Patterns of Cognitive Development in Infancy.

Abstract

of infants during the past ten years needs no documentation. A great deal of information about the functioning of infants in both controlled laboratory situations and in more naturalistic settings is being re corded. By means of ingenious adaptations of method and technique, the infant is being enticed to reveal more fully the range of his per ceptual and intellective capabilities, and the infant is showing himself to be more competent than was generally believed (Kessen, 1963). While the evaluations of these efforts have not been uniformly posi tive, an optimistic expectation that the growth in the volume of re search is bound to lead to the field's development as well emerges from many considered statements. Much of this research, however, is atomistic in character. Studies of particular behaviors—sucking, smiling, head-turning, looking at stimuli—abound; but even though such behaviors are usually thought to reflect attentional, memory, or learning functions, they are rarely studied in conjunction with each other to see if they give us a con gruent picture of the infant as a functioning organism. Clearly, there are exceptions (e.g., Bell, Weller, & Waldrop, 1971; Kessen, 1967; Wolff, 1966), but they do not yet constitute a trend. The influence of Piaget's theorizing, which shows so prominently in the research on cognitive development during the preschool and school years, is not very evident in the work pertaining to infancy. It may be that the theory is not very productive with respect to newborns, who still con stitute the most readily accessible source of infant research subjects. Or, it may be that we have lingering suspicions concerning the extent of cognitive functioning in a prelanguage creature, the infant. In any case, the paucity of studies reflecting Piaget's ideas concerning de

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