Lecture 2 -Reasoning and Memory Flashcards
What is counterfactual reasoning?
-people often reflect on how an event in the past might have turned out differently
-creating such alternatives to known facts
-certain age not able to do this
eg chocolate on top self boy took to room, what if little sister came to look for instead
Counterfactual syllogism
-a syllogism is a type of logical argument that applies deductive reasoning to arrive at a conclusion based on two or more propositions that are asserted or assumed to be true
Other factors important in counterfactual reasoning
- disengagement from reality (know what is real and what is not and be able to disengage from that)
- > inhibitory processes (executive function)
- > know when to disengage
- > improves executive function, improved knowledge
Type of counterfactual reasoning
- congruent: matches up with what know about real world
- incongruent: disagrees with what is in real world
- fantasy: made up, nothing know about in real world
Hawkin et al 1984
- congruent: bears have big big teeth, big teeth can’t read books, can bears read?
- incongruent: glasses bounce, everything that bounces made of rubber, is glass rubber?
- fantasy: every banga is purple, purple animals sneeze, do bangas sneeze?
Results: 4 y/o congruent 90% correct, incongruent 10% correct, fantasy 70% correct
-also depended on how items presente dif fantasy before incongruent performed better than when presented after
Scribner 1977
- all kpelle men are rice farmers, mr smith is not a rice farmer, is he a kpelle man?
- 53% adults got answer correct, also tested students
- interested in justification
- rather than using info in syllogism didn’t think in hypothetical way, empirical knowledge
Bias and Harris 1988 Pretence and empirical bias
- pretence can prevent empirical bias
- see if can get children to answer questions in a deductive or theoretical way
- see if context of playing make believe could affect answer (toys and dolls, all cats bark, rex is a cat does rex bark)
- empirical group and theoretical group
- 4 and 6 y/o (4 y/o worse)
- correct responses: pretense increased correct
- theoretical justifications: pretense helped
Leevers and Harris 2000, does understanding the experimenter’s intention affect it?
- young children may fail to understand experimenters intention and give false answer
- pretence and instructions to se imagery may make the experimenters intention clear
- autistic children find difficult to understand intentions expect to perform more poorly
- basic and imagination (of scenerio) problem
- tested children twice (autism, typical dev and MLD)
- autism: not as much differnce btw basic and imagination, other groups there were
- > autism response bias of yes, others more even
- did children carry on information?
- > yes children did, basic on second task same as imagination groups, children learned
When is an inference necessarily true or only possibly true?
- if a brick is thrown at the window the glass will break
1) a brick is thrown at window, does it break? -yes
2) the glass is broken, was a brick thrown at the window -i don’t know (not enough info to answer)
Pieraut-Le Bonnlec 1980 Certainty and Uncertainty (holes)
- can you tell without looking inside drawer what im putting into the small hole? (also same question about large hole)
- all got small hole right (certain)
- only children over 9 could get the answer for large hole correct (uncertain)
Bynes and Overton (1986) certainty and uncertainty box task, holes
- gave children practice and feedback
- 8y/o able to distinguish certainty from uncertainty
- 6y/o still failed to detect uncertainty
- this type of uncertainty involves a dual solution (thin AND thick object can fit in the the large hole)
- young children may think of one solution but difficult to think of other
certainty and uncertainty Ruffman et al 2001 slide task
- two slides: certain (red slide and red square) and uncertain (various could come down)
- 3 and 4 y/o
- certain 90%, uncertain 75% put counters next to both slides
- -indicates that young children can identify possible outcomes when they have a limited number of choices
Two main types of long-term memory
- explicit (declarative, conscious recall): semantic (knowledge facts) and episodic (personally experienced events)
- implicit (non declarative or procedural, no conscious recall): skills (motor and cognitive) and conditioning (classical and operant) and habits
- Mnemonic
2. Metamemory
- knowing how to know, how to organize memorizing (rehearsal, retrieval)
- knowing about knowing, knowing about your own memory, knowing when to make a special effort
Two alternative hypotheses of memory development
- Memory processes develop in a sequence
- All processes are available at the same time although strategies and metamemory are more restricted in younger children
How important is knowledge to recall?
Chi 1978
- look at child (good chess players) and adult chess players (novice)
- children better at arrays (chess positions)
- adults slightly better at digits
- expert knowledge influences development of mnemonic strategies
Bauer and Mandler 1989
- Imitation of causal sequences
- Imitation of arbitrary sequences
- child tasked with making rattle (has to be right order, for end goal): blue circle, red square, green square
- Goal: doll, train linked, on the track (but doesn’t have to be specific order)
-16 and 20 months, shown correct order then asked to show
Results: better at casual immediate, better delayed causal sequences in 2nd year
Memory duration in young infants
Barr et al 1996
- shown puppet
- infants shown 3 actions which they were expected to model after delay (24 hours)
- remove mitten, shake & ring bell, replace mitten (shown sequence 3 times)
- 6 months produced more target action in the demonstration than the control group
- but very few imitated the complete sequence
- no recall after 2 days (Barr et al 2001)
Using operant conditioning paradigms to study memory acquisition and recall
-infant responds in a certain way which produces an effect which is reinforced during the acquisition phase
-leg kick=movement of a mobile (2-6 months)
-panel press=movement of train (6mo-2yrs)
-if child responds in absense of reinforcement this is evidence for linking the response and effect previously (ie memory)
-possible to study recall either straight away or after a delay
(see next slide)
Contingent mobile (see notes for time line) and train tasks -Hartshorn et al 1998
-as age increases can retain information longer (2 mo can’t retain, 18 mo can retain for 13 weeks)
-6 months both tasks suitable for, performance same (not confounded)
-deferred imitation task: not as much retention but older more
(next slide)
(Barr et al 2001) train task vs puppet task
- retention?
- does one task affect the other?
- 6 month train task more retention than puppet (14 days vs 1 day)
- > retention depends on paradigm
- can stronger memory increase weaker memory?
- 2 sessions learning train, 60 seconds with puppet task, 3 groups that did both
- tested on the puppet task after 6, 14 and 21 days
- results: puppet retention 14 days
Use of mnemonic strategies in young children
Helsel and Ritter 1981
- is strategy use fragile in preschoolers
- children hid toy in one of 196 identical containers, instructed would have to retrieve at later point
- 3yrs no strategy (any location)
- 5yrs utilized simple strategies (chose a distinctive location and chose same location on all trials)
Development of rehersal strategy
Flavell et al 1966
- children shown a short series of pictures and told to remember the sequence (wore space helmet with a opaque visor)
- lip reader watched for signs of verbal rehearsal
- 5yrs (10%), 7yrs (60%), 10 yrs (85%)
- strategy was effective, children who rehearsed recalled more
- young children did not spontaneously use rehearsal strategy
- non-rehearsers were encouraged to rehearse and recall imported to the level of spontaneous rehearsers, however 50% stopped rehearsing on later trials
- production deficiency
Rehearsal and serial position effects in children
Naus and Ornstein (1983)
- primacy and recency effect
- results: 6yrs no primacy effect but have recency effect, 9yrs and 14 yrs have primacy effect (indicates rehearsal) and recency effect
How does rehearsal change with age?
Ornstein et al 1975
- words were read aloud at a 5 second interval
- children were told to say the words out loud rather than rehearsing non verbally
- 4 words presented: yard, cat, man, desk
- results: 8 yrs passive rehearsal (do not incorporate all the words), 13 yrs active rehearsal (incorporated all the words, eg desk, man, yard, cat, man, desk, cat, yard)
- older get more efficient
Organization in rehearsal
Schneider & Bjorklund 1998
- active rehearsal encourages children to notice relations between items (can lead to identification of categories)
- organized rehearsal also aids recall (category membership of items to be remembered)
- clustering is at chance levels in younger children but increases with age
Organization in rehearsal experiment
Salatas and Flavell 1976
- children presented with 16 pictures each from four categories (animal, clothing, toys, tools)
- younger children don’t organize to help rehearsal as well as older children
- 27% 6yrs organized, more 8yrs but still not a lot, older children much better at this
Organization in recall
Kobasigawa 1974
- similar changes are found in children’s ability to organize recall of information
- cued recall: showed children 24 pictures in 8 sets of 3
- also shown a cue picture relating to the set
- free recall (no cue picture) or cued recall
- results: spontaneous use of cue at 7 and 10 yrs improved recall (not at 5 yrs)
Knowledge affects on strategy use
Bjorklund and Jacobs 1985
- conceptual development also influences strategy use
- ask children to remember and recall items from this list (scissors, paper, knife) the strategy employed for recall will differ depending on age
- younger children’s recall determined by items with strong associations (scissor and paper)
- older organized their recall around conceptual categories they have learned (scissors and knife)
Different performance deficiencies
Mediation deficit: no spontaneous use of strategy, lack of mental apparatus to use strategy, unable to use strategy even after training
Production deficit: no spontaneous use of strategy, have ability to use strategy, strategy use occurs after training or prompting
Rehearsal strategy -a production deficiency
Keeny et al 1967
- 3 groups: no rehearsal then training, spontaneous rehearsers then training, spontaneous rehearsers no training
- results: non rehearsers performance improved to almost the same after training
Cued recall strategy -a production deficiency
Kobasigawa 1974
- free recall, cued recall and directive cued (told how many items were paired with the cue and asked to recall them beore moving onto the next category)
- 5yrs, 7yrs and 10yrs
- all children performed equally well in the directive cue condition whereas there was an improvement as a child aged in the free recall and cued recall conditions
- 5 yrs stored as much information as 10 yrs but had difficult accessing it
Allocation of cognitive resources
Miller 1998
- tested the development of specific strategies to aid recall
- each child was presented with pictures of furniture under the houses and animals under the cages
- child has 30 seconds to remember where the animals are hidden
- to test they are shown a card with an animal on it and asked to point to the door that covered it
- results: 4yrs did not use a strategy, opened all doors, used a spatial approach (rows and columns), 5-6yrs partial strategy, relevant doors were opened up to 75% of the time, 6yrs selective strategy, but this did not translate into an improvement in recall (utilization deficit), 8+yrs selective strategy and improved recall
Effort of strategies for younger children
Miller el al 1991
- cognitive load can be assessed using a dual task paradigm
- > baseline: finger tapping rate
- > child strategy while tapping same time
- > decline in tapping est of effort needed to execute the strategy
- all children spontaneously produced the strategy (younger children 6yrs show greater reduction in tapping than older children)
- execution of strategy more demanding for younger children (explain utilization deficit, no spare capacity for remembering)
Utilization deficit in adults
Gaultney et al 2005
- task: remember 15 nonsense words
- experimenter reads the words from cards and places the cards on the table so can study for 1.5 minutes
- told that could move cards to help remember (form categories)
- participants then presented with a different task for 30 sec before being asked to recall nonsense words
- the amount of clustering in the recall was measured
- adults display utilization deficits in challeging memory tasks, the availability of working memory for store affects performance
- doing a demanding strategy leaves no working memory capacity for storage (which means no benefit in recall)
- utilization deficit are not a developmental phenomenom but are a result of demands on limited capacity
Processing capacity and strategy development
Guttentag 1984 and 1997
- dual task paradigm with children 8, 9 and 12
- child rehearsed words while tapping
- younger children showed a greater decrease in tapping rate compared to baseline
- compared children who recalled same amount (younger had greater reduction in tapping)
- compared children with same decrease in tapping (younger recalled fewer words, strategy use suffers more to maintain tapping)
Early memory awareness
DeLoache and Brown 1984
-look notes for background slides
- knowing that you have remembered something is extremely important to metamemory
- 21 and 27 months
- toy hidden in a natural location at home, child leaves and returns later to search for toy
- most of time toy where thought it was
- experimenters introduced two surprise trials where they moved the toy
- 27 mo were sig. more likely to search in a close by location on the surprise trials that they were when they had made an error (looked in the incorrect place for toy)
Memory span and age relation
Dempster 1981
- increases with age
- increase could be due to increased absolute capacity but avidence suggests that it is due to faster processing and greater knowledge
- better at recalling numbers than letters (increases with age)
(more in notes but im fed up with this)
