COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT: INFORMATION-PROCESSING PERSPECTIVES

INFORMATION-PROCESSING THEORIES Analogy of the mind as a computer Information flows through a limited-capacity system of mental hardware and software Hardware – brain and nervous system Software – mental rules and strategies

Sensory store (sensory register) THE MULTISTORE MODEL Sensory store (sensory register) Detects and holds raw sensory input Separate store for each sense Large amounts of information Very limited duration

Short-term store (STS) / working memory THE MULTISTORE MODEL Short-term store (STS) / working memory Limited information (5–9 pieces) Several seconds Lost if we do nothing with the info Long-term store (LTS) Vast and relatively permanent

Figure 7.1 A schematic model of the human information processing system. Adapted from “Human Memory: A Proposed System and Its control Processes ,” by R. C. Atkinson and R. M. Shiffrin, 1968, in K. W. Spence and J. T. Spence (Eds.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory, (Vol 2). Copyright © 1968 by Academic Press, Inc. Adapted by permission of Elsevier..

DEVELOPMENT OF THE MULTISTORE MODEL Control processes or executive functions Involved in planning and monitoring what is attended to, and what is done with the information Metacognition – knowledge of one’s cognitive abilities and processes related to thinking

DEVELOPMENT OF THE MULTISTORE MODEL Developmental Differences in “Hardware”: Information-Processing Capacity Development of the Short-Term Store Assessed with memory span Recall in order of rapidly presented unrelated items Highly reliable age differences Facilitated by knowledge base

Figure 7.2 Children’s memory span for digits (digit span) shows regular increases with age. Adapted from “Memory Span: Sources of Individual and Developmental Differences,” by F. N. Dempster, 1981, Psychological Bulletin, 89, 63-100. Copyright © 1981 by the American Psychological Association. Adapted with permisson from the publisher and author.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE MULTISTORE MODEL Changes in Processing Speed Due to biological maturation Increased myelination of associative (thinking) areas of the brain Elimination of unnecessary synapses

DEVELOPMENT OF THE MULTISTORE MODEL Developmental Differences in “Software”: Strategies and What Children Know About Thinking Strategies Deliberately implemented, goal-directed operations used to aid task performance Production and Utilization Deficiencies Fail to produce effective strategies when young Fail to benefit immediately from a newly trained strategy

DEVELOPMENT OF THE MULTISTORE MODEL Multiple-Strategy and Variable-Strategy Use Children have a variety of strategies they choose from Adaptive strategy choice model With experience, more sophisticated strategies are used Novel situations children fall back to easier strategies

Figure 7. 3 Seigler’s adaptive strategy choice model of development Figure 7.3 Seigler’s adaptive strategy choice model of development. Change in strategy use is seen as a series of overlapping waves, with different strategies being used more frequently at different ages. Adapted from Emerging Minds: The Process of Change in Children’s Thinking, by R. S. Siegler. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Table 7. 1 General Model of How to Teach Strategies Table 7.1 General Model of How to Teach Strategies. Source: Pressley , M., and Woloshyn, V. (1995). Cognitive Strategy Instruction That Really Improves Children’s Academic Performance (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE MULTISTORE MODEL What Children Know about Thinking Implicit cognition – thought without awareness An early developing ability that shows little difference across age Explicit cognition – thought with awareness Large age differences

Figure 7.5 Incomplete drawings similar to these are used in studies of implicit memory. Reproduced with permission of author and publisher from: Gollin, E. S. Factors Affecting the Visual Recognition of Incomplete Objects: A Comparative Investigation of Children and Adults. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1962, 15, 583-590. © Southern Universities Press, 1962.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE MULTISTORE MODEL Fuzzy-Trace Theory: An Alternative Viewpoint continuum of memory representations Verbatim = literal More likely to forget Young children use more often Fuzzy (gist) = content, but not detail Easier to access, and use Older children use more often

Figure 7. 5 Fuzzy-trace theory Figure 7.5 Fuzzy-trace theory. Proportion of correct recognition responses for verbatim, global, and pairwise problems for preschool and grade-2 children. From C. J. Brainerd and L. L. Gordon, “Development of verbatim and gist memory for numbers,” Developmental Psychology, 30, 163-177. Copyright © by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted by permission.

Figure 7.6 A gistlike representation, or a fuzzy trace, preserves the central content of a scene or an event without all the precise details. This boy may remember that he saw a dog chasing a cat without recalling the color of the animals or the fact that the cat wore a red collar.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF ATTENTION Changes in Sustained Attention Attention span increases dramatically Myelination of reticular formation through puberty Selective Attention: Ignoring Irrelevant Info Also improves with age; less distraction Cognitive Inhibition: Dismissing Information That is Clearly Irrelevant Improves with age; neurological maturation

THE DEVELOPMENT OF ATTENTION Meta-Attention: What Do Children Know About Attention? Aware that distractions can be a problem Although they can’t yet ignore them 5-year-olds: look and label 7-year-olds: attend selectively, ignore irrelevant information

DEVELOPMENT OF MEMORY: RETAINING AND RETRIEVING INFORMATION Event Memory: long term memory for events Strategic Memory: processes for conscious attempts to retain or retrieve information Autobiographical Memory: experiences that have happened to us Mnemonics (Memory Strategies): helpful, effortful techniques

DEVELOPMENT OF MEMORY: RETAINING AND RETRIEVING INFORMATION Development of Event and Autobiographical Memory Origins of Event Memory Deferred imitation Infantile amnesia Stored in an irretrievable nonverbal code Lack of sense of self

DEVELOPMENT OF MEMORY: RETAINING AND RETRIEVING INFORMATION Development of Scripted Memory Scripts – schemes for recurring events organized in terms of causal and temporal sequences Organizes world Tend to remember info consistent with scripts Become more elaborate with age

DEVELOPMENT OF MEMORY: RETAINING AND RETRIEVING INFORMATION The Social Construction of Autobiographical Memories Parents play a role in development, through talking with children Helps with organization into stories What information is important

DEVELOPMENT OF MEMORY: RETAINING AND RETRIEVING INFORMATION The Development of Memory Strategies Rehearsal – based on repetition Older children use rehearsal more efficiently Active or cumulative – repeating several earlier items as they rehearse a successive word

DEVELOPMENT OF MEMORY: RETAINING AND RETRIEVING INFORMATION Organization Grouping into related categories Unlikely prior to age 9 or 10 But younger children can be trained Retrieval Processes Free-recall – general prompt Difficult for young children Cued recall – given specific cues Easy for young children

DEVELOPMENT OF MEMORY: RETAINING AND RETRIEVING INFORMATION Metamemory and Memory Performance Knowledge of memory and memory processes Increases from 4–12 Mind stores interpretations, not copies of reality

DEVELOPMENT OF MEMORY: RETAINING AND RETRIEVING INFORMATION Knowledge Base and Memory Development Age differences in recall memory Due to increases in knowledge base Due to increases in strategies The more one knows, the more one can learn and remember

Figure 7.7 Number of idea units remembered about a soccer story for high-amplitude and low-aptitude soccer experts and soccer novices. In this case, being an expert eliminated any effect of academic aptitude (IQ) on performance. Adapted from data presented in Schneider, Körkel, & Weinert, 1989.

DEVELOPMENT OF MEMORY: RETAINING AND RETRIEVING INFORMATION Culture and Memory Strategies Rehearsal and organization Industrialized societies Recall of location or orally transmitted stories Non-western cultures

Table 7.2 Four Major Contributors to the Development of Learning and Memory

DEVELOPMENT OF OTHER COGNITIVE SKILLS Reasoning Type of problem solving requiring one to make an inference Analogical Reasoning Applying existing knowledge to help reason about something not known yet

DEVELOPMENT OF OTHER COGNITIVE SKILLS Analogical Reasoning in Young Children Relational primacy hypothesis Analogical reasoning is available in early infancy 1-year-olds if it is perceptual similarity Relational similarity, more advanced, apparent by 4 years

Figure 7.9 The configuration of the three problems 1-year-olds solved to test their reasoning by analogy. From Z. Chen, R. P. Sanchez, & T. Campbell (1997), “Beyond to Within Their Grasp: The Rudiment of Analogical Problem Solving in 10- and 13-Month-Olds,”. Developmental Psychology, 33, 790-801. Copyright ©1997 by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted with permission..

Figure 7. 9 Example of problem used in Goswami & Brown Figure 7.9 Example of problem used in Goswami & Brown. Children must select from set of pictures in bottom row (picture D through G) the one that best completes the visual analogy on the top row (the correct answer is D). From U. Goswami & A. L. Brown (1990), “Higher-Order Structure and Relational Reasoning: Contrasting Analogical and Thematic Relations”. Cognition, 36, 207-226.Reprinted by permission of Elsevier Science Ltd.

DEVELOPMENT OF OTHER COGNITIVE SKILLS The Role of Knowledge in Children’s Analogical Reasoning Must understand the base relation Transitivity inferences: relations among at least 3 objects 3- and 4-year-olds capable, IF the basis for the analogy was familiar

DEVELOPMENT OF OTHER COGNITIVE SKILLS The Role of Metacognition in Children’s Analogical Thinking Metacognition – knowing about analogical reasoning is important Teaching children the value of reasoning by analogy increases use of this type of thinking

DEVELOPMENT OF OTHER COGNITIVE SKILLS Arithmetic Skills Infants can use quantitative info Toddlers have a rudimentary understanding of ordinal relationships

DEVELOPMENT OF OTHER COGNITIVE SKILLS Counting and Arithmetic Strategies 3–4 years old can count accurately 4 ½–5 cardinality – last word in a sequence is the number if items in a set Sum strategy – counting both numbers Min strategy – start from value of larger

DEVELOPMENT OF OTHER COGNITIVE SKILLS Development of Mental Arithmetic Decomposition strategies Breaking problem into simpler problems Fact retrieval Retrieved from long-term memory Tends to follow the adaptive strategy choice model

DEVELOPMENT OF OTHER COGNITIVE SKILLS Cultural Influences on Math Performance Math Competencies of Unschooled Children Problems embedded in real-life contexts are solved correctly Standard, out-of-context presentation tend to be incorrect

DEVELOPMENT OF OTHER COGNITIVE SKILLS Cultural Variations in Arithmetic Among Schooled Children Americans worse than East Asians Beginning in 1st grade; grows larger Linguistic Supports Numbering system, fractions Instructional Supports More practice, colored text for 1’s 10’s and 100’s

EVALUATING THE INFORMATION-PROCESSING PERSPECTIVE Reasonable description of how cognitive processes change with age and influence thinking. Ignores evolutionary/neurological influences Little attention to social/cultural influences

EVALUATING THE INFORMATION-PROCESSING PERSPECTIVE Not a comprehensive theory An analysis of parts Underestimates richness/diversity of cognition All cognitive activities may not take place in a single limited-capacity working memory store