1. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT: INFORMATION-PROCESSING PERSPECTIVES

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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..

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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, Copyright © 1981 by the American Psychological Association. Adapted with permisson from the publisher and author.

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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

15. 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, © Southern Universities Press, 1962.

16. 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

17. 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, Copyright © by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted by permission.

18. 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.

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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

24. 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

25. 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

26. 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

27. 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

28. 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

29. 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.

30. 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

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

32. 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

33. 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

34. 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, Copyright ©1997 by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted with permission..

35. 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, Reprinted by permission of Elsevier Science Ltd.

36. 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

37. 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

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

39. 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

40. 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

41. 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

42. 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

43. 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

44. 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