Cognitive Development Throughout the Lifespan

Chapter 13

Cognitive Development

We will look at three aspects of cognitive development in our discussion.

1. development 2. Metacognitive development 3. Development of language

Memory Development

Early research underestimated infants' memory abilities Psychologists used a number of different measure to ascertain memory capacities in infants and younger children.

1. (looking time, Own-Race Effect) 2. Recognizing mother (visual, voice) 3. Conjugate reinforcement with a mobile

1 Own Race Effect (ORE)

1. Sangrigoli and de Schonen (2004) showed photos of White and Asian women's faces shown to White babies. 2. Presented one photo (White or Asian ) repeatedly until looking time decreased. 3. Presented pair of photos (familiar-unfamiliar) White women or Asian women. 4. Looking time for unfamiliar White woman longer than familiar White woman. However no difference for familiar-unfamiliar Asian women.

Recognizing Mother

1. Visual recognition: 3-days old recognize their mother from a stranger (Bushnell & Sai, 1987; Rovee-Collier et al, 2001; Slater & Butterworth, 1997). 2. Demand mother’s video: Infants younger than 3- days old sucked to produce a video of their mother than strangers (Walton et al., 1992).

Recognizing Mother

3. Mother’s Voice: Prenatal babies preferred mother reciting the poem than a stranger. Heart- rate changed more when hearing mother’s voice (Kisilevsky et al 2003). 4. Prenatal babies prefer characteristics of mother’s spoken language when reading a passage read many times to passage never read to them (DeCasper & Spence, 1986).

2 Conjugate Reinforcement

Babies hooked-up to a mobile with a ribbon, move their leg and shake it. In instrumental conditioning terms foot movement is the response, and mobile movement is the reinforcement.

Rovee-Collier and colleagues tested 2-6 month old babies in this setup for immediate and LTM.

Conjugate Reinforcement 1. Baseline, spontaneous kicking is first ascertained. 2. The ribbon is connected to the mobile and number of kicks are assessed during the acquisition phase. 3. Number of kicks produced following delay is used to measure immediate or long-term memory.

Train Rovee-Collier and colleagues also used 6-18 month old children with a toy train on a circular tracks to measure memory. The train was hooked-up to lever that the infants could press, to make the train run or not.

3 Results

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12 Mobile Task Train Task 10

8

6

4

2 MinimumRentention (Weeks) 0 2 3 6 9 12 15 18 Age (Months)

Context Learning reactivated most strongly when retested in the same rather than a different context (Butler & Rovee-Collier, 1989).

Other Memory Aspects

Rovee-Collier also tested other aspects of infant memory and found that infant’s memory behaved much like adult memory for;

1. Interference 2. Spacing effect 3. Levels of processing.

4 Children's

1. Memory span (Kail, 1992) o Children were given lists like: dad, mom, doll, ball, baby, … etc. o 2-year children recalled 2 words, 9-year old recalled all 6 words. 2. Three working memory components 3. Relationship to school performance

Children's Long-Term Memory

Excellent recognition but poor for objects (Myers and Perlmutter, 1978).

125 Recognition 100 Recall 75

50

25 PercentCorrect Recall 0 2-Year Old 4-Year Old Age

Children's Long-Term Memory

1. and early childhood and Infant memory. 2. Deferred imitation. 3. Lack of well-organized sense of who they are. 4. Difficulty and retrieving. 5. Reminders.

5 Autobiographical Memory

Refers to events taking place in one’s life. People are unable to recall events before 2-3 years of age, called childhood amnesia.

More

Fewer DetailsRemembered

2-Year Old 3-Year Old Age at Sibling Birth

Childhood Amnesia

We know that infants and children have good . Children around 2-years have good verbal memories.

1. is not fully developed (Newcomb et al. 2000). 2. No well organized sense of (Conway & Pleydell- Pierce, 2000; Howe, 2000, 2003).

Deferred Imitation

Infants a few months old can imitate adult expressions and other events. Schema and scripts are retained in 11-month old infants for tasks that involve 2-step sequence.

Experimenter pushed a button through a slot of a box and said “shake, shake, shake” compared to putting a hat on the bunny and feeding a carrot.

6 Children's Long-Term Memory

1. Children's source monitoring (Foley, Ratner and colleagues, 19??). 2. performing vs. imagining how it would feel vs. visualizing. 3. performing vs. watching another person perform a task.

Children's Memory Strategies

1. Rehearsal not very effective, but can keep information in working memory. Four- and 5-year- olds do not spontaneously use rehearsal but can benefit from rehearsal if prompted. 2. Organizational strategies (categorizing and grouping) Moely and colleagues (????) children study pictures from four categories; younger children rarely rearrange into categories than older. 3. Imagery: even 6-year-olds can be trained to use visual imagery effectively.

Children's Eyewitness Testimony

1. Leichtman and Ceci (1995) "Sam Stone" study. Control, stereotype, suggestion, and stereotype- plus-suggestion groups. children interviewed about Sam Stone 10 weeks after visit. 2. Control group highly accurate. children can provide valid eyewitness testimony if they do not receive misleading information, either before or after the target event.

7 Children's Eyewitness Testimony

Leichtman and Ceci—"Sam Stone" study results.

Children's Eyewitness Testimony

1. Age, stereotyping, and misleading suggestions all influence children's eyewitness testimony. 2. Social factors reluctance to say "I don't know“. 3. Change statements under cross-examination.

Children’s Intelligence and Eyewitness Testimony 1. Henry and Gudjonsson (2007) children with mental retardation vs. typically developing children. 2. Older and younger children. 3. Misleading questions

8 Memory in Elderly People

1. Stereotypes. 2. Large individual differences. 3. Complex developmental trends. 4. Stine et al., (1989) recall for spoken English. 5. Normal syntax/normal rate vs. random order/fast rate. 6. Significant age difference for complicated, non- real-life task.

LTM in Elderly People

1. Perform well on tasks and easy, automatic tasks. 2. Age differences on more complex tasks. 3. (simulated shopping task). Complete fewer tasks and made more errors. Perform more accurately when they have an environmental cue. Can even perform better than younger adults.

LTM in Elderly People

4. (Light and colleagues, 1995). Reading familiar letter sequence. Older and younger adults performed similarly. 5. Explicit recognition memory. Long-term recognition memory declines slowly or not at all. 6. Explicit recall memory. Performance decreases slowly and age differences are more substantial Dunlosky and Hertzog (1998)—pairs of unrelated words, names, historical details, stories large individual differences—verbal ability, education. Hasher and colleagues—time of day.

9 Explanations

Explanations for Age Differences in Memory relate to changes in brain structures:

1. Difficulty paying attention 2. Ineffective use of memory strategies 3. The contextual-cues hypothesis 4. Cognitive slowing

Metamemory in Children

1. (Flavell, 199?). People's ideas on how their minds work and on their beliefs about other people's thoughts. 2. Children's understanding of how memory works. Small vs. large memory sets. Related vs. random words. Effectiveness of memory strategies. 3. Children's awareness that effort Is necessary. Young children do not appreciate the need for effort. Keep studying information they already know. Not accurate in judging what has been committed to memory.

Metamemory in Children

3. Children's awareness that effort Is necessary. Young children do not realize that they need to make an effort to use a memory strategy. Naive ideas about the effort required for memorization.

10 Metamemory in Children

Children's Judgments about their memory performance. Younger children unrealistically optimistic. Roebers and colleagues (2004) tested memory for magic show and looked at confidence ratings. Overconfidence. Average Level of Confidence for Questions Answered Correctly and Questions Answered Incorrectly. (1 = Very Unsure; 5=Very Sure)

Summary: Metamemory in Children

1. Their metamemory is faulty; they do not realize that they need to make an effort to memorize, and they also do not realize how little they can remember. 2. They do not spontaneously use helpful memory strategies. 3. Relative to older children, their memory performance is poor.

Metamemory & Memory Performance 1. Some evidence that metamemory is related Is there a causal link? to strategy use. 2. Extensive evidence that Metamemory strategy use is related to memory Strategy use performance. 3. Moderate correlation Memory performance between metamemory and memory performance.

11 Metamemory in Elderly

1. Beliefs about memory. younger and older adults share similar beliefs. 2. Memory monitoring. Equally skilled on some tasks—predicting items they will recall, selecting most difficult items for further study, judging accuracy on general-knowledge questions, deciding whether an item is old or new. Overconfident on some tasks. Overall performance on a test of memory for specific details about a recent event.

Metamemory in Elderly

3. Awareness of memory problems. problems with everyday memory. some elderly people don't try to develop helpful memory strategies because they think that memory decline is inevitable. Memory self-efficacy. the belief in one's own potential to perform well on memory tasks.

Development: Language Comprehension 1. Language in Infants rate of acquisition vocabulary size creative language use. 2. Speech Perception in Infancy phonemes speech- sound categories across speakers Eimas and coauthors (????) habituation studies, sucking response dishabituation indicates perceiving difference between sounds. Werker and Tees (????) distinguishing sounds in other languages. Kuhl (????) relearning lost distinctions. Language rhythms. Bilingual homes and language discrimination.

12 Development: Language Comprehension 3. Language Comprehension in Infancy. Recognizing important words like, name, mommy, daddy etc., Discriminating between grammatical words and meaning words. Understanding the correspondence between sound and sight. Emotional tone of spoken language. Walker- Andrews (????) recordings of either a happy voice or an angry voice side-by-side films of happy speaker and angry speaker, infants watched the face that matched the emotion of the voice.

Development: Language Comprehension 4. Appreciating semantic concepts (Mandler and colleagues, ????). Concepts about objects distinguishing between visually similar (animate- inanimate objects); "animal" vs. "vehicle" categories. Concepts become more refined.

Development: Language Production

1. Language Production in Infancy. Cooing, babbling, intentional communication. 2. Adults' Language to Infants (child-directed speech Motherese, fathers). Adults typically use a different language style when speaking to infants and young children than when speaking to older people. Differences across language communities. 3. Words. Early words and concepts. Word production. Comprehension of words. Interrelationship of memory and language.

13 Development: Language Production

3. Words (fast mapping). Using context to make a reasonable guess about a word's meaning. Heibeck and Markman (1987) used a series of paired objects familiar and unfamiliar terms. Grammatical overextension and underextension. 4. Morphology. Young children pay greater attention to phrases with appropriate morphology and are able create their own regular forms.

Development: Language Production

5. Overregularization. The tendency to add the most customary morphemes to create new forms of irregular words. Parallel distributed processing explanation. Language system keeps tally of morpheme patterns; patterns of excitation within neural networks account for overregularization. Rule-and-memory theory (Marcus, ????). Children learn a general rule for past-tense verbs and also store in memory the past tenses for many irregular verbs.

Development: Language Production

6. Syntax. Combining words into sentences. Two- word utterances. Morphology and syntax. Active process. Using syntax cues. 7. Pragmatics. Learning the social rules of language. What to say, to whom, language styles, coordinating conversations. Adapting language to the listener. Shatz and Gelman (1973) 4-year-olds speaking to 2-year-olds, 4-year-olds and adults, and 2-year olds speaking to infants. Taking turns in conversation. gestures of interest; listener responses.

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