Download Cognitive Development Throughout the Lifespan

Cognitive Development
Throughout the Lifespan
Chapter 13
Cognitive Development
We will look at three aspects of cognitive
development in our discussion.
1. Memory development
2. Metacognitive development
3. Development of language
Memory Development
Early research underestimated infants' memory
abilities Psychologists used a number of different
measure to ascertain memory capacities in infants
and younger children.
1.
2.
3.
Attention (looking time, Own-Race Effect)
Recognizing mother (visual, voice)
Conjugate reinforcement with a mobile
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Own Race Effect (ORE)
1. Sangrigoli and de Schonen (2004) showed photos
of White and Asian women's faces shown to
White babies.
2. Presented one photo (White or Asian woman)
repeatedly until looking time decreased.
3. Presented pair of photos (familiar-unfamiliar)
White women or Asian women.
4. Looking time for unfamiliar White woman longer
than familiar White woman. However no
difference for familiar-unfamiliar Asian women.
Recognizing Mother
1. Visual recognition: 3-days old recognize their
mother from a stranger (Bushnell & Sai, 1987;
Rovee-Collier et al, 2001; Slater & Butterworth,
1997).
2. Demand mother’s video: Infants younger than 3days old sucked to produce a video of their
mother than strangers (Walton et al., 1992).
Recognizing Mother
3. Mother’s Voice: Prenatal babies preferred
mother reciting the poem than a stranger. Heartrate changed more when hearing mother’s voice
(Kisilevsky et al 2003).
4. Prenatal babies prefer characteristics of mother’s
spoken language when reading a passage read
many times to passage never read to them
(DeCasper & Spence, 1986).
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Conjugate Reinforcement
Babies hooked-up to a mobile with
a ribbon, move their leg and shake
it. In instrumental conditioning
terms foot movement is the
response, and mobile movement is
the reinforcement.
Rovee-Collier and colleagues
tested 2-6 month old babies in this
setup for immediate and LTM.
Conjugate Reinforcement
1. Baseline, spontaneous kicking is first ascertained.
2. The ribbon is connected to the mobile and
number of kicks are assessed during the
acquisition phase.
3. Number of kicks produced following delay is used
to measure immediate or long-term memory.
Train
Rovee-Collier and colleagues also used 6-18 month
old children with a toy train on a circular tracks to
measure memory. The train was hooked-up to lever
that the infants could press, to make the train run or
not.
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Results
Minimum Rentention (Weeks)
14
12
Mobile Task
Train Task
10
8
6
4
2
0
2
3
6
9
12
15
18
Age (Months)
Context
Learning reactivated most strongly when retested in
the same rather than a different context (Butler &
Rovee-Collier, 1989).
Other Memory Aspects
Rovee-Collier also tested other aspects of infant
memory and found that infant’s memory behaved
much like adult memory for;
1. Interference
2. Spacing effect
3. Levels of processing.
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Children's Working Memory
1. Memory span (Kail, 1992)
o Children were given lists like: dad, mom, doll,
ball, baby, … etc.
o 2-year children recalled 2 words, 9-year old
recalled all 6 words.
2. Three working memory components
3. Relationship to school performance
Children's Long-Term Memory
Excellent recognition but poor recall for objects
(Myers and Perlmutter, 1978).
Percent Correct Recall
125
100
Recognition
Recall
75
50
25
0
2-Year Old
4-Year Old
Age
Children's Long-Term Memory
1. Autobiographical memory and early childhood
amnesia and Infant memory.
2. Deferred imitation.
3. Lack of well-organized sense of who they are.
4. Difficulty encoding and retrieving.
5. Reminders.
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Autobiographical Memory
Details Remembered
Refers to events taking place in one’s life. People are
unable to recall events before 2-3 years of age, called
childhood amnesia.
More
Fewer
2-Year Old
3-Year Old
Age at Sibling Birth
Childhood Amnesia
We know that infants and children have good
memories. Children around 2-years have good verbal
memories.
1.
2.
Prefrontal cortex is not fully developed (Newcomb et al.
2000).
No well organized sense of self (Conway & PleydellPierce, 2000; Howe, 2000, 2003).
Deferred Imitation
Infants a few months old can imitate adult
expressions and other events. Schema and scripts are
retained in 11-month old infants for tasks that
involve 2-step sequence.
Experimenter pushed a button through a slot of
a box and said “shake, shake, shake” compared
to putting a hat on the bunny and feeding a
carrot.
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Children's Long-Term Memory
1. Children's source monitoring (Foley, Ratner and
colleagues, 19??).
2. performing vs. imagining how it would feel vs.
visualizing.
3. performing vs. watching another person perform
a task.
Children's Memory Strategies
1. Rehearsal not very effective, but can keep
information in working memory. Four- and 5-yearolds do not spontaneously use rehearsal but can
benefit from rehearsal if prompted.
2. Organizational strategies (categorizing and
grouping) Moely and colleagues (????) children
study pictures from four categories; younger
children rarely rearrange into categories than
older.
3. Imagery: even 6-year-olds can be trained to use
visual imagery effectively.
Children's Eyewitness Testimony
1. Leichtman and Ceci (1995) "Sam Stone" study.
Control, stereotype, suggestion, and stereotypeplus-suggestion groups. children interviewed
about Sam Stone 10 weeks after visit.
2. Control group highly accurate. children can
provide valid eyewitness testimony if they do not
receive misleading information, either before or
after the target event.
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Children's Eyewitness Testimony
Leichtman and Ceci—"Sam Stone" study results.
Children's Eyewitness Testimony
1. Age, stereotyping, and misleading suggestions all
influence children's eyewitness testimony.
2. Social factors reluctance to say "I don't know“.
3. Change statements under cross-examination.
Children’s Intelligence and
Eyewitness Testimony
1. Henry and Gudjonsson (2007) children with
mental retardation vs. typically developing
children.
2. Older and younger children.
3. Misleading questions
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Memory in Elderly People
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Stereotypes.
Large individual differences.
Complex developmental trends.
Stine et al., (1989) recall for spoken English.
Normal syntax/normal rate vs. random order/fast
rate.
6. Significant age difference for complicated, nonreal-life task.
LTM in Elderly People
1. Perform well on semantic memory tasks and easy,
automatic tasks.
2. Age differences on more complex tasks.
3. Prospective memory (simulated shopping task).
Complete fewer tasks and made more errors.
Perform more accurately when they have an
environmental cue. Can even perform better than
younger adults.
LTM in Elderly People
4. Implicit memory (Light and colleagues, 1995).
Reading familiar letter sequence. Older and
younger adults performed similarly.
5. Explicit recognition memory. Long-term
recognition memory declines slowly or not at all.
6. Explicit recall memory. Performance decreases
slowly and age differences are more substantial
Dunlosky and Hertzog (1998)—pairs of unrelated
words, names, historical details, stories large
individual differences—verbal ability, education.
Hasher and colleagues—time of day.
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Explanations
Explanations for Age Differences in Memory relate to
changes in brain structures:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Difficulty paying attention
Ineffective use of memory strategies
The contextual-cues hypothesis
Cognitive slowing
Metamemory in Children
1. Theory of mind (Flavell, 199?). People's ideas on
how their minds work and on their beliefs about
other people's thoughts.
2. Children's understanding of how memory works.
Small vs. large memory sets. Related vs. random
words. Effectiveness of memory strategies.
3. Children's awareness that effort Is necessary.
Young children do not appreciate the need for
effort. Keep studying information they already
know. Not accurate in judging what has been
committed to memory.
Metamemory in Children
3. Children's awareness that effort Is necessary.
Young children do not realize that they need to
make an effort to use a memory strategy. Naive
ideas about the effort required for memorization.
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Metamemory in Children
Children's Judgments
about their memory
performance. Younger
children unrealistically
optimistic. Roebers and
colleagues (2004) tested
memory for magic show
and looked at confidence
ratings. Overconfidence.
Average Level of Confidence for Questions Answered
Correctly and Questions Answered Incorrectly. (1 = Very
Unsure; 5=Very Sure)
Summary: Metamemory in Children
1. Their metamemory is faulty; they do not realize
that they need to make an effort to memorize,
and they also do not realize how little they can
remember.
2. They do not spontaneously use helpful memory
strategies.
3. Relative to older children, their memory
performance is poor.
Metamemory & Memory
Performance
Is there a causal link?
Metamemory
Strategy use
Memory performance
1. Some evidence that
metamemory is related
to strategy use.
2. Extensive evidence that
strategy use is related
to memory
performance.
3. Moderate correlation
between metamemory
and memory
performance.
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Metamemory in Elderly
1. Beliefs about memory. younger and older adults
share similar beliefs.
2. Memory monitoring. Equally skilled on some
tasks—predicting items they will recall, selecting
most difficult items for further study, judging
accuracy on general-knowledge questions,
deciding whether an item is old or new.
Overconfident on some tasks. Overall
performance on a test of memory for specific
details about a recent event.
Metamemory in Elderly
3. Awareness of memory problems. problems with
everyday memory. some elderly people don't try
to develop helpful memory strategies because
they think that memory decline is inevitable.
Memory self-efficacy. the belief in one's own
potential to perform well on memory tasks.
Development: Language
Comprehension
1. Language in Infants rate of acquisition vocabulary
size creative language use.
2. Speech Perception in Infancy phonemes speechsound categories across speakers Eimas and
coauthors (????) habituation studies, sucking
response dishabituation indicates perceiving
difference between sounds. Werker and Tees
(????) distinguishing sounds in other languages.
Kuhl (????) relearning lost distinctions. Language
rhythms. Bilingual homes and language
discrimination.
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Development: Language
Comprehension
3. Language Comprehension in Infancy. Recognizing
important words like, name, mommy, daddy etc.,
Discriminating between grammatical words and
meaning words. Understanding the
correspondence between sound and sight.
Emotional tone of spoken language. WalkerAndrews (????) recordings of either a happy voice
or an angry voice side-by-side films of happy
speaker and angry speaker, infants watched the
face that matched the emotion of the voice.
Development: Language
Comprehension
4. Appreciating semantic concepts (Mandler and
colleagues, ????). Concepts about objects
distinguishing between visually similar (animateinanimate objects); "animal" vs. "vehicle"
categories. Concepts become more refined.
Development: Language Production
1. Language Production in Infancy. Cooing, babbling,
intentional communication.
2. Adults' Language to Infants (child-directed speech
Motherese, fathers). Adults typically use a
different language style when speaking to infants
and young children than when speaking to older
people. Differences across language communities.
3. Words. Early words and concepts. Word
production. Comprehension of words.
Interrelationship of memory and language.
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Development: Language Production
3. Words (fast mapping). Using context to make a
reasonable guess about a word's meaning.
Heibeck and Markman (1987) used a series of
paired objects familiar and unfamiliar terms.
Grammatical overextension and underextension.
4. Morphology. Young children pay greater attention
to phrases with appropriate morphology and are
able create their own regular forms.
Development: Language Production
5. Overregularization. The tendency to add the most
customary morphemes to create new forms of
irregular words. Parallel distributed processing
explanation. Language system keeps tally of
morpheme patterns; patterns of excitation within
neural networks account for overregularization.
Rule-and-memory theory (Marcus, ????). Children
learn a general rule for past-tense verbs and also
store in memory the past tenses for many
irregular verbs.
Development: Language Production
6. Syntax. Combining words into sentences. Twoword utterances. Morphology and syntax. Active
process. Using syntax cues.
7. Pragmatics. Learning the social rules of language.
What to say, to whom, language styles,
coordinating conversations. Adapting language to
the listener. Shatz and Gelman (1973) 4-year-olds
speaking to 2-year-olds, 4-year-olds and adults,
and 2-year olds speaking to infants. Taking turns in
conversation. gestures of interest; listener
responses.
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