Download Slide 1 - Dr. Robin Goins

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT:
INFORMATION-PROCESSING
PERSPECTIVES
INFORMATION-PROCESSING THEORIES
• Analogy of the mind as a computer
• Information flows through a limitedcapacity system of mental hardware and
software
– Hardware – brain and nervous system
– Software – mental rules and strategies
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
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, 63100. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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