Social and cognitive development in infancy

Abstract

The relation between social and cognitive development has been important in several accounts of infant development. Piaget's theory specifies that social and cognitive development become significant at eight months and are closely linked thereafter. Brazelton and Trevarthen emphasize the role of social development and social interaction from the first months on. Neither theory predominates today, but studies of new topics such as the infant's discrimination of people and objects may help decide which is correct. In contrast to the question of when infants distinguish the social from the cognitive, it is obvious that the social and physical environments of the child arefundamentally different all along. Adults, and not objects, have expectations for infant development and adjust their behaviour in line with those expectations. The research on developmental outcome preserves this difference. Cognitive development in infancy proceeds normally in a great many environments. Social development, on the other hand, has been found to vary with the characteristics of the caregiver. This difference between social and cognitive development is interpretable in terms of the difference between the social and physical worlds.A quarter century of intensive research has established how very remarkable development in infancy is. In the time from birth to the end of infancy at about two years of age, babies come to see, recognize, manipulate and use objects. They acquire a practical understanding of the basic properties of the world. The know that objects are three dimensional, occupy space and obey the laws of causality. Over the same period infants also gain the essential elements of social knowledge. They not only form specific relationships with individual people, but they identify people as a special class. Babies recognize that people carry out actions, show affect, and respond to looks, signals and words. Indeed, babies are so accomplished regarding all of these distinctions that at two years they can routinely carry out a conversation with another person about common objects in the world.The rapid progress of infant development in both the cognitive and social realms raises the question of the relationship between the two. How do early cognitive and social developments intermingle? Do the physical and social worlds always exist for the child or does one precede the other. For instance, babies could understand the physical world first and then place people in it. Alternatively, all early knowledge may be social -derived from interactions with people -and only later is the physical world deciphered. It may even be that development in one of these domains drives or controls the other. Answers to these questions have clear educational importance because they help identify the environments and experiences that can best support and sustain early development.

Treating twins as individuals: Maternal educative practices

“…This study clearly points to the difficulty of forming a one-to-one relationship with each infant. In the contrast to the mother-singleton dyad, the relationship of the mother to her twins is always triadic (see Frye, 1989, this issue, for more details on the dyadic dialogue in singletons). When the mother of twins is involved in care of one baby, the other infant is always present, either physically when he cries and waits his turn to be fed or held, or simply through the fact that the mother knows that when she has finished with one infant she must perform the same routine once more with the second infant.…”