L7 Cognitive Development: Information Processing Perspectives and Connectionism

Intro

Piaget + Vygostky's left us with questions, especially when it comes to how learning happens exactly

Do human brains function in same way as PC (processor, hardware, memory) → NS + sensory receptors play some role

Today’s lectrue → How do children’s brain change with memory, attentiion, etc.

Multistore Model

• Shows the flow of information in thinking (Atkinson and Shiffrin 1968)

• Information flows through 3 processing units.

  • Sensory store: briefly holds raw sensory information from senses (raw data = things we feel, hear, see) → processed in seconds

  • Short-term store (STS): also called “working memory”

    • stimuli retained for several seconds

    • if we don’t rehearse/process info → it will go away

  • Long-term store (LTS): processed information stored for future use

    • where knowledge + experiences retained for longer period of time

• diagram - env input that enters sensory store, where all info is briefly locked in → if paying attention to input → enters STWM where we can temporarily hold + manipulate → if info is processed in meaningful way it = LTM so info can be easily retrievable later on

• WM manages flow and is in control

Working Memory & Executive Function

• Term “working memory” allows us to actively work with information rather than just storing it (Alan Baddeley 1992)

• We actively channel information input

• Executive function

  • 1. Planning, monitoring, and executing strategies

    • select best possible strategy

  • 2. Attention: Focusing on selected stimuli & Inhibitory control: Choosing not to focus on certain stimuli

    • focus on important stimuli + block distractions

  • 3. Set-shifting: Moving between strategies (or tasks) when circumstances + goals change (e.g., multi-tasking)

• exec functions mostly engaged when working toward specific goal

Development of Short-Term Memory

Development of the short-term store

1. Memory span: Refers to the number of items can hold in short-term memory (and recall in same order), which increases with age. Tested efficiency using tasks like the forward digit span task.

2. Span of apprehension: Refers to how many items can be attended to at once (w/o deliberate memorization) → amount of info that can be taken in in brief snap, improves w age. Assessed using tasks where participants recall digits they weren't explicitly focusing on.

3. Domain specificity: Specialized learning mechanisms in different areas of learning. → reminds us that memory performance does not rely just on memory capacity but also knowledge & exp (new vs experiences chess players)

Diagram: shows Children’s memory span for digits (digit span) shows regular increases with age.

Knowledge Base and Memory Development

• why do some children perform better at memory tasks?

• Domain-specific knowledge: Older children, with more experience and knowledge, tend to perform better in tasks related to familiar subjects (e.g., chess experts recall more about chess pieces than novices).

  • children w extensive knowledge in specific domain performs just as well or even better on memory tasks than older individuals w/in that domain → doesn’t relate to memory capacity but rather knowledge (time to store it in brain for easier recall)

• Familiarity and memory: Children develop specialized strategies for processing familiar material more effectively, which makes it easier to learn and remember new information in familiar areas.

  • making patterns, connecting info together for easier retrieval

• Transfer between domains: Mixed results; while domain-specific knowledge helps in related areas, transferring strategies between unrelated domains is often challenging, particularly for younger children.

  • domain specificity

  • children memory more easily distracted than adults

Strategies & Mnemonics

• Goal-directed actions to improve task performance.

  • intentional behaviours that help us perform task more effectively (instead of doing everything at once, moving through a topic at a time)

• Strategic memory: Actively attempting to retain or retrieve information.

  • recalling phone number, you would use strategic memory

• to make strategic memory = Mnemonics: Techniques such as rehearsal, organization, and elaboration that enhance memory.

  • rehearsal = repetition, flashcards, etc.

  • organization = group related items together into meaningful categories

  • elaboration = connecting info to something already known to create meaningful story

  • as children grow older, they become better at selecting these strategies → memory improves due to improvements in strategies

Production and Utilization Deficiencies

• these are phased when memory improvement:

• Production Deficiency: Younger children often fail to use strategies they know could improve performance.

  • may group similar items together for easier retrieval → but won’t use this unless someone else reminds them (non-spontaneous)

• Utilization Deficiency: Even when children use a strategy, they may not benefit from it immediately.

  • new strategy requires lots of mental effort → so much WM devoted into using it, leaving them w little cognitive resources to complete the task (wasted on process instead of outcome)

• Strategies become more effective with age as children’s cognitive resources increase and strategies become automatized. (after time + practice)

• Production deficiencies are most common in early childhood, while utilization deficiencies often appear when children first adopt more complex strategies

Siegler’s Adaptive Strategy Choice Model

• Strategy development is not step-by-step or linear. Instead, children have multiple strategies available at any given time, and these strategies compete for use

  • Diagram: Siegler’s Adaptive Strategy Model depicts the development of strategies over time, showing how different strategies dominate at different ages

• First then choose simplest of strategies → later on Children don’t abandon simpler strategies as they grow; they add new, more effective ones.

  • simpler ones for simpler tasks

  • advanced strategies for more difficult tasks

• what control which strategies are used:

• Executive Functions: Switching strategies requires skills like inhibition, metacognition, and working memory.

  • children need to abandon old strategies and switch to new one to hold memory

  • Dimensional Change Card Sort Task (Zelazo) = child asked to sort cards by colour + asked to sort cards by shape (and won’t be able to do it correctly even if they understand the rule) but at 5 years, they can inhibit old strategy and use the new one → this tests exec functions + cognitive flexibility (how they switch b/w tasks), not inhibiting (perservation? after the video of card sort review.)

• Transfer Utilization Deficiency: Children struggle when trying to apply learned strategies to new tasks.

• Siegler’s Adaptive Strategy Choice Model: Multiple strategies compete for use, and older, simpler strategies can still be employed in familiar tasks. → over time, more effective strategies are selected more often but older strategies don’t disappear

  • lines overlap instead of replacing (some dominate more than the other) → depends on how frequent new strategies are used

Development of Metacognition and Executive Control

• Children’s awareness of the distinction between conscious and unconscious thought develops gradually.

  • Example: Most infant thoughts are implicit or unconscious.

• Implicit cognition: thought processes that occurs without awareness that one is thinking; is unconscious

• Explicit cognition: thinking and thought processes of which we are consciously aware; is conscious (can reflect on thinking)

• Metacognition: Knowledge about one’s own cognitive processes and the ability to regulate them. (thinking about how mind works + starting to think about regulation of thinking)

  • creative thinking higher than metacognition

  • e.g., rereading a paragraph, thinking of how to memorize

  • false belief task → when children start to understand that others have thoughts + beliefs differ from their own → this provides foundations for metacognition development

• Executive control processes: Higher-level processes that regulate attention, working memory, and problem-solving

  • like a brain management system - help for focus, attention, holding of WM, distraction inhibition, strategy switching, monitor effectiveness of strategies

Retention and the Development of Attention: Attention Span

Changes in attention span

• 1 month old doesn’t decide to look at face, it naturally grabs their attention; preschooler switches to activity that is more interesting

• Attention span: capacity for sustaining attention to a particular stimulus or activity over time (increase with age due to elimination of distractions + putting effort into specific goal)

• 1. Biological Maturation

  • Increases with age, partly due to myelination of the central nervous system, including the reticular formation (communication b/w brain regions become faster + more efficient)

  • Reticular formation: area of the brain that activates the organism and is thought to be important in regulating attention (arousal as well) - to resist distractions (e.g., background noise)

  • Biological maturation provides the foundation for attention, but it does not fully explain how children learn to control and direct their attention intentionally.

• 2. Development of planful attentional strategies

• With age, attention becomes more planful, selective, and goal-directed.

House Task: Planful Attentional Strategies

• to study planful attentional strategies - shown 2 houses and children asked if both are the same/different

  • w age, the search for differences are difffernet

  • 5 yr old would only look at few parts of houses to conclude (search is unsystematic)

  • older kids would respons in more systematic

• Think of the biological foundations of ToM → PFC + reticular formation

• Children with ADHD:

Selective Attention

• Selective attention: capacity to focus on task-relevant aspects of experience while ignoring irrelevant or distracting information.

• Older children are much better than younger ones at concentrating on relevant information and filtering out extraneous input that may interfere with task performance.

• Example: In memory tasks, younger children (3-4years old) tend to remember both relevant and irrelevant information, while older children (5 years old and above) focus better on the task and filter out distractions

Cognitive Inhibition & Meta-Attention

Cognitive inhibition: dismissing irrelevant information

• Inhibition: the ability to prevent ourselves from executing some cognitive or behavioral response.

• Example: Young children have difficulty inhibiting automatic or preferred responses, which improves with age as cognitive control develops

Meta-attention: What do children know about attention?

• Knowledge about attentional processes increases with age, though it starts in infancy (ex., joint attention).

  • Even 5-year-olds understand that they should focus on task-relevant stimuli.

  • By 7-9 years old, children understand the importance of ignoring distractions for better performance.

Fuzzy-Trace Theory

• offers an alternative to the multistore model proposed by Brainerd and Reyna (2015)

• Information is processed at 2 levels:

  • Level 1, Gist: fuzzy representation of information that preserves the central content but few precise details

    • Easily accessed

    • Requires relatively little effort

  • Level 2, Verbatim traces: Detailed memory representations

    • More susceptible to interference and decay

    • More easily forgotten

• Children’s reliance on verbatim or gist traces shifts with age: Younger children (before age 6-7) tend to encode and recall verbatim details.

• Older children and adults rely more on gist-like representations

Schema Theory + Scripts and Event Memory

• Schema theory emphasizes how memories of events are organized and manipulated.

• A script of routine actions is extracted with slot fillers for details from a specific event.

  • Script: a generalized representation of a familiar sequence (what occurs and when) of events

  • Slot-filling: specific details are filled into predefined roles

  • Young children rely on scripts because they reduce cognitive load

Development of Event Memory

Personal, social, and cultural circumstances influence how memories are organized.

• Event memory: long-term memory for events

  • Children from individualistic cultures tend to recall events from their own perspective and retrieve information related to their personal goals.

  • Children from collectivist cultures encode, retain, and retrieve more social aspects of events.

• Autobiographical memory improves during the preschool years.

  • Parents strengthen it by discussing past events.

Infantile Amnesia: Why Early Memories Fade

• Limited language at encoding

• Developing sense of self

• Immature source monitoring

Children as Eyewitnesses → how do they recall information?

• Children use the following strategies to recall info:

  • Retrieval: actions and strategies aimed at getting information out of the long-term store

  • Free recall: recollection that is not prompted by specific cues or prompts

  • Cued recall: recollection that is prompted by a cue associated with the setting in which the recalled event originally occurred

• accuracy of children’s eyewitness memory increases with age

Eyewitness Interviewing: What Improves Accuracy?

• Free recall → fewer errors, fewer details

• Cued recall → more detail, if cues are neutral

• Start with generic recall, then probe specifics

• Use open-ended questions

Suggestibility & Legal Testimony

• Suggestibility: the likelihood that false information that is suggested is incorporated into one’s memory

  • All ages susceptible to false memories

  • Children younger than 8 to 9 years more suggestible than older children and adults

• Implications for legal testimony

  • Steps to increase the accuracy of children’s eyewitness testimony in legal proceedings include the following:

    • Maximizing the completeness and accuracy of children’s narratives

    • Probing with open-ended questions tied to cues provided by children

Development of Analogical Reasoning

• Reasoning: a particular type of problem solving that involves making inferences

• Analogical reasoning: reasoning that involves using something you already know to help reason about something not known yet

• Relational similarity: the relation between two analogues (e.g., a parent feeding a child is relationally similar to an adult bird feeding its chicks)

  • Using knowledge of relational similarity improves along with improvements in executive control processes such as working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility

Number and Arithmetic Development

• Even infants are capable of processing and using quantitative information.

• Counting begins once children begin to talk.

• Preschoolers gradually construct such basic mathematical understandings as the principle of cardinality.

  • Cardinality: The principle that the last number in a counting sequence represents the total number of items in a set.

  • Early arithmetic strategies typically involve counting out loud. With development, arithmetic becomes internalized and more strategy-based.

Development of Arithmetic Strategies

• Children of any age use a variety of strategies to solve math problems, adapting based on their age and skill.

• Robert Siegler’s adaptive strategy choice model: children have multiple strategies available to them that compete with one another for use.

  • Counting on fingers is an early strategy for solving arithmetic problems.

  • As children’s knowledge grows, this strategy is used less frequently.

  • Children’s arithmetic development reflects non-stage-like strategy change, meaning multiple strategies coexist and are used flexibly rather than replacing one another in fixed stages.
    

Cultural Differences In Math

• Unschooled children develop arithmetic strategies that they apply quite skillfully to practical, everyday problems

• They may perform well in real-life contexts but struggle with paper-and-pencil mathematics.

  • For example, street vendors can quickly and accurately add and subtract currency values mentally.

• context-embedded math Versus decontextualized math

Culture, Language, and Mathematics - Vygotsky’s socialcultural theory

• Cultural variations influence mathematics performance, as emphasized in Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory

• East Asian children often outperform North American children in mathematics.

• Differences are partly due to language structure and instructional practices.

• These cultural tools support math fact retrieval, computational efficiency, and conceptual understanding.

• From a Vygotskian perspective, language functions as a tool of intellectual adaptation, shaping higher-order thinking.

Evaluating the Information-Processing Perspective

Despite its many strengths, the information-processing perspective has been criticized:

1. Underemphasizes neurological, evolutionary, and sociocultural influences on cognitive development

2. Does not offer a single, integrative theory of intelligence

3. May underestimate the richness, flexibility, and diversity of human cognition