Cognitive Development Notes

Physical Development Over a Lifetime

  • Today's lecture covers physical and cognitive development, significant thinkers in cognitive development, and cognitive decline and aging.

Prenatal Development

  • Three major stages:
    • Germinal
    • Embryonic: Development of the nervous system and organs.
    • Fetal: Rapid muscular development.
Influence of the Environment
  • Teratogens: Environmental agents that may harm the embryo or fetus.
    • Examples: Substance use, certain maternal illnesses.
  • Congenital abnormalities: Caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors.

Infancy: Measuring Motor Milestones

  • Adaptive reflexes:
    • Rooting reflex: Touching cheek to turn head.
    • Sucking reflex: Rhythmic response to stimulation.
  • Motor development in infancy mostly progresses along a universal sequence with some variation.
    • Aboriginal infants develop head and neck muscles earlier than Anglo-European infants (Hamilton, 1981; Kearins, 1986).
    • Kipsigi Kenyan infants sit, stand, and walk at an earlier age than Western Infants (Super, 1981).

Childhood and Adolescence: Big Changes

  • Significant changes in size and shape.
  • Growth for females and males equal until age 10.
  • Female growth spurt at age 12.
  • Male growth spurt at age 14-15.
  • Puberty.
  • Early maturation stress in females.

Adulthood and Aging: Midlife Changes

  • Physical growth is mostly complete by the end of adolescence.
  • Menopause: A dramatic physical change in women, typically occurring between ages 40-50 and lasting several years.
    • Approximately 2% experience premature menopause prior to age 40.
    • Can cause significant emotional and psychological stress.

Adulthood and Aging: Later in Life

  • Observable physical changes.
  • Substantial sensory changes, which can lead to psychological consequences.
    • Reduced sensitivity to visual contrasts.
    • Longer time to adapt to darkness.
    • Hearing loss.
    • Deterioration of functioning.

Cognitive Development

Perceptual and Cognitive Development in Younger Years

  • Historically, the cognitive capacity of infants has been underestimated.
  • Developments in methodology provide a more complete story.
  • Methods for assessing infant cognition:
    • Time spent fixated on a stimuli.
    • Discriminating between categories.
    • Recognizing facial expressions.
    • Intermodal understanding: Ability to associate sensations of an object from different senses or match one’s actions to visually observed behaviors (sights and sounds, synchronized speech sounds and lip movements).
    • Attention shifting.
  • Infants' perception of meaning: Evolutionary explanation for perception of threat/ danger and value stimuli.

Infant Memory

  • Explicit memory:
    • Infantile amnesia: Lack of explicit memory prior to age 3.
    • What infants remember varies depending on the task and reflects maturation of neural circuits involved.
    • Significant development of retention over the first two years.
    • Representational flexibility: The ability to retrieve memories despite changes in cues at the time of the memories encoding. Infants rely more on these cues; over time, memories become encoded such that they can be linked.
  • Implicit Memory:
    • Memory for information that is expressed unconsciously or automatically through improved performance on related tasks.
    • Various forms and incidents from birth.
    • Infants exposed to a stimulus will respond faster when presented again in two years (Perris et al., 1990).
    • Three-month-olds conditioned to kick their legs to make a mobile move will begin kicking their legs sooner than other infants (Rovee-Collier, 1990).
    • Literature suggests that the ‘machinery’ of implicit memory may be ‘up and running’ very early.

Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development (1896-1980)

  • Addresses the philosophical question with psychological answers.
  • John Locke: "All knowledge comes from experience."
    • To know what a dog is, we need to have previous experiences of dogs, including varied sensory information.
  • Immanuel Kant: "Some forms of knowledge do not come from observation; they are innate."
    • People apply categories of thought (space, time, causality, etc.) on the data they sense, but these categories did not come from previous experience.
    • Rules of logic and mathematics exist in the world and are not summaries of previous sensory information.
  • John Piaget: Agreed with Kant but proposed that children develop knowledge by inventing or constructing reality out of their own experience, combining what they observe with ideas about how the world works.
Assimilation and Accommodation
  • Piaget suggested that intelligence is the individual’s way of adapting to new information about the world.
    • Assimilation: Interpreting actions or events in terms of one’s present/existing schemas.
    • Accommodation: Modification of existing schemas to fit reality.
    • Equilibration: Balancing both assimilation and accommodation to adapt to the world.
    • When a child encounters something they don’t understand, they experience cognitive disequilibrium, which motivates them to try and make sense of it.
Stages of Cognitive Development
  • We assimilate and accommodate throughout our lives.
  • At each stage of our development, children use a distinct underlying logic or structure of thought to guide their thinking.
  • Every stage builds on the next.
Critiques of Piaget's Theory
  • The theory significantly defined cognitive development for decades and continues to influence modern literature.
    • Critiques
      • Big focus on scientific and philosophical ways of thinking, but doesn’t account for bias, irrationality, and delusion.
      • The stages are very strict, and kids can be taught ‘future’ ways of thinking at earlier stages.
      • Underestimation of the capacities of infants and preschool children as the testing didn’t allow for detection of ‘future’ thinking.
      • What about cultural differences?

Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development (1896-1934)

  • Emphasizes the role of social interaction for a child’s motivation for cognitive gains and learning.
  • The importance of collaboration.
  • Proposed that children collaborate and strive together on tasks to enhance understanding.
  • Children may work with parents, guardians, siblings, and teachers to advance knowledge and skills.
  • Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD): A continuum of cognitive development.
    • Suggests that a child will achieve greater understanding by socializing collaboratively with a skilled partner.
Zone of Proximal Development
  • Current Understanding: What a child can learn unassisted.
  • Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD): Learns with specific assistance (scaffolding).
  • Out of reach - unable to learn even with scaffolding.

Information Processing Approach to Cognitive Development

  • Focuses on the finer details of cognitive processes.
    • Processing Speed
      • As children age, they become faster at a range of cognitive tasks, such as decision-making, categorization, and problem-solving.
    • Automatic Processing
      • Automization refers to the process of executing mental processes with greater efficiency, which reduces attention requirements.
    • Knowledge Base
      • As we age, we accumulate more knowledge.
    • Cognitive Strategies
      • Develop from simple to sophisticated.
    • Metacognition
      • Thinking about thinking. Cognition that reflects on, monitors, and regulates an individual’s thinking.
      • Problem-solving often requires an understanding of how your mind works.
      • Metamemory: Knowledge of one’s own memory and strategies to assist remembering.

The Digital Age and Cognitive Development

  • Technological changes have significantly and rapidly impacted cognitive development.
    • Multitasking
      • A 2010 study found that 2/3 of teenagers doing their homework on a computer were also using another device (Rideout, 2010).
      • Potential loss of ability to undertake deeper-level cognitive study and knowledge acquisition.
      • The reality of our current technological environment favors and rewards the acquisition of broad, shallow levels of information.
    • Video Games
      • Action-based video games have been shown to increase attentional, visual, spatial, and perceptual skills.
      • Potential to improve reading skills in dyslexic children.
      • Help treat amblyopia owing to brain plasticity.
      • Improve cognitive functioning in impaired or aging brains.
      • Concerns about effect on brain function and reward via dopamine pathways.

Cognitive Development in Adulthood

  • Psychomotor Speed
    • Psychomotor slowing: An increase in the time required for processing and acting on information, occurring across both simple and complex tasks.
    • Gradual and largely unnoticed until 50-60.

Cognitive Changes Associated with Aging

  • Memory
    • Working Memory
      • Elderly people do well on simple short-term tasks but show deficits in complex working memory tasks.
      • Neuroimaging research shows both decreased and overall less efficient activation in areas of the prefrontal cortex.
    • Long-Term Memory
      • Longer to learn new information, but ultimately similar to younger adults.
      • May continue adding to the knowledge base for the entire life.
      • Relatively little impairment to implicit memory.
      • The problem area is the retrieval of explicit memories, particularly recall tasks.
    • Everyday Memory
      • Is the depressing outlook on elderly peoples' memory explained by their reality? (Blanchard-Fields, Chen, 1996).

Individual Differences in Aging and Cognition

  • Cross-sectional studies show differences between age groups but don’t show what proportion of people have a decline in cognitive functioning.
  • "Of those people in different age groups, how many actually deteriorate?”
Is Cognitive Decline Inevitable?
  • Followed participants aged 25-81 over several years.
  • Most people do not show significant cognitive decline.
  • Reflects the differences between individuals in how they age.
Not All Doom and Gloom
  • Using it early means keeping it later.
  • Having a certain amount of intellectual training early may reduce future deterioration.
  • Learning complex new skills later in life can improve cognitive functioning.
    • Older adults (60-90) trained to use iPads showed improvements in episodic memory and processing speed (Chan et al., 2010).
    • Learning digital photography later in life led to improved episodic memory after three months (Park et al., 2014).
Further Consideration
  • The Molyneux problem: "If someone blind from birth, who can differentiate between a cube and a sphere by touch, were to regain sight, could they immediately tell which object is which just by looking at them, without touching them first?”