Lecture 04 - Cognitive Processing and Academic Skills

What are 2 origins of memory?

• Infants remember, forget, and can be prompted to remember things they've forgotten

  • e.g. mobile and foot experiment with babies

• improvements in memory are related to growth in the brain

  • hippocampus responsible for initial storage of info

  • frontal cortex develops later and is related to retrieval of stored memories

What four strategies do older children use to remember?

1. rehearsal

2. organization

3. elaboration

4. chunking

What is rehearsal?

repeating info that must be remembered

What is organization?

structuring material to be remembered so that related info is placed together

What is elaborating?

embellishing info to be remembered to make it more memorable or meaningful to self

What is chunking?

process of organizing related terms into one meaningful group

What is metacognitive knowledge? What occurs as children get older?

knowledge about cognition

• improve with age

What is metamemory? How does it develop for children?

memory/knowledge about memory

• develops in parallel with metacognitive 

What kinds of memory strategies to children often use?

external strategies

e.g. using external aids (writing down events in school agenda)

What basic approach can we use for choosing problem solving strategies?

determine goal → select strategy → use strategy → monitor strategy (was it effective or ineffective?)

Does knowledge help memory or not?

Knowledge helps recall memory AND knowledge can also distort our recall

What are scripts?

memory structures that describe the sequence in which events occurs?

e.g. 'What did you do last Friday?' use a script to help you: 'My day starts with a class at 11:30 oh right I had a quiz in PHIL210, etc.'

• Script cued you to remember

What is autobiographical memory?

people’s memory of their own lives

e.g.  'Tell me about what you did over the summer?'

What is infantile amnesia? What age is this usually true?

inability to remember events from early life

• before 3 years old, it is difficult to remember things that occurred to you at that age

What was the shrinking machine experiment and what did it tell us about infantile amnesia?

Incredible shrinking machine: box that is supposed to shrink balloons into tennis ball size (e.g. beach ball in machine and someone replaces it with a small beach ball

• show this to young children

• later ask children when they are older about it and most can't remember it BUT if you show them pictures of it, they remember it better

  • If you ask them in language about an event when they didn't know language and couldn't encode event in language = difficult to remember

  • If you show picture about event that they could visually encode years ago = can remember

How can preschoolers’ eyewitness testimony be distorted?

by adults suggestions, learned stereotypes

Briefly describe the Texas death row case in 1987:

• Entire case was on a child's testimony

• Child's mother had told child on multiple occasions that guy was a 'bad man'

  • Providing a schema relating to his character before event she allegedly witnessed

    • Pre-existing knowledge influencing child's memory

  • From interviews with child, she possessed a deeply inherited stereotype about the man

    • Child was extensively interviewed about what she said she had witnessed

    • Interview asked a lot of leading questions

      • Leading question: question that biases your answer in the way it is formulated (how much blood was on the shirt?)

• Child eventually took back statement saying that interviews and pre-existing schemas biased her

Explain the Sam Stone trial? What were the four conditions tested?

control

stereotype

suggestions

stereotype + suggestions

What was the experiment set-up describe the 4 stages?

phase 1:

• stereotypes and stereotypes + suggestions were told that this guy Sam is nice but clumsy (he fell down stairs and broke friends barbie)

phase 2:

• sam visit daycare centre briefly

phase 3:

• interviews (neutral interviews for control and stereotypes and suggestive interviews for suggestions and stereotypes + suggestions_

  • asking leading questions or planting false info

phase 4:

• asked children about Sam and his actions

What were the results from the Sam Stone experiment?

almost half the children in the stereotypes + suggestions condition ‘recalled’ events that never happened!

suggestions next followed by stereotypes and then control

What 3 strategies for children and adolescents use for problem solving?

1. heuristics

2. analytical problem solving

3. collaboration enhances problem solving

What are heuristics?

‘rules of thumb’ based on personal experiences

• e.g. availability heuristic = recall things that are more readily available 

• system 1

What is analytical problem solving?

more effortful and incorporates logical or mathematical rules

• not using shortcuts and taking time

• system 2

What are different strategies for learning how to read?

1. word recognition

2. comprehension

3. phonological awareness

What is word recgnition?

process of identifying a unique pattern of letters

emphasizing remembering what words look like

focus on whole word

e.g. caregiver is reading with child and points and says 'rabbit' as they point to a rabbit

What is comprehension?

extracting meaning from a sequence of words

semantics of words 

• remembering what words go with what

What is phonological awareness?

knowing letters and letter sounds

pre-reading skill

sounding out words

Why is learning to read in English so difficult?

• wide inconsistencies in pronunciations

What are two approaches to teaching readings?

phonics

• research indicates phonics instruction is essential

whole-language reading

What do beginner readers rely heavily on for learning how to read?

rely on sounding out words

BUT even beginning readers retrieve some words from memory

• shorter words recalled from memory easier

Example game of learning via phonics?

• write several word families (-at, -it, -op)

• give letters

see how many real words are possible and read word aloud

reinforces grapheme-phoneme relationships

Example game of learning via whole-language approach?

choose picture book with rich illustrations and read aloud

ask students to predict what will happen next using story context and illustrations

develops comprehension and semantics 

Does writing take longer than reading to develop?

yes!

learning to write takes years of effort

What 3 developmental things contribute to improvement in writing?

greater knowledge about topics

• the more you know about something, the more you can write about it

greater understanding of how to organize writing

greater ease in dealing with mechanics

• verbs, subject and where to place grammar elements

How can children be taught to be better writers?

teaching strategies for planning, drafting and revising

What strategy do we give to younger writers?

writing down info on topic as they retrieve from memory

What strategy do we give to adolescents?

deciding what info to include and how best to organize it for the point they want to convey

Do children have an early understanding of number? How do we know? Use experiment

yes!

• Child is more surprised by impossible outcome

• They expected the addition of the two rats

What three basic principles do children use when counting early on?

1. one-to-one

• Each thing has its number when counting something

• Four apples: 1, 2, 3, 4

  • Every apple has its number

2. Stable-order

• Order is always the same

• If you put something in order, that order stays

• Idea if something is out of order

1. Cardinality

• Last number that you count is bigger number

• Last number in sequence is number that you have