Cognitive development in infants and toddlers progresses through several stages: 1) Simple reflexes at birth focus on automatic responses to stimuli. 2) Between 1-4 months, infants develop habits and primary reactions focused on their own bodies. 3) From 4-8 months, infants become more object-oriented and can intentionally repeat actions that bring pleasurable results. 4) Between 8-12 months, hand-eye coordination develops along with the ability to coordinate means and ends.

1. Cognitive Development of
infants & Toddlers
MODULE 13:

2. Cognitive Development
•Cognitive development in infancy refers to
development in t way a baby thinks. This
includes his/her language, communication
and exploration skills. Examples of cognitive
activities include pay attention,
remembering learning to talk, interacting
with toys a identifying faces.

3. 1.) SIMPLE REFLEXES (birth to 1 month)
In the first month of
life, infants reflects
more reflexes -
automatic responses to
particular stimuli

4. 2. First habits and primary circular
reactions phase ( 1 to 4 months )
• Coordination of sensation and two types of schemes: habits
(reflex) and primary circular reactions. Primary reaction
because the action is focused on the infant's body. Circular
reaction because it is a repetition of an action that initially
occurred by chance.
• Ex. A child may suck his/her thumb by accident and then
later intentionally repeat at the action.

5. 3.SECONDARY CIRCULAR REACTION (4-8 months)
In this stage the infants become more object - oriented,
moving beyond self-preoccupation repeat actions that
bring interesting or pleasurable results. This stage is
associated primarily with the development of
coordination between vision & prehension.
Ex. 4 month old accidentally knocks a toy hanging in
front of her producing a fascinating swinging motion
and attempts to repeat this effect.

6. 4.) COORDINATION OF REACTIONS STAGE
SECONDARY CIRCULAR (8-12 months)
• Coordination of vision and touch-hand-eye coordination; of
schemes intentionally.
• This stage is associated primarily with the development of logic
& the coordination between means & ends.
• Ex. When an infant sees the string of a pull-toy near her,
rather than crawling over to the toy she might instead reach
out & grab the string & then purposely pull the string in order
to acquire the toy.

7. 5.) TERTIARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS, NOVELTY, AND CURIOSITY
(12-18 months)
•Infants become intrigued y the many
properties of objects & by the many
things they can make happen to
objects; they experiment with new
behavior.

8. 6. INTERNALIZATION OF SCHEMES(INVENTION OF
NEW MEANS THROUGH MENTAL COMBINATION
(18-24 months)
Infants develop the ability to use primitive symbols &
form enduring mental presentation. This stage is
associated primarily with the beginnings of insight, or
true creativity.
Ex. 19 month old bumps his new push toy against a
wall,pauses for a moment as if "thinking", then
immediately turns the toy in new direction.

9. Do infants learn and remember?
▪️Yes! Pavlov's classical conditioning & skinner's operant
conditioning have been proven to apply to infants.
▪️All of us experience infantile amnesia, the inability to recall
events that happened when we were very young.
▪️Generally, we can remember little or nothing that has happened
to us before the age of about 5 years, and it is extremely rare for
someone to recall many memories before 3 years.
LEARNING AND REMEMBERING

10. LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
From day one, infants appear to be programmed to tune in to their
linguistic environment with the specific goal of acquiring language.
Infants clearly have remarkably acute language learning activities
even from an early age.Within the first years of life, we humans
seem to progress through the following stages in producing
language:
1.)Cooing, which compromise consonant as well as vowel sounds.
Infants produce soft vocalizations around 3 months of age

11. • 2.) Babbling, which compromises consonant as well as vowel sounds; to most
people's ears, the babbling of t infants growing up among speakers from different
language groups sounds very similar.
• Ex. "bababababa" or "nanananana“
• 3.) One-word utterances; these utterances are limited in both the vowels &
the consonants they utilize.
• Ex. Usually they refer to important people ("mama", "dada"), animals ("doggie,"
"kitty"), objects that move ("ball," "car"), foods ("milk", "apple"), familiar actions
("bye-bye“)

12. • 4.) Two-word utterances & Telegraphic speech
• Ex. "go car", "mommy shoe", "door open" or "where daddy go?
• 5.) Basic adult sentence structure
(present by about age 4 years) with the continuing vocabulary
acquisition.dFJAs children become more sophisticated in their
language, overgeneralize rules in ways that are inconsistent with
common usage.
Ex. "I come home" for "I came home" (sometimes called creative
grammar).

13. Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
The Language Acquisition Device- is the innate biological
ability of humans to acquire & develop language.
The LAD was developed by linguist Noam Chomsky who
contribute to the field of cognitive psychology through his
language research. He challenged the prevailing
behaviorist theory that language was acquired through
exposure to it in our environment.

14. THANK YOU!