Cognition refers to the mental processes involved in thinking, perceiving, and acquiring and organising knowledge. In the first three years of life, cognition develops in three ways: Sensorimotor intelligence, perception and language.
Sensorimotor intelligence refers to learning more through the senses and the development of motor skills than by listening and talking. According to Piaget, a famous psychologist, until infants develop language, they think and learn best with their senses and their motor skills. Piaget believed that this sensorimotor intelligence happened in six stages:
Many researchers, including Maria Montessori, found that thinking depended on previous experience, opportunity to learn, and ability to remember. Recent researchers have found that while all children develop sensorimotor intelligence, it does not happen for every child in the same way. Studies have found that such things as race, family, culture, income and individual differences affect the development of cognition. For example, how would the learning of the previous child be affected if her parents became angry every time she made noise with her xylophone, or what if her parents could not afford to buy her books, toys or nutritious food?
The second important part of cognitive development is perception, the organizing and understanding of information from the senses. Eleanor and James Gibson, two of the researchers who studied perception in the late 20th century, suggested that perception does not happen automatically in the same way for everyone, but happens as a result of a selection from a wide range of possible responses. They suggested that everything in an infant’s surroundings gives her many chances to develop. Everything an infant perceives will be affected by past experiences, present needs and the infant’s understanding of possibilities.
The Gibsons believed that infants also need to grasp something they are perceiving so that they learn to organise many sensations and perceptions at once, such as touching, looking, tasting, hitting and shaking. They can also use the information from one sense to anticipate something in another sense. For example by just sucking on something, newborns could perceive information about it, whether it would taste good, what shape and size it was, and whether it was hard or soft.
Eleanor Gibson is best known for designing a “cliff experiment” that showed that infants have depth perception. She placed infants (the youngest 6 months old and the oldest 14 months old) on a sheet of plate glass placed on a table and extending beyond the table’s edge. Most of the infants would not crawl past the edge of the glass “cliff”, even when enticed with a favourite object or person.
Like Montessori, the Gibsons discovered that infants learn very quickly to organise people and things by color, size, shape, taste, and even by whether they appear male or female. For example what happens when an one year old holds an unpeeled banana for the first time? She may have many perceptions. She may look at the banana carefully, bang it a few times on the table, then put it in her mouth. She has eaten bananas before so she knows the fruit. While she chews the banana, she finds out that the skin is hard not soft. When she squeezes it she discovers that the banana she likes is inside the skin. This chance to explore and experience will affect the child’s behaviour the next time she is given an unpeeled banana.
The third part of cognitive development is language. It refers to how living beings communicate with each other, whether by making sounds, forming words and sentences, making gestures and facial expressions, or doing certain actions. Language is affected by both sensorimotor intelligence and perception. Montessori found that the time between one and two years old is the time of the second sensitive period, when children are absorbed in acquiring language and fascinated by listening to and replicating sounds.
Many researchers besides Montessori such as Noa Chomsky and B.F. Skinner, explored how language develops. Skinner believed that children learn to talk because they are rewarded for making sounds and saying certain words. He called this way of learning conditioning, gradual training using stimulus response and reinforcement. When an infant learns that every time she makes the sound “da-da”, her parents smile and repeat the sound back to her. Gradually, she learns that saying “da-da” gets the attention of her father especially.
According to Skinner and other researchers, an infant is most likely to develop language if her parents reward her first sounds that sound like words and repeat them back to her. If her parents make fun of the words or ignore them or correct them the child may be slow to develop language. She may never add as many words as an infant whose parents are encouraging. Skinner and other researchers also found that infants learn by association. For example, if the child’s parents make a habit of naming such things as food, toys, pictures in books, and pieces of clothing, the infant will soon learn to link things with their names. This training will later support the reading process.
Chomsky’s ideas are a bit different from Skinner’s. Chomsky believes that heredity determines how and when infants learn to use language. According to his ideas and other researchers , an infant’s understanding of the basic structure of language is present at her birth. On the other hand she has to learn vocabulary and grammar. This inborn human ability is called a Language Acquisition Device (LAD). They believe that as an infant develops the LAD develops and that the LAD develops around the same time in infants all over the world.
The ecological approach popular nowadays combines the ideas of Chomsky and Skinner and believe that most children regardless of the country they live they develop language in nine steps. Even though most infants go through the nine steps, each infant develops language differently from other infants depending on heredity, physical growth and experience with others. In a typical infant, the language development may look this way:
In order for an infant to be able to say over 200 words and use sentences she needs to train, practice and communicate with others throughout each of the nine stages described above. Montessori suggests that parents should first catch the child’s attention, smile and use a quiet tone, simple words and short sentences.
Gradually as the child becomes older and starts to say her first words, the parents begin to carry a conversation with her as though she can actually talk. This kind of practice in attentive two way interaction helps children to listen when someone talks, learn how people talk to each other and identify the words that are important to the people around her. At the same time, she learns that what she communicates affects other people. This learning in turn affects how she learns to develop relationships with others.
Great Minds ECC Team
Cognition refers to the mental processes involved in thinking, perceiving, and acquiring and organising knowledge. In the first three years of life, cognition develops in three ways: Sensorimotor intelligence, perception and language.
At our Montessori nursery for children aged 1 to 6, one of the most common questions we hear from parents is: “Will my child be ready for other schools if they start with Montessori?” The answer is a confident yes — and here’s why.
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