As explained in Chapter 2, Piaget’s sweeping overview of four periods of cognition contrasts with information-processing theory, a perspective analogous to computer functioning, including input, memory, programs, analysis, and output. Just as input connects with a program and then leads to output on a computer, sensation leads to perception, which may produce cognition. Those links are described and traced in detail by information-processing theorists.

For infants, output might be moving a hand to uncover a toy (object permanence), saying a word to signify recognition (e.g., mama), or looking at one photo longer than another (habituation). Some recent studies examine changes in brain waves when infants see a picture (Kouider et al., 2013); such research both confirms and refutes Piaget’s theory.

To understand the many aspects of information processing in infancy, consider the baby’s reaction to an empty stomach. A newborn simply cries as a reflex to hunger pangs, but an older hungry infant hears Mother’s voice, looks for her, reaches to be picked up, and then nuzzles at her breast. Or, at an even older age, the toddler signs or says something to indicate hunger.

Each step of this process requires information to be processed. Older infants are more thoughtful and effective because of advanced information processing. Advances occur weekly or even day-by-day in the first year, with no sudden leaps, contrary to Piaget’s notion of six discrete stages (Cohen & Cashon, 2006).

The information-processing perspective, aided by modern technology, has uncovered many aspects of infant cognition. As one researcher summarizes, “Rather than bumbling babies, they are individuals who … can learn surprisingly fast about the patterns of nature” (Keil, 2011, p. 1023). Concepts and categories seem to develop in infants’ brains by 6 months or earlier (Mandler & DeLoach, 2012).

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This perspective helps tie together many aspects of infant cognition. In earlier decades, infant intelligence was measured via age of sitting up, grasping, and so on, but we now know that age of achieving motor skills does not predict later intellectual achievement, although when an infant is way behind schedule (e.g., not sitting up at 8 months) that may indicate cognitive delay.

However, information-processing research has found perceptual measures that do predict later intelligence. For example, early attention and relatively rapid habituation correlate with later cognitive ability. Babies who focus intently on new stimuli, and then quickly become bored, may be more intelligent than babies who stare aimlessly (Bornstein & Colombo, 2012). Rapid habituation is an encouraging sign; smart babies like novelty.

Now let us look at two specific aspects of infant cognition that illustrate the information-processing approach: affordances and memory. Affordances concern perception or, by analogy, input. Memory concerns brain organization and output—that is, storage and retrieval.

Perception, remember, is the processing of information that arrives at the brain from the sense organs. Decades of thought and research led Eleanor and James Gibson to conclude that perception is far from automatic (E. J. Gibson, 1969; J. J. Gibson, 1979). Perception—for infants, as for the rest of us—is a cognitive accomplishment that requires selectivity: “Perceiving is active, a process of obtaining information about the world…. We don’t simply see, we look” (E. J. Gibson, 1988, p. 5). Or, as one neuroscientist said, “You see what you expect or are trained to see, not what is there” (Freeman, quoted in Bower, 2007, p. 106).

The environment (people, places, and objects) affords, or offers, many opportunities to interact with whatever is perceived (E. J. Gibson, 1997). Each of these opportunities is called an affordance. Which particular affordance is perceived and acted on depends on four factors: sensory awareness, immediate motivation, current level of development, and past experience.

As an example, imagine that you are lost in an unfamiliar city. You need to ask directions. Of whom? Not the first person you see. You want someone knowledgeable and approachable. Affordance is what you seek, and you scan the facial expression, body language, gender, dress, etc. of passersby (Miles, 2009). They, in turn, assess the affordance of your request. Are you genuinely lost, and do they know how to direct you? If they judge that your request is a scam, or they decide that your question is beyond them, their judgment of the affordance will force you to find another person.

Developmentalists studying children emphasize that age of the perceiver affects what affordances are perceived. For example, since toddlers enjoy running as soon as their legs allow it, every open space affords running: a meadow, a building’s long hall, a highway. To adults, affordance of running is much more limited: They worry about a bull grazing in the meadow, neighbors behind the hallway doors, or traffic on the road. Furthermore, because motivation is pivotal in affordances, toddlers move when most adults prefer to stay put.

Selective perception of affordances depends not only on age, motivation, and context but also on culture. Just as a baby might be oblivious to something adults consider crucial—or vice versa—an American in, say, Cambodia might miss an important sign of the social network. In every nation, foreigners behave in ways considered rude, but their behavior may simply indicate different affordances from those of the natives.

Variation in affordance is also apparent within cultures. City-dwellers complain that visitors from rural areas walk too slowly, yet visitors complain that urbanites are always in a hurry. Sidewalks afford either fast travel or views of architecture, depending on the perceiver.

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Experience affects which affordances are perceived. This is obvious in studies of depth perception. Research demonstrating this began with an apparatus called the visual cliff, designed to provide the illusion of a sudden drop-off between one horizontal surface and another (see photo). In a classic research study, 6-month-olds, urged forward by their mothers, wiggled toward Mom over the supposed edge of the cliff, but 10-month-olds, even with Mother’s encouragement, fearfully refused to budge (E. J. Gibson & Walk, 1960).

Scientists once thought that a visual deficit—specifically, inadequate depth perception—prevented 6-month-olds from seeing the drop, which was why they moved forward. According to this hypothesis, as the visual cortex matured, 10-month-olds perceived that crawling over a cliff afforded falling.

Later research (using advanced technology) disproved that interpretation. Some 3-month-olds notice the drop: Their heart rate slows and their eyes open wide when they are placed over the cliff. Depth perception is in place, but until they can crawl, they do not realize that crawling over an edge affords falling.

Reaction to the visual-cliff hazard depends not only on vision but also on experience with crawling and on other specifics, such as the particular texture and depth of the supposed cliff. The difference is in processing, not input—in affordance, not sensory ability. Those conclusions were drawn by Eleanor Gibson herself, the scientist who did the early visual-cliff research and who explained the concept of affordance (Adolph & Kretch, 2012). Further research on the visual cliff includes the social context, with the tone of the mother’s encouragement indicating whether or not the cliff affords crawling (Kim et al., 2010).

A similar sequence happens with fear of many objects. By 9 months, infants attend to snakes and spiders more readily than to other similar images, but they do not yet fear them. A few months later, perhaps because they have learned from others, they are afraid of such creatures. Thus, perception is a prerequisite, but it does not always lead to affordance (LoBue, 2013).

Despite the variations from one infant to another in the particular affordances they perceive, all babies are attracted to two kinds of affordances. Babies pay close attention to things that move and to people.

Dynamic perception focuses on movement. Infants love motion. As soon as they can, they move their bodies—grabbing, scooting, crawling, and walking. To their delight, such motion changes what the world affords, an early example of dynamic perception. As a result, infants strive to master the next motor accomplishment, and repeat whatever ability they already have (Adolph et al., 2012). They love to watch things that move—passing cars, flickering images on a screen, mobiles.

It’s almost impossible to teach a baby not to chase and grab any moving creature, including a dog, a cat, or even a cockroach. Infants’ interest in motion was the inspiration for another experiment that sought to learn what affordances were perceived by babies too young to talk or walk (van Hof et al., 2008). A ball was moved at various speeds in front of infants aged 3 to 9 months. Most tried to touch or catch the ball as it passed within reach. However, marked differences appeared in their perception of the affordance of “catchableness.”

Sometimes younger infants did not reach for slow-moving balls yet tried to grasp the faster balls. They tried but failed, touching the ball only about 20 percent of the time. By contrast, the 9-month-olds knew when a ball afforded catching. They grabbed the slower balls and did not try to catch the fastest ones; their success rate was almost 100 percent. This “follows directly from one of the key concepts of ecological psychology, that animals perceive the environment in terms of action possibilities or affordances” (van Hof et al., 2008, p. 193).

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Another universal principle of infant perception is people preference. This follows from evolutionary psychology: Over the millennia, humans survived by learning to attend to, and rely on, one another. You just read that the affordance of the visual cliff depends partly on the tone of the mother’s voice. Infants soon recognize their caregivers and expect certain affordances (comfort, food, entertainment) from them.

Very young babies are particularly interested in emotional affordances, using their limited perceptual abilities and intellectual understanding to respond to smiles, shouts, and so on. Indeed, in one study, babies watched a three-second video demonstration by an actor whose face was covered (so no visual expression could be seen) as he acted out happiness, anger, or indifference. The results: 6-month-olds can distinguish whether a person is happy or angry by body moments alone (Zieber et al., 2014). Hundreds of experiments have shown that infants are able to connect movements, facial expressions, and tone of voice long before they understand language. This ability led to an interesting hypothesis:

Given that infants are frequently exposed to their caregivers’ emotional displays and further presented with opportunities to view the affordances (Gibson, 1959, 1979) of those emotional expressions, we propose that the expressions of familiar persons are meaningful to infants very early in life.

[Kahana-Kalman & Walker-Andrews, 2001, p. 366]

Building on earlier research design, these researchers tested their hypothesis by presenting infants with two moving images side by side on one video screen (Kahana-Kalman & Walker-Andrews, 2001). Both images were of the same woman, either the infant’s own mother or a stranger. In one image, the woman was joyful; in the other, sad. Each presentation was accompanied by an audiotape of that woman’s happy or sad talk.

Previous studies had found that 7-month-olds could match emotional words with facial expressions, but younger babies could not. In that research, at 7 months, but not earlier, infants looked longer at strangers whose voice matched the emotion on their face and less long at strangers whose face did not match the tone.

These researchers first replicated the earlier experiments, again finding that 3½-month-old babies could not match a stranger’s voice and facial expression. Then the 3½-month-olds saw two images of their own mother and heard her happy or her sad voice. They correctly matched visual and vocal emotions. They looked longest when their smiling mother talked happily; but, when their mother sounded sad, they stared more at the video of their sad-faced mother than at the video of their happy mother—thus connecting sound and sight, presumably based on their past experience with that person.

The researchers noticed something else as well. When infants saw and heard their happy mothers, they smiled twice as fast, seven times as long, and much more brightly (cheeks raised and lips upturned) than for the happy strangers. Experience had taught them that a smiling mother affords joy. The affordances of a smiling stranger are more difficult to judge.

Information-processing research, with detailed behavioral and neurological measures, finds that memory is evident in very young babies. Within the first weeks after birth, infants recognize their caregivers by face, voice, and smell. Memory improves month by month. In one study, after 6-month-olds had had only two half-hour sessions with a novel puppet, a month later they remembered the experience—an amazing feat of memory for babies who could not talk or even stand up (Giles & Rovee-Collier, 2011).

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There are several distinct types of memories, each in a particular part of the brain that is developing in its own way. That means that, even though infants already remember some things, other kinds of memory build and emerge throughout childhood. Instead of noting the many “faults and shortcomings relative to an adult standard,” it may be more appropriate to realize that children of all ages remember what they need to remember (Bjorklund & Sellers, 2014, p. 142). Sensory and caregiver memories are apparent in the first month, motor memories by 3 months, and then, at about 9 months, more complex memories (Mullally & Maguire, 2014).

The evidence suggests that infant amnesia, which is the belief that infants remember nothing, is mistaken. It is true that adults rarely remember events that occurred before they were 3. Children do somewhat better, remembering what happened at age 2. But the fact that memories fade with time does not mean that memory is absent.

If you forgot your third grade teacher’s name, for example, that does not mean that you had no memory when you were 9; it just means that you do not now remember what you could easily remember many years ago. And memory itself may be inaccessible, but not completely gone. If you saw a photo of your third grade teacher, and a list of four possible names for her or him, you probably could choose correctly.

No doubt memory is fragile in the first months of life and improves with age over the first months and years. Apparently a certain amount of experience and a certain amount of brain maturation are required in order to process and recall what happens (Bauer et al., 2010). But some of that experience happens on day one—or even in the womb—and some memories may begin long before a baby can say them.

One reason for the apparent fragility is linguistic: People use words to store (and sometimes distort) memories, so preverbal children have difficulty with recall (Richardson & Hayne, 2007), while adults cannot access their infant memories because they did not yet have words to solidify them. Another probable reason is that memories fade over time: Adults cannot remember what happened when they were 1, but 2-year-olds can, because the memory traces in the brain have not yet been degraded (Mullally & Maguire 2014).

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Many studies seek to understand what infants can remember, even if they cannot later put memories into words. Memories are particularly evident if:

The most dramatic proof of infant memory comes from innovative experiments in which 3-month-olds learned to move a mobile by kicking their legs (Rovee-Collier, 1987, 1990). The infants lay on their backs connected to a mobile by means of a ribbon tied to one foot (see photo). Virtually every baby began making occasional kicks (as well as random arm movements and noises) and realized that kicking made the mobile move. They then kicked more vigorously and frequently, sometimes laughing at their accomplishment. So far, this is no surprise—observing self-activated movement is highly reinforcing to infants, a dynamic perception.

When some infants had the mobile-and-ribbon apparatus reinstalled and reconnected one week later, most started to kick immediately. Their reaction indicated that they remembered their previous experience. But when other 3-month-old infants were retested two weeks later, they began with only random kicks. Apparently they had forgotten what they had learned—evidence that memory is fragile early in life. But that conclusion needs revision, or at least qualification.

The lead researcher in the mobile experiments, Carolyn Rovee-Collier, developed another experiment demonstrating that 3-month-old infants could remember after two weeks if they had a brief reminder session before being retested (Rovee-Collier & Hayne, 1987). A reminder session is any experience that helps people recollect an idea, a thing, or an event.

In this particular reminder session, two weeks after the initial training, the infants watched the mobile move but were not tied to it and were positioned so that they could not kick. The next day, when they were again connected to the mobile and positioned so that they could move their legs, they kicked as they had learned to do two weeks earlier.

Apparently, watching the mobile move on the previous day had revived their faded memory. The information about making the mobile move was stored in their brains, but they needed processing time to retrieve it. The reminder session provided that time. Other research similarly finds that repeated reminders are more powerful than single reminders and that context is crucial, especially for infants younger than 9 months old: Being tested in the same room as the initial experience aids memory (Rovee-Collier & Cuevas, 2009).

After about 6 months of age, infants retain information for a longer time than younger babies do, with less training or reminding. Many researchers find that by 9 months, memory markedly improves, although it is not clear if this is purely maturational or if it is the result of locomotion, since 9-month-olds can usually crawl (Mullally & Maguire, 2014).

Memory researchers now believe that several kinds of memory, lodged in various parts of the brain, reach an important level of maturation at about 9 months. For example, linguistic memory is evident when a baby’s vocalizations begin to sound like the speech he or she has heard. Motor memory is evident when an infant first watches someone else play with a new toy and, the next day, plays with it in the same way as he or she had observed. Infants younger than 9 months do not usually do this.

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Many experiments show that 1-year-olds can transfer learning from one object or experience to another. They learn from various people and events—from parents and strangers, from other babies and older siblings, from picture books and family photographs (Hayne & Simcock, 2009).

The dendrites and neurons of the brain change to reflect remembered experiences during infancy. (Developmental Link: Experience-related brain growth is described in Chapter 5.) Note that these experiments are further evidence of several facts already mentioned: Babies observe affordances carefully, and they are especially attuned to movement, people, and emotions.

The crucial insight from information processing is that the brain is a very active organ, changing with each day’s events. Therefore, the particulars of early experiences and memory are critically important in determining what a child knows or does not know.

Generalization becomes possible. At every age “people perceive more of a visual scene than was presented to them.” Even infants develop expectancies for what they observe and fill in the unseen parts (Mullally & Maguire, 2014).

Many studies show that infants remember not only specific events and objects but also patterns and general goals (Keil, 2011). Some examples come from research, such as memory of what syllables and rhythms are heard and how objects move in relation to other objects. Additional examples arise from close observations of babies at home, such as what they expect from a parent or a babysitter, or what details indicate bedtime. Every day of their young lives, infants are processing information and storing conclusions.