Intellectual Development of the Infant

Chapter 8

Intellectual development is how people learn, what they learn, and how they express what they know through language.

*Also called mental or cognitive development.

*This development happens as quickly as physical development.

Babies react to stimuli (sound, light, and others) with reflexes.

Babies use sense organs and motor skills to learn about people, objects, places, and events in their world.

SO HOW DO INFANTS

LEARN????

Brain Development

Brain development helps babies learn. Different parts of the brain are developing at different times.

The baby’s brain and sense organs mature a lot during the first year.

Motor Center

As reflexes wane, much activity occurs in the motor center. Wiring here begins at 2 months.

They include learning voluntary gross-motor movements.

Wiring for fine-motor begins at 2-3 months.

Vision Center

Vision is needed quite early in life. For this reason the vision center is active in early infancy.

This helps baby look into people’s faces and look at objects.

First to mature is the ability of the baby to see through the eye clearly.

At 2-3 months baby’s begin to see clearly.

Around 3 months the baby’s brain “sees” things as one sharp images, whereas before there were “two” in the vision.

Once the baby can fuse the vision it is called binocular vision.

This is necessary when recognizing how far an object is.

Thinking and Memory

Instead of just seeing, hearing and touching, babies try to make sense of people, objects, sounds and events.

they want to know _________________________________

and they want to ___________________________________

babies like to _______________________events

babies like to _______________________events

Brain development research suggests that thinking and memory wiring begins at 6mo and lasts about 10 years.

PERCEPTION

 Perception involves organizing information that comes through the senses. This is a major step in learning.

People perceive by noting how things are alike and different in size, color, shape, texture.

Finally, perceptions involves the way a person reacts to different sensory experiences.

Perceptual learning – The process of developing perception. It happens because…

Preferences

Babies are exposed to ____________________. There are some they prefer to others. (see page 223)

Cognition

Cognition is the act or process of knowing or understanding.

This gives meaning to perception. (see Piaget’s Stages of development page 226)

Sensorimotor stage First stage of mental development Begins birth Completed in 2 years Children use their senses and motor skills to learn and

communicate.

This time is important and is the basis for all future mental development.

Children learn by solving problems

WHAT INFANTS LEARN

Babies often learn by exploring.

Concepts are ideas formed by combining what is known about a person, object, place, quality, or event. Thinking is organized through concepts. For example, if you see and animal you believe is a cat, you immediately think of all you know about cats.

Perceptual Concepts

Information comes to infants through their senses. At this time, babies begin to make order of what they see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. They begin to mentally organize this information.

Major perceptual concepts

object consistency – the ability to learn that objects remain the same even if they appear different

object concept – the ability to understand that an object, person, or even is separate from one’s interaction with it

object identity – the ability to learn that an object stays the same from one time to the next

object permanence – the ability to learn that people, objects and places still exist even when they are no longer seen, felt, or heard

depth perception – the ability to tell how far away something is

THE BEGINNINGS OF LANGUAGE

Language is closely related to mental development.

Language wiring begins at birth.

The wiring follows this sequence: babies distinguish differences in sounds at 6 months, babies come to notice major differences in

sound between 9 and 12 months, the brain’s speech center

begins the wiring process by 12 months, babies complete the auditory maps

needed for their own language a person’s vocabulary consists of the words he or she

understands and uses.

HOW BABIES COMMUNICATE

Newborns do not have control over the sounds that they make. During the 1st month, babies communicate through

crying. between the 6th and 8th week, most babies begin to

coo (happy sound) between the fourth and fifth month, babies begin to

babble (make a series of vowel sounds with consonant sounds slowly added…ba, da, gi)

during the last 3 months of the first year, babies may begin talking.