Information Processing Approach
- Analyzes how individuals encode, manipulate, monitor information, and create strategies.
- Focuses on how people think, similar to Piaget and Vygotsky.
- Uses the computer as an analogy:
- Sensory and perceptual systems are the “input channel.”
- Mental processes act on the input.
- Information is retrieved from memory and displayed as an observable response or “output.”
- The computer model is oversimplified but continues to expand in cognitive psychology.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI): creating machines capable of human-like intelligent activities.
- Developmental Robotics: Uses robots to examine developmental topics such as motor, perceptual, and language development, and information processing.
- Effective information processing involves attention, memory, and thinking.
- Mechanisms of Change:
- Encoding: Getting information into memory.
- Automaticity: Processing information with little or no effort.
- Strategy Construction: Creating new procedures for processing information (e.g., reading strategies).
- Children's information processing is characterized by self-modification, applying previous learning to new situations.
- Metacognition: "Thinking about thinking or knowing about knowing," assists in self-modification.
- The best way to understand how children learn is to observe them while they are learning.
- Microgenetic Method: Obtains detailed information about processing mechanisms as they occur moment to moment.
- Influences what we can do with information.
- Assessment uses a reaction time task.
- Improves dramatically across childhood.
- Continues to improve in adolescence.
- Begins to decline in middle adulthood and continues into late adulthood.
- Processing speed is linked with competence in many aspects of cognition.
- Strategies learned through experience may compensate for decline in processing speed.
Attention
- Focusing of mental resources.
- Types of attention:
- Selective Attention: Focusing on relevant aspects while ignoring irrelevant ones.
- Divided Attention: Focusing on more than one activity.
- Sustained Attention: Maintaining attention to a selected stimulus for a prolonged period.
- Executive Attention: Planning actions, giving attention to goals, detecting and compensating for errors, monitoring progress, and dealing with new or difficult circumstances.
Attention in Infancy
- Orienting/investigation process dominates in the first year.
- Directing attention to potentially important locations and recognizing objects/features.
- Closely linked to habituation and dishabituation:
- Habituation: Decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated presentation.
- Dishabituation: Recovery of responsiveness after a change in stimulation.
- Parents should do novel things and repeat them often until the infant stops responding.
- Joint Attention: Two or more individuals focusing on the same object or event.
- Observed frequently by the end of the first year.
- Increases infants’ ability to learn from others.
- Requires:
- Ability to track another’s behavior (e.g., following a gaze).
- One person directing another’s attention.
- Reciprocal interaction.
Attention in Childhood and Adolescence
- Improves significantly during the preschool years.
- Advances in executive and sustained attention.
- Greatest increase in vigilance.
- Deficiencies in:
- Salient vs. Relevant Dimensions: Paying attention to stimuli that stand out, even if irrelevant.
- Planfulness: Using haphazard comparison strategies instead of examining all details.
- Control and sustained attention are related to school readiness.
- Training can improve attention skills.
- Attention to relevant information increases through elementary and secondary school.
- Processing of irrelevant attention decreases in adolescence.
- Older children and adolescents are better at shifting attention.
- Use of multiple electronic media increases multitasking.
- Multitasking reduces attention to complex tasks.
Attention in Adulthood
- Attentional skills often excellent in early adulthood.
- Older adults may not focus on relevant information as effectively.
- Less adept at selective attention.
- Performance decreases as attention demands increase.
- Perform well on simple vigilance and sustained attention tasks.
- Performance declines on more complex tasks.
Memory
- Retention of information over time.
- Basic processes: encoding, storage, and retrieval.
- Encoding: Getting information into memory.
- Storage: Retaining information over time.
- Retrieval: Taking information out of storage.
- Failures can occur in any of these processes.
Constructing Memory
- Schema Theory: People mold memories to fit existing information.
- Schemas: Mental frameworks that organize concepts and information.
- Influence how people encode, make inferences, and retrieve information.
- Gaps are often filled in when memories are retrieved.
- We reconstruct the past, and our minds distort events as they encode and store impressions.
Memory in Infancy
- Except for perceptual-motor actions, most young infants’ conscious memories are short-lived.
- Newborns and fetuses show a limited type of memory.
- Infants can remember perceptual-motor information.
- Implicit Memory: Memory without conscious recollection.
- Explicit Memory: Conscious memory of facts and experiences.
- Infants do not show explicit memory until after 6 months.
- Infantile Amnesia: Most adults remember little from the first 3 years.
- By 8–9 years, children’s memory of events at 3 years fades away.
- Immaturity of the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex plays a role.
Memory in Childhood
- Memory improves considerably after infancy.
- Long-Term Memory: Relatively permanent and unlimited.
- Short-Term Memory: Retention of information for up to 30 seconds without rehearsal.
- Individuals can retain information longer using rehearsal.
- Short-term memory increases during childhood.
- Older children use rehearsal more than younger children.
- Speed of information processing is also important.
- Working Memory: Where individuals manipulate and assemble information when making decisions, problem-solving, and comprehending language.
- Autobiographical Memory: Significant events and experiences.
- Young children’s memories increasingly take on more autobiographical characteristics.
- Culture has a strong influence.
- Children’s long-term memory improves as they move into middle and late childhood.
- Eyewitness Testimony:
- Age differences in children’s susceptibility to suggestion.
- Individual differences in susceptibility.
- Interviewing techniques can produce distortions in children’s reports about salient events.
Memory in Childhood: Strategies
- Mental strategies can improve information processing.
- Rehearsal (repetition) works better for short-term memory.
- Creating mental images.
- Works better for older children.
- Elaboration: Engaging in more extensive processing of information.
- Thinking of examples and personal associations.
- Adolescents are more likely to use elaboration spontaneously.
- Fuzzy Trace Theory: Memory is best understood with two types of representations:
- Verbatim Memory Trace: Precise details of the information.
- Gist: The central idea of the information.
- Young children tend to store and retrieve verbatim traces; then during elementary school, they begin to use gist more.
- Gist contributes more to improved memory and reasoning because fuzzy traces are more enduring and less likely to be forgotten than verbatim traces.
- Knowledge: Influences what people notice and how they organize, represent, and interpret information.
- Expertise in a particular area leads to better memory of information pertaining to that area.
- Children can organize (chunk) the information into meaningful subgroups based on their expertise (e.g., chess).
- Teaching Strategies:
- Show children how to organize information, how to elaborate the information, and how to develop images of the information.
- Encourage children to understand the material rather than mechanically memorizing it.
- Repeat with variation on the instructional information and link early and often.
- Embed memory-relevant language.
Memory in Adulthood
- Working memory and processing speed are two important cognitive resources linked with aging.
- Working memory declines from 65 to 89 years.
- In older adults, working memory has plasticity—it can be improved through training and exercise.
- Explanations of the decline include less efficient inhibition in the face of irrelevant information and increased distractibility.
- Declines in processing speed and attention may also play a role.
- Implicit Memory: Memory of skills and routine procedures performed automatically—is less likely than explicit memory to be adversely affected by aging.
- Explicit Memory: Conscious memory of facts and experiences.
- Also called declarative memory.
- Can be subdivided into episodic memory and semantic memory.
- Episodic Memory: Retention of information about the where and when of life’s happenings.
- Autobiographical memories are stored as episodic memories.
- Reminiscence Bump: Adults remember more events from the second and third decades of their lives than from other decades.
- Semantic Memory: Knowledge about the world.
- Fields of expertise, general academic knowledge, “everyday knowledge,” meanings of words, names of famous individuals, important places, and common things.
- Older adults often take longer to retrieve semantic information, but they are usually successful.
- Tip-of-the-Tongue (TOT) Phenomenon: Individuals can’t quite retrieve familiar information.
- Source Memory: The ability to remember where one learned something.
- Failures increase with age.
- Prospective Memory: Remembering to do something in the future.
- Some decline may occur with age.
Thinking
- Manipulating and transforming information in memory to reason, reflect, think critically, evaluate ideas, solve problems, and make decisions.
Thinking in Infancy and Childhood
- Concepts: Cognitive groupings of similar objects, events, people, or ideas—are key aspects of infants’ cognitive development.
- Unclear how early concept formation begins.
- Infants’ early categorizations are best described as perceptual categorization.
- Based on similar perceptual features of objects such as size, color, movements, and parts.
- Not until about 7–9 months do infants form conceptual categories.
- Further advances in categorization occur in the second year.
- First concepts are broad and global.
- Large gender differences in categories based on passionate interests:
- Boys: Vehicles, trains, machines, dinosaurs, balls.
- Girls: Dress-up and books/reading.
- Executive Function: A number of higher-level cognitive processes linked to the development of the brain’s prefrontal cortex.
- Involves managing one’s thoughts to engage in goal-directed behavior and to exercise self-control.
- In early childhood, involves advances in cognitive inhibition, cognitive flexibility, goal-setting, and delay of gratification.
- Linked to school readiness.
- Parents and teachers play important roles.
Thinking in Infancy and Childhood: Executive Function
- Significant advances unfold over the middle and late childhood years.
- Key dimensions:
- Self-control/inhibition.
- Working memory.
- Flexibility.
- Some research suggests executive function is a better predictor of school readiness than general IQ.
Executive Function in Adolescents and Emerging Adults
- Improvement in executive control may be the most important cognitive change in adolescence.
- Two categories:
- Cool Executive Function: Psychological processes involving conscious control driven by logical thinking and critical analysis.
- Hot Executive Function: Psychological processes driven by emotion; especially, emotion regulation.
- Cool executive function appears to increase with age, while hot executive function peaks at 14–15 years and then declines.
- Cognitive control increases.
- Cognitive flexibility involves being aware that options and alternatives are available and adapting to them.
Executive Function and Aging
- Executive function skills decline in older adults.
- Aerobic exercise, overall physical fitness, and activities such as tai chi have been shown to improve executive function.
- Linked to health, emotion regulation, adaptation to life’s challenges, motivation, and social functioning.
Thinking in Infancy and Childhood: Critical Thinking
- Thinking reflectively and productively and evaluating the evidence.
- Grasping the deeper meaning of ideas, keeping an open mind, and deciding for oneself what to believe or do.
- Mindfulness is an important aspect.
- Being alert, mentally present, and cognitively flexible.
- Children who engage in mindfulness can improve cognitive and socioemotional skills.
- Contemplative Science: The study of how various types of mental and physical training might enhance development.
Thinking in Adolescence: Decision Making
- Adolescence is a time of increased decision-making.
- Older adolescents are described as more competent than younger adolescents and children.
- Adolescents are more likely to generate different options, examine a situation from various perspectives, anticipate consequences, and consider the credibility of sources.
- Like most people, adolescents make better decisions when calm.
- Adolescents’ willingness to engage in risky behavior depends on the social context.
- More risky decisions are made when alcohol, drugs, or other temptations are readily available.
- The presence of peers makes risky decisions more likely.
- Fuzzy-Trace Theory Dual-Process Model: Decision-making is influenced by “verbatim” analytical and gist-based intuitional cognitive systems.
- Basing decisions on simple gist is viewed as more beneficial to adolescents’ decision-making—particularly in risky situations.
- Adolescents who have a higher level of trait inhibition are less likely to engage in risk-taking behavior.
Thinking in Adolescence: Critical Thinking
- Several factors provide a basis for improvement:
- Increased speed, automaticity, and capacity of information processing.
- Greater breadth of content knowledge in a variety of domains.
- Increased ability to construct new combinations of knowledge.
- Greater range and more spontaneous use of strategies and procedures for obtaining and applying knowledge.
Thinking in Adulthood: Expertise
- Extensive, highly organized knowledge and understanding of a particular domain.
- Shows up more among middle-aged or older adults.
- Within their particular domain, experts tend to process knowledge differently than novices.
- Rely more on accumulated experience.
- Often process information automatically and analyze it more efficiently.
- Have better strategies and shortcuts.
- More creative and flexible.
- Mindfulness: Involves being alert, mentally present, and cognitively flexible.
- Some studies have shown mindfulness training improves older adults’ cognitive functioning.
- Education, work, and health influence the cognitive functioning of older adults.
- Some declines in intellectual performance are likely due to health-related factors, such as illness and mood disorders.
- Exercise is linked to improved cognitive functioning, as are healthy dietary patterns.
- Terminal Decline: Changes in cognitive functioning are linked more to distance from death or cognition-related pathology than to distance from birth.
- Cognitive Neuroscience and Aging:
- Key regions of the brain are involved in links between aging, brain health, and cognitive functioning.
- Neural circuits in the prefrontal cortex decline.
- Use of both hemispheres compensates for age-related declines.
- Decline is more evident for retrieval than for encoding.
- Functioning suffers as attentional demands increase.
- Cortical thickness in the frontoparietal network predicts executive function.
- Connectivity between brain regions declines.
- Fitness training may increase volume in the frontal and temporal lobes.
- Neurocognitive Scaffolding View: The brain is adaptive, compensating for the challenges of declining structures and function with complementary neural circuits.
- Use It or Lose It:
- Older adults benefit from activities such as reading books, doing crossword puzzles, and attending lectures and concerts.
- Disuse may promote atrophy of cognitive skills.
- Cognitive training can improve the cognitive skills of many older adults.
- Improving physical fitness can also improve cognitive functioning.
- “Thinking about thinking or knowing about knowing.”
- Involves dimensions of executive function, such as planning, evaluation, and self-regulation.
- Helps people perform cognitive tasks more effectively.
- Metamemory: Knowledge about memory.
- General knowledge and knowledge about one’s own memory.
- Children’s understanding is relatively poor at the beginning of elementary school but improves by age 11–12.
- Theory of Mind: Awareness of one’s own mental processes and the mental processes of others.
- From 18 months to 3 years, children begin to understand three mental states:
- Perceptions.
- Emotions.
- Desires.
- Children aged 2–3 years understand that desires are related to actions and simple emotions.
- Between 3 and 5 years, children come to understand that the mind can represent objects and events accurately or inaccurately.
- Awareness of false beliefs—beliefs that are not true—develops by age 5 in most children.
- Executive function, involving goal-directed behavior and self-control, is linked to the development of a theory of mind.
- Children who have deficits in theory of mind and social interaction show repetitive behaviors or interests, and predicts the severity of autism in children
- Adolescents are more likely than children to engage in recursive thinking—thinking about what other people are thinking about.
- Adult life calls on the theory of mind to cope with the challenges of the social world.
- Theory of mind abilities decline in older adults.
- Increased capacity to monitor and manage cognitive resources to meet the demands of a learning task.
- Increased metacognitive ability results in improved cognitive functioning and learning.
- Adolescents have a better meta-level understanding of strategies.
- Middle-aged adults have accumulated a great deal of metacognitive knowledge, which can help combat decline in memory skills.