HDFS 2950 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Object Permanence, 18 Months, Mental Representation
20 Sep 2016
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Chapter six: cognitive development in infancy and childhood. Creating new schemes and adjusting old ones to better fit environment. Steady state in which children assimilate more than they accommodate. State of rapid cognitive change in which children shift from assimilation to accommodation. Internal linking together of schemes into an interconnected cognitive system. Circular reaction: stumbling onto a new experience caused by the baby"s own motor activity. Simple motor habits centered around an infant"s own body. Aimed at repeating interesting events in the surrounding world. Violation-of-expectation research assesses infants" knowledge, based on their attention to events consistent versus inconsistent with reality. Some critics believe it indicated only non-conscious awareness of physical events. Others maintain it reveals only perceptual preference for novelty. Ren e baillargeon found evidence for object permanence in the first few months of life. Critics question the significance of babies" looking preferences. Mastery of object permanence is a gradual achievement. Babies construct mental representations of objects and their whereabouts.
