Download Middle Childhood

Middle Childhood: Biological and
Cognitive Development
Aylin Küntay
PSYC 206
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Motor Development
• At age of 5, boys tend to be more advanced in motor
skills that require power and force (e.g., jumping,
running, throwing or kicking a ball), while girls tend
to excel in fine motor skills (e.g., drawing and writing)
or in gross motor skills that combine balance and foot
movement (e.g., skipping and gymnastics)
– Boys have slightly greater muscle mass and are bigger than
girls (until age 10½ when girls spurt ahead in height for a
few years)
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• However, cultural conceptions of the activities
appropriate to boys and girls also play an important
role in shaping these differences
Brain Development
• Increased myelination,
particularly in frontal cortex
• Increased number of synapses
• Increased output of neurotransmitters
• EEG patterns change dramatically…
– Until age 5, EEGs of awake children are dominated by theta
activity (characteristic of adult sleep states), rather than alpha
activity (characteristic of engaged attention)
– Theta and alpha patterns are equalized in ages 5-7, and
thereafter alpha activity dominates
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• EEG coherence (synchronization of electrical activity
in
different areas of brain) increases significantly…
– Particularly between frontal lobes and other parts of the brain
Changes in
amount of theta
and alpha EEG
activity during
development
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Changes in
EEG
coherence in
the transition
from early to
middle
childhood
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Cognitive Developments
A Change in
Logical Thinking
Conservation
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A Change in the
Logic of Thinking
• In middle childhood
children’s thinking
becomes distinctly
“two-sided”
– Can think about objects
from more than one
perspective
– Can hold one characteristic of a situation
in mind while comparing it with another
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A Change in the
Logic of Thinking
• Piaget: Concrete Operations
– “Concrete” because these mental
actions (i.e., operations) are
directed toward concrete objects
in everyday activities
– Distinguished from preoperations
by their double-sidedness
– Results in more flexible and
organized thinking (e.g., can think about alternatives
and can reverse their thinking)
– Allows children to think through their actions, and to8
mentally combine, separate, order, and transform
objects and actions
Conservation
• Understanding that some properties of an object
remain the same even when its appearance is altered
(e.g., beaker test…, card test…)
– Begin to understand at age 5 or 6;
typically mastered by age 8
• Mental operations
– Identity – “They were equal to start
with and nothing was added, so
they’re the same.”
– Compensation – “The liquid is higher,
but the glass is thinner”
– Reversibility – “If you pour it back,
you’ll see that it’s the same”
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Piaget:
Conservation of
Quantity
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Piaget: Conservation of Number
Children below the age of 6 or 7 rarely
display conservation of number, and will
say that the elongated row has more.
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An understanding of logical necessity—that “it has to be that
way”—is Piaget’s key criterion of a stagelike change in thinking.
Causes of Developmental Changes in Cognition
Information-Processing Bridges
Evolution of Strategies
Additional Bridging Processes
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Possible Causes
• Piaget believed that all cognitive growth is driven by
assimilation (i.e., incorporate new experiences
into existing schemas) and
accommodation (i.e., modify
existing schemas in the
light of new experiences)
• Other, more recent, explanations
– Memory capacity
– Accumulating knowledge
– Development of cognitive
strategies
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Influence of Memory on Cognition
• Factor 1: Increased speed and
capacity of memory processing
– Memory span: 5-year-olds
remember 4 digits, 10-year-olds
remember 6, adults remember 7
– Retrieval speed: 11-year-olds
retrieved information from
long-term memory about
6 times faster than 5-year-olds
– Speed and capacity are
interrelated…
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Relationship of
memory span
and speed of
naming
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Influence of Memory on Cognition
• Factor 2: Expanded
knowledge base
– Retention improves
because children have
more prior information to
which to relate new
information
– Younger subjects who have
a rich knowledge base in a
given area remember more
new information related to
that area than older
subjects whose knowledge
base is not as rich
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Influence of Memory on Cognition
• Factor 3: Acquisition of improved memory strategies
(all are two-sided because they must
simultaneously think about a goal and
the way to achieve it)
– Rehearsal – Repeating to oneself the
material one is trying to memorize
– Memory Organization – Group in
meaningful clusters (e.g., by sound,
by situational associations “farm
things”, by conceptual categories
“foods”), tested by free recall (any order)
– Elaboration – Make up connections
between 2 or more things to be
remembered (“tomato” and “street”,
imagine tomato squashed in the street),
tested by paired words
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Influence of Memory on Cognition
• Factor 4: Emergence of metamemory
(i.e., the ability to think about one’s own
memory processes)
– 8-year-olds have a better
understanding of the limitations
of their own memories than
most 5-year-olds
– Consequently they knew
enough to study the materials
and to test themselves on
their ability to remember
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Combining Memory
and Logical Stages
• It is an increase in the
capacity of working
memory that allows
children to think about
two or more aspects of
a problem at one time
– Hence, a close relationship
between problem-solving
ability and the capacity of
working memory
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Not until middle
childhood did children
pay attention to each
of the four houses in a
systematic way to
discover the subtle
differences between
them.
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Increased Linguistic Skills
• Vocabulary
– 6-year-olds understand about
10,000 words
– 2 years later that has doubled
– By 10 or 11, have a vocabulary
of approximately 40,000 words
• Conversation: Older children are
better at making sure they and their
partners understand each other and
have a greater ability to maintain
coherence in a conversation over longer periods of time
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– Use linguistic makers: “Getting back to…” “As I was
saying”
– Provide ongoing feedback by nodding or saying “Uh hum”
Increased Classification Skills
• Piaget: Set of brown beads and white beads
“Are there more brown beads or more beads?”
– Children 4-6 cannot attend to the
subclass and the superordinate class at
the same time; instead they compare
one subclass with another subclass
– In middle childhood gain ability to
understand the hierarchical structure
of categories and can categorize
objects according to multiple criteria
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– Begin to collect stamps, baseball
cards, etc.
Is conservation
acquisition universal?
Children in
non-industrial
societies lag a
year or more
behind
Piaget’s
norms, and in
some cases
never acquire
it, even as
adults
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Is conservation
acquisition universal?
• Performance improves, however, with
training, and when interviewed in their
native language and with content with
which they are more familiar
• Thus, conservation is a universal cognitive
achievement of middle childhood, as Piaget
assumed it was, when these conditions are
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taken into account