Cognitive Development

Intellectual development depends on learning that involves three elements: the attention, information processing and memory (which includes both the encoding and retrieval of information). Intellectual development is reflected in the promotion of capacity to understand, reason and make judgments. The standardized intelligence tests measure general intelligence two forms of school-age children: verbal and performance (or non-verbal). These standardized tests are not available to measure intelligence infant. How then, can we recognize the attributes of intelligence verbal and non-verbal in infants? Over the past two decades, the discovery of visual habituation techniques for assessing the infants' attention was seen as a breakthrough in the study of infant cognition. It is illustrated by a study that describes 4-day-old infants to listen in a long series of "see-bee-lee" sounds. When a novel is "yes" sound is heard, the children responded with a change in heart rate and faster, stronger sucking on a pacifier, indicating that very young infants can perceive differences in vowel sounds.

More complex studies using simultaneous visual and auditory stimuli also indicate that infants are able to organise perceptions across sensory modalities (cross-modal matching), without the language skills to describe them. For example, 11 months, infants were presented in a sequence of continuous pure tones and interrupted. Two photos were in the infant view throughout the experiment: one contains a continuous line, the other a dotted line. Infants always correspond good visual stimulus to the hearing, inferring cross-modal matching and some rudimentary understanding of the concept of interruptedness. The use of these techniques, it has been shown that infants less than 1 year can form a wide range of categorical representations quite complex, including the faces, colors, geometric shapes, and the orientation of lines.

Attempts to measure the responses of infants, such as those described above, rely on sophisticated technologies, including infrared photography to monitor eye gaze and child pupillary dilation, video facial reactions, and electrophysiological monitoring in heart rate and evoked potentials. The primary pediatrician can best estimate infant intelligence by assessing problem-solving and language milestones. Language is the best indicator of intellectual potential, problem solving is the best measure. Their gross motor development less correlated with the cognitive potential, most children who are diagnosed with mental retardation later walk at the time.