Chapter 5 Infancy and Toddlerhood: First Two Years

Spans the first two years of life. Piaget believed that infants and toddlers "think" with their eyes, ears, hands, and other sensorimotor equipment. They cannot yet carry out many activities inside their heads.

Specific organized structures-- organized ways of making sense of experience

Involves building schemes through direct interation with the environment

Assimilation and Accommodation

Use of current schemes to interpret the external world

Create new schemes or adjust olf ones after noticing that our current ways of thinking do not capture the environment effectively.

Prcoess that takes place internally, apart from direct contact with the environment. Once children form new schemes, they rearrange them, linking them with other schemes to create a strongly interconnected cognitive system

Provides special means of adapting their first schemes. The reaction is "circular" because as the infant tries to repeat the event again and again a sensorimotor response that first occurred by chance beacomes strengthened into a new scheme

(birth-1 month)

Newborn reflexes

(1-4 months)

Simple motor habits centered around the infan'ts own body; imited anticipation of events

(4-8 months)

Actions aimed at repeating interesting effects in the surrounding world, imitation of familiar behaviors

(8-12 months)

Intentional, or goal -directed, behavior; ability to find a hidden object in the first location in which it is hidden (obejct permanence); improved anticipation of events; imitation of behaviors slightly different from those the infant usually performs

12-18 months)

Exploration of the properties of objects by acting on them in novel ways; imitation of novel behaviors; ability to search in several locations for a hidden object (accurate A-B Search)

(18 months- 2 years)

Internal depictions of objects and events, as indicated by sudden solutions to problems; ability to find an object that has been moved while out of sight (invisible displacement) ; deferred imitation; and make-believe play

A method which researcheers show babies an expected event (one that follows physicial laws) and an unexpected event ( a variation of the first event that violates physical laws) Heightened attention to the unexpected event suggests that the infant is "surprised" by a deviation from phsyical reality and , therefore, is aware of that aspect of the physical world.