5: Cognitive Development

Question 1

Information Processing Model

Answer 1

Likens thinking to information processing - computer analogy of the brain.
Continuous - not stage like.

Question 2

Children’s thinking

Answer 2

• encoding: screening to input important things
• automaticity
• strategy construction
• generalise

Question 3

Changes in attention over the lifespan

Answer 3

Infants: can selectively attend to object by 4 months
Toddlers: can shift attention rapidly
Preschoolers: will attend to up to 30 minutes, but cannot distinguish between important and unimportant things
Primary schoolers: can efficiently attend to relevant parts of a task by 6-7 years. Lots of incidental learning
Adolescence & young adulthood: capacity to shift attention from one task to another increases.

DECLINES WITH AGEING

Question 4

Changes in memory over the lifespan

Answer 4

Infancy:

• deferred imitation of novel behaviour shown at 6 months.
• habituation only cued by stimulus and lasts only few seconds
• operant conditioning shows that reactivation in infants can help recover a conditioned response and that retrieval is better is context matches that of time of encoding (encoding specificity)
• recognise after birth, recall after 8-11 months, have proper memories by 2 years.
• implicit = conditioned & LT (matures at 2), explicit = conscious recall at 8-11 months (matures at adolescence)

Question 5

From STM to LTM

Answer 5

1. Rehearsal
2. Scripts (2-3 years)
3. Organisation (9-10 years)
4. Elaboration (12+)

Question 6

Constructive memory

Answer 6

How people use general knowledge to try to retrieve things from their memory

Question 7

Metamemory

Answer 7

Knowledge about memory

Question 8

Episodic memory

Answer 8

When and where

Question 9

Semantic memory

Answer 9

Knowledge about the world

Question 10

Vygotsky’s approach

Answer 10

Emphasised that children learn through social interaction

Question 11

Scaffolding

Answer 11

Providing support without being intrusive - child later internalises these instructions

Question 12

Zone of proximal development

Answer 12

Tasks that are too difficult for child to do alone but can be learned with the guidance of others

Question 13

Private speech

Answer 13

When children use private speech to guide their thinking. Vygotsky believed that social speech became private speech which became inner speech

Question 14

Realism

Answer 14

How children have no understanding of mental life and don’t distinguish between things and thoughts about things

Question 15

Animism

Answer 15

How children animate inanimate objects

Question 16

How do children learn about other people

Answer 16

• newborns: prefer looking at humans
• 8-12 months: – show social referencing
• 2 years: child develops TOM from 18-24 months and has desire psychology
• 3 years: can tell you what objects look like from different perspectives, are reality psychologists
• 4 years: children become belief psychologists - people act based on what they think