, and by the third or fourth month they smile easily at the sight of a human face, especially one talking to or smiling at the infant. This social smiling, as it is called, marks the beginning of the infant’s emotional responses to other people.
Cognitive development
Perception
Research shows the achievement of extraordinary perceptual sophistication over the first months of life. The fetus is already sensitive to stimulation of its skin, especially in the area around the mouth, by the eighth week of intrauterine development. Judging from their facial expressions when different substances are placed on their tongues, newborn infants apparently discriminate between bitter, salty, or sweet tastes; they have an innate preference for sweet tastes and even prefer a sucrose solution to milk. Newborns can also discriminate between different odours or smells; six-day-old infants can tell the smell of their mother’s breast from that of another mother.
Much more is known, however, about infants’ ability to see and hear than about their senses of touch, smell, or taste. During the first half-year of life outside the womb, there is rapid development of visual acuity, from 20/800 vision (in Snellen notation) among two-week-olds to 20/70 vision in five-month-olds to 20/20 vision at five years. Even newborn infants are sensitive to visual stimulation and attend selectively to certain visual patterns; they will track moving stimuli with their gaze and can discriminate among lights that vary in brightness. They show a noticeable predilection for the sight of the human face, and by the first or second month they are able to discriminate between different faces by attending to the internal features—eyes, nose, and mouth. By the third month, infants can identify their mothers by sight and can discriminate between some facial expressions. By the seventh month, they can recognize a particular person from different perspectives—for example, a full face versus a profile of that face. Infants can identify the same facial expression on the faces of different people and can distinguish male from female faces.
Newborns can also hear and are sensitive to the location of a sound source as well as to differences in the frequency of the sound wave. They also discriminate between louder and softer sounds, as indicated by the startle reflex and by rises in heart rate. Newborns can also discriminate among sounds of higher or lower pitch. Continuous rather than intermittent sounds and low tones rather than high-pitched ones are apparently those most soothing to infants.
Even young infants show a striking sensitivity to the tones, rhythmic flow, and individual sounds that together make up human speech. A young infant can make subtle discriminations among phonemes, which are the basic sounds of language, and is able to tell the difference between “pa,” “ga,” and “ba.” Furthermore, infants less than one year old can make discriminations between phonemes that some adults cannot because the particular discrimination is not present in the adult language. A distinction between “ra” and “la” does not exist in the Japanese language, and hence Japanese adults fail to make that discrimination. Japanese infants under nine months can discriminate between these two phonemes but lose that ability after one year because the language they hear does not require that discrimination.
Determinants of attention
Both movement and contrasts between dark and light tend to attract an infant’s attention. When an alert newborn is placed in a dark room, he opens his eyes and looks around for edges. If he is shown a thick black bar on a white background, his eyes dart to the bar’s contour and hover near it, rather than wander randomly across the visual field. Certain other visual qualities engage the infant’s attention more effectively than do others. The colour red is more attractive than others, for example, and objects characterized by curvilinearity and symmetry hold the infant’s attention longer than do ones with straight lines and asymmetric patterns. Sounds having the pitch and timbre of the human voice are more attractive than most others; the newborn is particularly responsive to the tones of a mother’s voice, as well as to sounds with a great deal of variety. These classes of stimuli tend to elicit the most prolonged attention during the first 8 to 10 weeks of life. During the infant’s third month a second principle, called the discrepancy principle, begins to assume precedence. According to this principle, the infant is most likely to attend to those events that are moderately different from those he has been exposed to in the past. For instance, by the third month, the infant has developed an internal representation of the faces of the people who care for him. Hence, a slightly distorted face—e.g., a mask with the eyes misplaced—will provoke more sustained attention than will a normal face or an object the infant has never seen before. This discrepancy principle operates in other sensory modalities as well.
Judgment
Even infants less than one year old are capable of what appears to be complex perceptual judgments. They can estimate the distance of an object from their body, for example. If an infant is shown a rattle and hears its distinctive sound and the room is then darkened, the infant will reach for the rattle if the sound indicates that the object can be grasped but will not reach if the sound indicates that it is beyond his grasp.
More dramatically, infants will also reach for an object with a posture appropriate to its shape. If an infant sees a round object in the shape of a wheel and hears its distinctive sound and also sees a smaller rattle and hears its sound, he will reach in the dark with one hand in a grasping movement if he hears the sound of the rattle but will reach with both hands spread apart if he hears the sound associated with the wheel.
The four-month-old infant is also capable of rapidly learning to anticipate where a particular event will occur. After less than a minute of exposure to different scenes that alternate on the right and left side of their visual field, infants will anticipate that a picture is about to appear on the right side and will move their eyes to the right before the picture actually appears. Similarly, infants only five to six months old can detect the relation between the shape of a person’s mouth and the sound that is uttered. Thus, they will look longer at a face that matches the sound they are hearing than at one where there is a mismatch between the mouth’s movements and the sound being uttered.
Infants develop an avoidance reaction to the appearance of depth by the age of 8 to 10 months, when they begin to crawl. This discovery was made on the surface of an apparatus called the visual cliff. The latter is a table divided into two halves, with its entire top covered by glass. One half of the top has a checkerboard pattern lying immediately underneath the glass; the other half is transparent and reveals a sharp drop of a metre or so, at the bottom of which is the same checkerboard pattern. The infant is placed on a board on the centre of the table. The mother stands across the table and tries to tempt her baby to cross the glass on either the shallow or the deep side. Infants younger than seven months will unhesitatingly crawl to the mother across the deep side, but infants older than eight months avoid the deep side and refuse to cross it. The crying and anxiety that eight-month-olds display when confronted with the need to cross the deep side are the result of their ability to perceive depth but also, and more importantly, their ability to recognize the discrepancy of sitting on a solid surface while nevertheless seeing the visual bottom some distance below. Both nervous-system maturation and experience contribute to this particular cognitive advance.
Finally, infants create perceptual categories by which to organize experience, a category being defined as a representation of the dimensions or qualities shared by a set of similar but not identical events. Infants will treat the different colours of the spectrum, for example, according to the same categories that adults recognize. Thus, they show greater attentiveness when a shade of red changes to yellow than when a light shade of red merely replaces a darker shade of the same colour. Five-month-old infants can tell the difference between the moving pattern of lights that corresponds to a person walking and a randomly moving version of the same number of lights, suggesting that they have acquired a category for the appearance of a person walking. By one year of age, infants apparently possess categories for people, edible food, household furniture, and animals. Finally, infants seem to show the capacity for cross-modal perception—i.e., they can recognize an object in one sensory modality that they have previously perceived only in another. For example, if an infant sucks a nubby pacifier without being able to see it and then is shown that pacifier alongside a smooth one, the infant’s longer look at the nubby pacifier suggests that he recognizes it, even though he previously experienced only its tactile qualities.
Memory
Infants make robust advances in both recognition memory and recall memory during their first year. In recognition memory, the infant is able to recognize a particular object he has seen a short time earlier (and hence will look at a new object rather than the older one if both are present side by side). Although newborns cannot remember objects seen more than a minute or two previously, their memory improves fairly rapidly over the first four or five months of life. By one month they are capable of remembering an object they saw 24 hours earlier, and by one year they can recognize an object they saw several days earlier. Three-month-old infants can remember an instrumental response, such as kicking the foot to produce a swinging motion in a toy, that they learned two weeks earlier, but they respond more readily if their memory is strengthened by repeated performances of the action.
By contrast, recall memory involves remembering (retrieving the representation, or mental image) an event or object that is not currently present. A major advance in recall memory occurs between the 8th and 12th months and underlies the child’s acquisition of what Piaget called “the idea of the permanent object.” This advance becomes apparent when an infant watches an adult hide an object under a cloth and must wait a short period of time before being allowed to reach for it. A six-month-old will not reach under the cloth for the hidden object, presumably because he has forgotten that the object was placed there. A one-year-old, however, will reach for the object even after a 30-second delay period, presumably because he is able to remember its being hidden in the first place. These improvements in recall memory arise from the maturation of circuits linking various parts of the brain together. The improvements enable the infant to relate an event in his environment to a similar event in the past. As a result, he begins to anticipate his mother’s positive reaction when the two are in close face-to-face interaction, and he behaves as if inviting her to respond. The infant may also develop new fears, such as those of objects, people, or situations with which he is unfamiliar—i.e., which he cannot relate to past experiences using recall memory.
Piaget’s observations
As stated previously, Piaget identified the first phase of mental development as the sensorimotor stage (birth to two years). This stage is marked by the child’s acquisition of various sensorimotor schemes, which may be defined as mental representations of motor actions that are used to obtain a goal; such actions include sucking, grasping, banging, kicking, and throwing. The sensorimotor stage, in turn, was differentiated by Piaget into six subphases, the first four of which are achieved during the initial year. During the first subphase, which lasts one month, the newborn’s automatic reflexes become more efficient. In the second subphase, the infant’s reflex movements become more coordinated, though they still consist largely of simple acts (called primary circular actions) that are repeated for their own sake (e.g., sucking, opening and closing the fists, and fingering a blanket) and do not reflect any conscious intent or purpose on the infant’s part. During the third phase, lasting from the 4th to the 8th month, the infant begins to repeat actions that produce interesting effects; for example, he may kick his legs to produce a swinging motion in a toy. In the fourth subphase, from the 8th to the 12th month, the child begins coordinating his actions to attain an external goal; he thus begins solving simple problems, building on actions he has mastered previously. For example, he may purposely knock down a pillow to obtain a toy hidden behind it. During the fifth subphase, covering the 12th to 18th months, the child begins to invent new sensorimotor schemes in a form of trial-and-error experimentation. He may change his actions toward the same object or try out new ones to achieve a particular goal. For example, if he finds that his arm alone is not long enough, he may use a stick to retrieve a ball that rolled beneath a couch. In the final subphase of infancy, which is achieved by about the 18th month, the child starts trying to solve problems by mentally imagining certain events and outcomes rather than by simple physical trial-and-error experimentation.
The child’s actions thus far have shown progressively greater intentionality, and he has developed a primitive form of representation, which Piaget defined as a kind of mental imagery that can be used to solve a problem or attain a goal for which the child has no habitual, available action. An important part of the child’s progress in his first year is his acquisition of what Piaget calls the idea of “object permanence”—i.e., the ability to treat objects as permanent entities. According to Piaget, the infant gradually learns that objects continue to exist even when they are no longer in view. Children younger than six months do not behave as if objects that are moved out of sight continue to exist; they may grab for objects they see but lose all interest once the objects are withdrawn from sight. However, infants of nine months or older do reach for objects hidden from view if they have watched them being hidden. Children aged 12 to 18 months may even search for objects that they have not themselves witnessed being hidden, indicating that they are capable of inferring those objects’ location. Show such a child a toy placed in a box, put both under a cover, and then remove the box; the child will search under the cover as though he inferred the location of the toy.
Vocalizations
The first of the two basic sounds made by infants includes all those related to crying; these are present even at birth. A second category, described as cooing, emerges at about eight weeks and includes sounds that progress to babbling and ultimately become part of meaningful speech. Almost all children make babbling sounds during infancy, and no relationship has been established between the amount of babbling during the first six months and the amount or quality of speech produced by a child at age two. Vocalization in the young infant often accompanies motor activity and usually occurs when the child appears excited by something he sees or hears. Environmental influences ordinarily do not begin to influence vocalization seriously before two months of age; in fact, during the first two months of postnatal life, the vocalizations of deaf children born to deaf parents are indistinguishable from those of infants born to hearing parents. Environmental effects on the variety and frequency of the infant’s sounds become more evident after roughly eight weeks of age. The use of meaningful words differs from simple babbling in that speech primarily helps to obtain goals, rather than simply reflecting excitement.
Physical growth and development
A child’s first year is characterized by rapid growth of body and brain: healthy, well-nourished children experience an almost 200 percent increase in height between birth and one year. Every normal, healthy infant proceeds through a sequence of motor development that occurs spontaneously and requires no special training. The infant can reach for and grasp an object by about the 4th month and can grasp a small object between his thumb and forefinger by the 10th month. By 4 months of age most babies are able to sit up for a minute or so with support, and by 9 months they can do so without support for 10 minutes or more. Most babies begin crawling (i.e., moving with one’s abdomen in contact with the floor) between 7 and 10 months and are creeping on hands and knees adequately at the end of that time. By 10 months an infant can pull himself up to a standing position by holding onto an external support (e.g., a piece of furniture), and by 12 months he can stand up alone. He is able to walk with help by 12 months and can walk unaided by 14 months. By 18 months, with exposure to stairs, the average child can walk up and down them without help, and by his second birthday he can run, walk backward, and pick up an object from the floor without falling down.
