Early cognitive development

===Lecture Details===
Glenn Melvin; Week 2 MED1022; MotM
===Lecture Content===
Piaget's cognitive development theory has sensorimotor (0-2) where knowledge of the world is based on senses and motor skills; preoperational thought (2-6) where child learns how to use words and numbers to repesent aspects of the world but only through their perspective; concrete operational thought (7- early adolesence) where child understands and applies logical operations to experiences as long as they are here and now; formal operational thought (adolesence and beyond) where there is abstract thought.
Piaget key concepts are that there are schemes where mental structure organises information and regulates behaviour, assimilation is where new information is assimilated into what is already known, and accommodation is modification of previous understanding.
Before 6/7, intuitive psychology is the framework for understanding bodily processes. Causality is based on intentions, desires and beliefs rather than internal biological processes. After this age mechanistic explanations are more common, children can differentiate biological phenomena from psychological ones. Internal workings of the body can be understood.
Understanding death- preoperational: death reversible, characterised by stillness, eyes closed. Concrete operational: universal, irreversible, caused by elements outside the body. Formal operational- inevitable, universal, cessation of bodily function.
Information processing approach- recognising a cat: encode visual features on seeing the object, assemble visual features to construct image, search memory for recognition of matching image, if recognised, search long term memory for object name.
Theory of mind- at 2, children understand desires and relationship with action. By 3 children distinguish between mental and physical worlds. 4 children have a grasp of how thoughts and beliefs explain behaviour. Memory has encoding, storage and retrieval. Recognition is realising a present object/event has been encountered before, recall is retrieval of object/event when it is not present. Newborns have memories that last a few seconds. 5 months an infant will have a memory of faces lasting 3 months. 2 years there is complex and relatively durable memory. Metamemory is knowledge about memory and understanding ones memory abilities. Implicit memory is memory we are unaware of such as tying shoelaces, and matures at age 3.
Language: birth-1 phonemes; 1 can talk and gesture; 1-2 vocabulary expands rapidly, reflective and expressive learning styles appear. 3-5 vocabulary continues to expand, grammatical morphemes are added. At 2 months there is cooing, at 6 there is babbling, 8-11 months there is intonation.
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