Transcript Overheads: Infant Intelligence and Memory

Overheads: Infant
Intelligence and Memory
Carolyn R. Fallahi, Ph. D.
The History of Infant Intelligence
 Underestimates their abilities
 Why?
How Infants Learn
 Learning = a relatively permanent change in
behavior resulting from experience.
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Born with ability
Needs experience
Types of Learning
 Habituation and dishabituation
 Classical conditioning
 Operant conditioning
 Social learning
 Babies remember things that give them
pleasure!
 Problem solving.
Intelligence
 The ability to perform goal-oriented behavior
that is conscious and deliberate and adaptive.
 Infant intelligence – 2 year mark.
 Early tests – developmental in nature.
 Later tests – verbally-based.
Self-righting tendency
 Definition
 18-24 month mark.
memory
 Infant researcher Carolyn Rouie-Collier
 Is the infant’s memory of the mobile
conscious?
 Do infants acquire the ability to consciously
remember the past?
 Study with 9 month old girls.
 Study with 7 month old infants.
 What happens in the first 6 months?
Why does conscious memory develop
later than other learning?
 Theory.
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Maturation of certain brain structures, e.g.
hippocampus.
Or… depends on development of cognitive
structures.
Infantile amnesia.
Support for this.
Imitation
 Tiffany Field (1982) – 36 hour old infants.
 Meltzoff (1989) – imitation biologically based.
 Deferred imitation – Meltzoff (1988)
 Piaget versus Metlzoff