Infants learn a great number of skills throughout their initial two years of life.
They not only try to learn new information, but also their brains physically develop at an amazing rate and that varies the kind of attention and knowledge they are capable of.
The cognitive development of your infant from birth to two years of age:
Stage 1:
This stage is the period from birth to one month of age. During this stage, your infant purely responds by reflex, for instance, sucking in response to the nipple. Frankly speaking, there is not any cognitive development in these reactions.
Infants imitate the observed mouth actions. This is the first language objective; along with this your infant vocal cords also develop in order to make language-like sounds.
Stage 2:
This stage is the period from one to fours months of age. During this stage, your infant can understand the patterns, like the existence of a bottle means it is the time for feeding.
Your baby begins to select to do the activities because he/she can expect the outcome. Babies try to learn, trust or mistrust. They start to coo and make vowel noise. By the end of this stage, the babies learn to make some constant sounds.
Stage 3:
This stage is the period from 4-8 months. Till now all the actions of your baby are centered on him/her, but from now onwards babies begin to perform some actions on external objects without considering their physical needs. Infants try to search with their hands and mouth and start testing the object. They try to grab the objects which are in their direct line of vision.
Your baby tries to add vowels and consonants to make nonsense words. By the end of this stage, your baby can understand some simple words and the baby tries to use the words in order to represent the objects.
Stage 4:
This stage is the period from 8-12 months. Babies begin to accept more complicated means-end behavior. Babies try to mimic some actions like clapping and try to mimic the same behavior with various objects to contrast the result.
Your infant can learn that objects does not disappear when they are out of sight and he/she tries to search for the objects that have been hidden. Your baby starts to use real words and when they reach to the end of the first year, they are able to talk up to dozen words.
They are able to understand more language than they can speak. Up to the end of first year, they can point to desired objects.
Stage 5:
This stage is the period from 12-18 months. During this period, the babies continue to explore and experiment, but they do not understand that some things can harm them. They try to remember the object images without observing them and the same applies to other senses.
Stage 6:
This stage is the period from 18-24 months. Your baby tries to search for the things in expected places, like searching for the toy in the toy chest. They can learn scripted routines. They can get an understanding about past, present and future.
They learn to group the objects into categories. Till the end of this stage, babies learn to do the things and engage themselves in pretended play.
