Infant Toddler Learning & Development Foundations

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
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145) concludes: “It is now clear that
from early in life, the human organism
stores information over the long term
and that the effects of prior experience
are apparent in behavior. In the first
months of life, infants exhibit recognition
memory for all manner of natural
and artificial stimuli.”
Number Sense
Number sense refers to children’s
concepts of numbers and the relationships
among number concepts.
Research findings indicate that infants
as young as five months of age are
sensitive to number and are able to
discriminate among small sets of up
to three objects (Starkey and Cooper
1980; Starkey, Spelke, and Gelman
1990). Infants demonstrate the ability
to quickly and accurately recognize
the quantity in a small set of objects
without counting. This ability is called
subitizing.
According to one theoretical perspective,
infants’ abilities to discriminate
among numbers, for example,
two versus three objects, does not
reflect “number knowledge.” Rather,
this early skill appears to be based on
infants’ perceptual abilities to “see”
small arrangements of number (Clements
2004; Carey 2001), or on their
ability to notice a change in the general
amount of objects they are seeing
(Mix, Huttenlocher, and Levine 2002).
The alternative view is that the infant’s
early sensitivity to number is numerical
in nature. In other words, infants
have a capacity to distinguish among
numbers and to reason about these
numbers in numerically meaningful
ways (Wynn 1998; Gallistel and Gelman
1992). In some sense, they know
that three objects are more than one
object. Whether early number sensitivity
is solely perceptual in nature
or also numerical in nature, developmental
theorists agree that it sets the
foundation for the later development
of children’s understanding of number
and quantity.
As children’s understanding and use
of language increases, they begin to
assimilate language based on number
knowledge to their nonverbal knowledge
of number and quantity (Baroody
2004). Between 18 and 24 months of
age, children use relational words to
indicate “more” or “same” as well as
number words. They begin to count
aloud, typically starting with “one”
and continuing with a stream of number
names (Fuson 1988; Gelman and
Gallistel 1978), although they may
omit some numbers and not use the
conventional number list (e.g. “one,
two, three, seven, nine, ten”). Around
the same age, children also begin to
count small collections of objects; however,
they may point to the same item
twice or say a number word without
pointing to an object. And they begin
to construct an understanding of
cardinality (i.e., the last number word
is used when counting represents the
total number of objects).
Classification
Classification refers to the infant’s
developing ability to group, sort, categorize,
connect, and have expectations
of objects and people according
to their attributes. Three-month-olds
demonstrate that they expect people to
act differently than objects (Legerstee
1997). They also demonstrate the ability
to discriminate between smiling
and frowning expressions (Barrera
and Maurer 1981). Mandler (2000)