1. Intellectual Development
What will a baby learn during the
first 12 months?

2. Today
#1 Give examples of intellectual growth
#2 Describe how and what a baby learns
#3 Identify and apply Piaget’s stages of learning

3. Consider ...
• Babies use their senses as the building
blocks for learning. (Learn through physical
experience)
• Incapable of symbolic learning (Gathering
meaning from reading, understanding numbers)
• The difference in knowledge between birth and
one year!!

4. By Age 1
• Move: creeping, crawling or walking
• Understand: words (say words too)
• Communicate: their own needs, gestures
• Play: with people, games and toys
• Manipulate: holding and moving objects

5. How do they learn?
• Sensory learning
• sensations > sensory neurons > CNS > brain
• New information is relayed through the central
nervous system (spinal cord & brain)

6. Cerebral Cortex
• Cortex – the outer
layer of the brain which
allows for more complex
learning.
•
Memory, attention, thoug
ht and language.
• Allows perception –
learning from the senses
– to improve.

7. Newborns
• Brain cannot send messages to the body
right away.
• Newborns’ actions are usually physical
reflexes, not conscious messages from the
brain.

8. The First Months
• Cause and Effect – the idea that one action
will result in another action/condition.
• Understanding that for their actions there are
consequences. (motor skills)
• Consistency and awareness of their actions and
control over them.

9. Attention Span
• The amount of time we can concentrate on a task
without getting bored.
• Bright babies = short attention span.
• Boredom arrives quickly.
• Below Avg. Intelligence = long attention span
• After infancy, this becomes a sign of greater
intelligence.

10. Piaget’s Theories
• Swiss Child Psychologist
• Researched and studied his own children.
• Developed patters of intelligence which explain
how adult intelligence originates in infancy.

11. Piaget’s Learning Stages
• These stages will appear in the same order for all
children, but not always at the same age.
#1 Sensorimotor Period
#2 Preoperational Period
#3 Concrete Operations Period
#4 Formal Operations
*each have several sub-stages.

12. Sensorimotor
• Birth > Age 2
• Learn through senses and own actions
• Egocentric – thinking only about him or herself
• Object Permanence – the idea that an object
exists even when it is not in view.

13. Preoperational
• Age 2 > Age 7
• Children think of everything in terms of:
▫ their own activities
▫ what they perceive at the moment
• Their unusual perspectives are often seen as
“imaginative”
• Understand abstract language (love, beauty)

14. Preoperational cont’d
• Concentration is limited (one thing at a time)
• Often solve problems by pretending.
• Real and make believe are blurred.

15. Concrete Operational
• Age 7 > 11
• Children can think logically
• Still learn best from experience (senses)
• Need to see/experience a problem to solve it.
• Understand logical processes such as “the
glasses experiment”

16. Formal Operational
• Age 11 > adulthood
• Capable of symbolic learning – interpreting
meaning from words, numbers or reading.
• Do not need to experience something to understand
it. (logical, critical, compassionate)
• Able to make plans, goals for the future.
• Detect subtle or hidden meaning.