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Margaret W. Matlin, Cognition, 8e
Outline Chapter 13
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CHAPTER 13
Cognitive Development Throughout the
Lifespan
CHAPTER INTRODUCTION
Study the cognitive processes of infants and children in order to:
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understand the origin of cognitive skills
prepare for careers requiring background knowledge about infancy and
childhood
Lifespan approach to development
Study older adults in order to:
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discover which cognitive skills decline during the aging process and which
remain stable
prepare for careers requiring background knowledge about older adults
understand older adults you already know and prepare for your own aging
Research challenges
THE LIFESPAN DEVELOPMENT OF MEMORY
Memory in Infants
 Early research underestimated infants' memory abilities.
 Six-month-old infants can create an association between two objects,
even if they have never previously seen the objects together at the
same time and even if they were never reinforced for creating these
associations.
 One way to assess infants' memory is to see whether they look longer
at one stimulus than another.
©2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Margaret W. Matlin, Cognition, 8e
Outline Chapter 13
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Memory in Infants (continued)
Recognizing Mother
visual recognition—can distinguish mother from stranger
Kisilevsky and coauthors (2003)—recognizing mother's voice
 mothers and infants in China
 tested infants 1-2 weeks before they were born
 mother's voice reading poem or female stranger's voice reading the same
poem
 Heart rate changed more when listening to mother's voice than stranger's
voice.
Conjugate Reinforcement
Carolyn Rovee-Collier and colleagues
nonverbal measures of memory
conjugate reinforcement technique—mobile, ribbon, kicking
 baseline, spontaneous kicking
 acquisition phase; 2 spaced training sessions
 immediate retention (number of kicks)
 long-term memory (number of kicks produced, following a delay)
older infants—press lever to run train
steady linear improvement during first 18 months of life
factors influencing infant memory
 context effects
 spacing effect
 levels of processing
Memory in Children
Children can respond verbally, but may not understand the task
instructions, or recognize letters and words
Children's Working Memory
Memory spans improve dramatically during childhood.
Children have the same three working-memory components that adults have.
Working memory is related to school performance.
©2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Margaret W. Matlin, Cognition, 8e
Outline Chapter 13
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Memory in Children (continued)
Children's Long-Term Memory
excellent recognition but poor recall—Myers and Perlmutter (1978)
1. Autobiographical memory and early childhood
"life narrative"
Language skills help children remember personal experiences.
scripts—When mothers encourage their children to provide detailed
descriptions of events, these children are more likely to develop a narrative
style that is detailed and coherent.
People seldom recall events that happened when they were younger than 3.
 lack of well-organized sense of who they are
 difficulty encoding and retrieving
2. Children's source monitoring
source monitoring—distinguishing between reality and fantasy
Foley and colleagues
performing vs. imagining how it would feel vs. visualizing
performing vs. watching another person perform a task
working together
Preschool children have significant problems with source monitoring
across a range of conditions.
Children's Memory Strategies
memory strategies
utilization deficiency
1. Rehearsal
not very effective, but can keep information in working memory
4- and 5-year-olds do not spontaneously use rehearsal
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 pictures into categories without
prompting.
3. Imagery
Even 6-year-olds can be trained to use visual imagery effectively.
Spontaneous use of imagery does not develop until adolescence.
©2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Margaret W. Matlin, Cognition, 8e
Outline Chapter 13
Page 4 of 11
Memory in Children (continued)
Children's Eyewitness Testimony
Older children typically provide much more accurate eyewitness testimony than
younger children.
Leichtman and Ceci—"Sam Stone" study
 control, stereotype, suggestion, and stereotype-plus-suggestion conditions
 children interviewed about Sam Stone 10 weeks after visit
 control group highly accurate
 Children can provide valid eyewitness testimony if they do not receive
misleading information, either before or after the target event.
 Misleading information can lead to invalid/false memories.
Age, stereotyping, and misleading suggestions all influence children's eyewitness
testimony.
social factors
reluctance to say "I don't know"
change statements under cross-examination
Individual Differences: Children’s Intellectual Abilities and
Eyewitness Testimony
Henry and Gudjonsson (2007)
gas station video
children with intellectual disabilities vs. typically developing children
older and younger children
recall & misleading questions
recall test—Older children recalled more items than the younger children; the age
difference was especially strong for the typically developing children.
misleading-question situation—Older children made the same number of errors as
the younger children; within each age group, the typically developing children
provided a greater number of correct answers and a smaller number of errors.
©2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Margaret W. Matlin, Cognition, 8e
Outline Chapter 13
Page 5 of 11
In Depth: Memory in Elderly People
stereotypes
large individual differences
complex developmental trends
Working Memory in Elderly People
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nature of the task
age similarities in working memory when the task is relatively straightforward
and requires simple storage (e.g., digit-span test)
age differences when the task is complicated and requires manipulation of
information (e.g., lists of unrelated words, recall in alphabetical order)
Long-Term Memory in Elderly People
Elderly people perform well on semantic memory tasks (e.g., crossword puzzles)
and easy, automatic tasks.
Age differences are found on more complex tasks (e.g., source monitoring).
1. Prospective memory
 simulated shopping task
 Older adults perform more accurately when they have an environmental
cue.
 can even perform better than younger adults
2. Implicit memory
Light and colleagues (1995)
 reading familiar or unfamiliar letter sequences
 older and younger adults performed similarly
Age differences are minimal when memory task does not require effortful
remembering
3. Recognition memory
Long-term recognition memory declines slowly or not at all.
4. Explicit recall memory
age differences are more substantial
Aizpurua and colleagues (2009)—robbery video
 Older adults recalled less information than younger adults.
 similar in errors
large individual differences—verbal ability, education
Hasher and colleagues—time of day
Zacks and Hasher (2006): ‘‘Taken together, these recent findings suggest that
we may have seriously underestimated the memory abilities of older adults.’’
©2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Margaret W. Matlin, Cognition, 8e
Outline Chapter 13
Page 6 of 11
In Depth: Memory in Elderly People (continued)
Explanations for Age Differences in Memory
The complex pattern of effects requires a complex explanation.
1. Neurocognitive changes
Some changes in brain structures occur during normal aging.
Explicit recall memory can be disrupted if one component of the network is
not functioning appropriately.
increased activation in the frontal lobe, even though its actual size may
decrease
2. Difficulty paying attention
Elderly adults are more likely than younger adults to have difficulty paying
attention.
3. Less effective use of memory strategies
fewer chunks in working memory
similar memory strategies in long-term memory
4. The contextual-cues hypothesis
recognition tasks—contextual cues may encourage recognition for elderly
individuals
explicit recall tasks—elderly adults recall fewer contextual cues; must rely on
effortful, deliberate processing, task more challenging
5. Cognitive slowing
Elderly people often experience a slower rate of responding on cognitive
tasks.
Need several hypotheses to explain memory differences between older and
younger adults.
Currently no comprehensive explanation for results.
©2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Margaret W. Matlin, Cognition, 8e
Outline Chapter 13
Page 7 of 11
THE LIFESPAN DEVELOPMENT OF METAMEMORY
metacognition
metamemory
theory of mind
metacomprehension
Metamemory in Children
Children's Understanding of How Memory Works
Demonstration 13.3
related vs. random words
effectiveness of memory and study strategies
Children's Awareness That Effort Is Necessary
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Memory is not an automatic process.
Young children do not appreciate the need for effort.
Children are not accurate in judging whether they have successfully
committed some information to memory.
Children don't realize that they need to make an effort to use a memory
strategy.
Even older children have naive ideas about the effort required for
memorization.
Children's Judgments About Their Memory Performance
Younger children are overconfident about memory performance.
Older children are somewhat more accurate.
Roebers and colleagues
 memory for magic show; confidence ratings
 overconfident that incorrect answers had been correct
©2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Margaret W. Matlin, Cognition, 8e
Outline Chapter 13
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Metamemory in Children (continued)
Children's Metamemory: The Relationship Between Metamemory and
Memory Performance
Summary
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
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Strategy use
Memory performance
some evidence that metamemory is related to strategy use
extensive evidence that strategy use is related to memory performance
moderate correlation between metamemory and memory performance
Metamemory in Elderly People
Beliefs about memory
Younger and older adults share similar beliefs about the properties of memory
tasks.
Memory monitoring
Older and younger adults are equally skilled on some tasks:
 monitoring memory performance (e.g., 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
Older adults are overconfident on some tasks:
 overall performance on a test of memory for specific details about a recent
event
 performance on a task where working memory is "overworked"
Older adults skilled in monitoring their memory, but may not use this information
to decide how to remember information
dementia
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
©2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Margaret W. Matlin, Cognition, 8e
Outline Chapter 13
Page 9 of 11
THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE
a spectacular human accomplishment
vocabulary
word combinations
Language in Infants
Speech Perception During Infancy
phonemes
speech-sound categories across speakers
Infants can perceive almost all the speech-sound contrasts used in language, either
at birth or within the first few weeks of life.
recognizing similarities
Werker and Tees (1984)
 phonemic distinctions made by children but not adults
 Hindi t sounds
 changes across first year
Young infants perceive numerous phonetic distinctions in every language; later
they reorganize perceptual categories to focus on important distinctions in their
own language environment.
language rhythms
In bilingual homes infants can discriminate between different languages.
Language Comprehension in Infancy
1. Recognizing important words
name, mommy, daddy
2. Understanding the correspondence between sound and sight
emotional tone of spoken language
Walker-Andrews (1986)
 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.
3. Appreciating semantic concepts
Mandler and colleagues—concepts about objects
animate/inanimate objects
"animal" vs. "vehicle" categories
Concepts become more refined with age.
©2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Margaret W. Matlin, Cognition, 8e
Outline Chapter 13
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Language in Infants (continued)
Language Production in Infancy
cooing
babbling
intentional communication
Adults' Language to Infants
child-directed speech (formerly known as "motherese")
Adults typically use a different language style when speaking to infants and
young children than when speaking to older people.
Features of child-directed language help young language learners understand the
meaning and structure of language.
pitch, variation in pitch, vocabulary, sentence length, repetition, intonation
Can Infants Learn Language from a DVD?
DeLoache and colleagues (2010)
1. The parent-teaching condition did not use any DVD; instead the parents
were given a list of the 25 words from the DVD, and they were instructed
to try to teach their infant as many words as possible for a 4-week period.
2. In the DVD-with-interaction condition, the child and the parent watched
the DVD together at least five times each week for a 4-week period.
3. In the DVD-with-no-interaction condition, the children watched the DVD
by themselves, at least five times each week for a 4-week period.
4. In the control condition, there was no DVD and the parents did not try to
teach specific words to their children.
object identification tested after 4 weeks
parent-teaching condition significantly better than the other three groups
Language in Children
Words
early words and concepts
word production
vocabulary growth and caregiver talk; storytelling
comprehension of words; understand more than they can produce
interrelationship of memory and language
fast mapping—using context to make a reasonable guess about a word's meaning
overextension
©2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Margaret W. Matlin, Cognition, 8e
Outline Chapter 13
Page 11 of 11
Language in Children (continued)
Morphology
morphemes
morphology
 pay greater attention to phrases with appropriate morphology
 create their own regular forms
overregularization—the tendency to add the most customary morphemes to create
new forms of irregular words
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.
 gradually replace the overregularized words with appropriate past-tense
verbs
Syntax
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combining words into sentences
two-word utterances
working memory
different relationships
gradual improvement in morphology and syntax
active process
using syntax cues to understand relationships in sentences
Pragmatics
learning the social rules of language; successful communication
what to say (and not to say), to whom, in what circumstances
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
2-year olds speaking to infants
taking turns in conversation
gestures of interest; listener responses
©2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.