Infant Development: Physical, Cognitive, and Psychosocial Aspects, Study notes of Advanced Education

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 Infancy During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions. ~Piaget Physical Development: Physical development during the first two years is so rapid that infants often seem to change before their parents’ very eye. the typical patterns of growth and maturation that occur in the infant’s body and nervous system and looks at how the development of sensory, perceptual, and motor abilities keeps pace with physical development. For the most part, development takes place as rapidly as a baby’s genetic history allows, and the developmental sequence is the same for all healthy infants. The age at which certain skills are mastered, however, varies because development of many skills depends on the interaction of biological and environmental forces. One critical variable in development is nutrition. In developing countries, where poverty and poor hygiene are the rule rather than the exception, malnutrition is common, sometimes resulting in lifelong impairment of both physical and cognitive development. Cognitive Development: Cognitive development—the ways in which the infant comes to learn about, think about, and adapt to his or her surroundings. It focuses on the various ways in which infant intelligence is revealed: through sensorimotor intelligence, perception, memory, and language development. The discussion includes a description of Jean Piaget’s theory of sensorimotor intelligence, which maintains that infants think exclusively with their senses and motor skills. Piaget’s six stages of sensorimotor intelligence are examined, as is information-processing theory, which compares cognition to the ways in which computers analyze data. Finally, it turns to the most remarkable cognitive achievement of the first two years: the acquisition of language. Beginning with a description of the infant’s first attempts at language, the chapter follows the sequence of events that leads to the child’s ability to utter two-word sentences. This module concludes with an examination of three classic theories of language acquisition and a fourth, hybrid theory, which combines aspects of all three.