Memory
1. Discuss production deficiencies
in children’s memory
performance. What are possible
explanations for young children’s
poor recall performance?
HDFS 631:
Learning & Cognitive
Development
October 14, 2002
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2. Discuss how age related
changes in knowledge base can
affect differences in children’s
memory performance.
Include both strategic and nonstrategic effects.
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3. How consistent and stable is
memory?
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Take any cognitive skill or
concept...
4. Explain the differences between
explicit and implicit memory; describe
developmental differences in each.
What research methods are used to
study each?
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• From earliest, fragile beginnings
• To full, robust maturation
• Where will you see the skill or concept
applied first?
• Where will you see the skill or concept
applied last?
• What contextual characteristics will affect
when/where/how the skill/concept is
applied?
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What changes in memory?
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What changes affect memory?
• Knowledge
Capacities
Knowledge
Strategies
Three phases
– Amount
– Representation
– Organization
• Type
• Episodic and semantic
• Declarative and procedural
– Birth to five years
– Five to 10 years
– 10 years to adult
• Speed of processing
• Automatization of skills
• Control Processes
– Metamemory
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Changes in children’s information
processing: “How many are there?”
Response
Generator
“3”
Automatization
What changes?
Long
term
memory:
“1…2…3”
Sensory
Register
Atkinson & Shiffrin
Working
memory:
“1…2…3”
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cardinal
principle
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Basic Capacities
Strategies
Organization
Metamemory
Content Knowledge
Metamemory strategies
Rehearsal
Elaboration
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Three deficiencies in Strategy
Utilization
What roles do adults play?
• Mediation Deficiency(Reese)
In coaching children through memory tasks:
• Coaching strategies for recall
• Providing cues for recall
• Teaching strategies
– Child doesn’t use strategy
– If you teach strategy, child won’t use it
– If prompted, the strategy doesn’t help recall
• Utilization Deficiency (Miller)
– Child uses strategy
– Strategy doesn’t help recall
• Production Deficiency (Flavell)
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– Child doesn’t use strategy unless prompted
– When child prompted, recall improves
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Age differences in Recall
Mean Number of Items
Recalled
Review of Chapter 8
Changes in Memory:
Birth to 5 years
5 to 10 years
10 years to Adult
Directive Cue
Available Cue
Free Recall
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3
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Grade
Kobasigawa, 1974
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Basic Capacities: 0-5
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Recognition
• Capacities present in infants
• Perlmutter & Lange:
• 2.5 year olds recognize pictures more
accurately than adults can recall them
– Recognition
– Association
– Generalization
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Association
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Generalization
• Event Representations (Nelson)
• Rovee & Fagen: 3-month olds learned to
kick to make a mobile turn
• Rovee & Fagen: 3-month olds kicked to
new mobile:
• faster after 4 days
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Capacities present in 5-yearolds
Capacities from 5 to 10 five
years
• Sensory Store Limits
• Case: 6 year olds could hold 2 digits in
memory
• 10 year olds: 4 (4-digits: insert last)
• Speed of processing increases
• Hoving, Spencer, Robb, & Schulte: 7-yearolds can represent objects at sensory level
in 1/7 second
• Adults: 1 second
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Capacities from 10 years to
adulthood
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Strategies 0 - 5 years
• Speed of processing increases
• Keating & Bobbitt: 9-year-olds took 7
seconds longer to retrieve from LTM than
from STM
• 17 year olds took 4 seconds longer
• Little evidence of strategy use
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Strategies: 5-10 years
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Rehearsal
• Many strategies acquired:
• Rehearsal
• Organization
• Ornstein, Naus, & Liberty
• 8 year olds repeat each name
• 13 year olds combine new with previously
learned
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Organization
Strategies: 10 - Adulthood
• Moely: Younger children use more
categories with fewer members in each
• Continuing improvement in quality of all
strategies (see Ornstein)
• Elaboration
– 46% of 10 year olds
– 94% of 14 year olds
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Metamemory
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Metamemory: 0-5 years
• 0-5: Little factual knowledge about
memory
• 30% 5-year-olds claimed that they never
forget (Kreutzer, Leonard, & Flavell)
• 50% 4-year-olds can remember 10
pictures (Flavell, Friedrichs , & Hoyt)
– Some monitoring of ongoing performance
• 5-10: Some factual knowledge
– Improved monitoring
• 10-Adulthood
– factual knowledge
– ongoing monitoring
– regulation of memory
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Metamemory: 5-10
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Metamemory: 10 - Adult
• Markman: 8-11 year olds changed in
recognition of absurdities
• Factual knowledge may exert increasing
effects on memory procedure
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Content knowledge
Content Knowledge: 10-adult
– Spilich, Vesonder, Chiesi & Voss studied
memory for baseball games among college
students
– differed in errors and in irrelevent information
• At all ages, steadily increasing content
knowledge helps in areas where
knowledge exists (Chi & Koeske)
• 5-10
– And in learning new strategies
• 10-adulthood
– Continuing improvements
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The Good Strategy User
(Pressley)
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Particular strategies:
Possesses strategies:
• goal-specific procedures for certain memory,
comprehension, & problem-solving goals
• monitoring strategies that keep track of
cognition and performance (processing shifts
when needed)
• higher order sequencing strategies that chain
goal-specific monitoring strategies into larger,
articulated sequences to accomplish complex
goals.
• memorization (categorization, elaboration,
rehearsal)
• self-control procedures (self-verbalization)
• specific problem-solving regimens
(analogical identification)
Monitoring procedures
Specific strategy knowledge
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• compare effects of different strategies
• Integration of goal-specific and monitoring
into higher order procedures (clinical
psychology, reading, problem solving)
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• When and where to apply specific
strategic procedures
• if-then conditions of production systems
• motivational information
• episodic information (when & where
acquired and who taught it)
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Knowledge base can make
strategy use unnecessary
Effects of strategy use
• General beliefs and general strategic
tendencies
• general set to expend effort and to
reshape strategies to fit new problems
• shield cognitive procedures from other
behaviors, distractions, debilitating
emotions
• Stimulates data-driven selection of
strategy, rather than goal-driven choice
• Enables strategy execution (e.g.,
category selection)
• Example: Hardy Boys
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Higher order sequencing strategies
• action control
• Strategic, metastrategic, and knowledge
components interact
sequential strategy use
• automatized use
• when to switch
– used rehearsal and mental imagery
– used top-down in descriptions
– aware of constructive memory errors (used
photos)
– articulated strategies; used appropriately
Alternative approaches to
strategy instruction
• Discovery and guided-discovery learning
of strategies
• hypothesized advantages:
– higher motivation
– better learning and retention
– more complete understanding of strategies
that facilitate transfer
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Is there a best approach to
strategy instruction?
Questions:
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efficiency
comprehensiveness
guided discovery through questioning
requires sophisticated teacher
lack of evidence
• Strategies
• Children often experience difficulties
executing strategies if processing is not
detailed extensively and explicitly
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Specific Strategy knowledge
General strategic tendencies
• three ways to acquire specific strategy knowledge:
– external agent provides information: when, where, how
– let people discover it on their own as they use strategies
• vary practice materials across range of strategy
applications
• provide opportunities to experience situations where
strategy cannot be applied profitably
• Nonstrategic knowledge
• strategies and domain-relevant knowledge
should be taught simultaneously
• teach strategies in contexts in which they
will be used
– teach them procedures for discovering metacognitive
knowledge
• eg., comparing strategies to find out which is more
potent
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Summary
Both are needed:
• Fenton Hardy spent years teaching
strategies and domain-specific declarative
knowledge to Frank and Joe!
• Strategy instruction should occur across
school curriculum asnd in diverse aspects
of child's world
• Direct explanation (regular classrooms)
• Reciprocal instruction (family settings,
small classrooms)
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Rocky roads to transfer
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Low road transfer
Transfer occurs in two ways:
High road transfer
Low road transfer
Salomon & Perkins
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depends on extensive, varied practice
distance of transfer depends on
amount of practice and
variability of contexts in which practice has
occurred
• occurs by automatic triggering of welllearned behavior in a new context
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High road transfer
Backward reaching
• intentional mindful abstraction of
something from one context
• and application in a new context
• Can be forward reaching
• mindfully abstracts basic elements in
anticipation for later application
• faces a new situation
• searches for relevant knowledge already
acquired
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Some key distinctions
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How much transfer?
• Transfer versus mere learning
• Amount?
• Distance?
– depends on similarity
– transfer more likely when learning has side
effect we were not perfectly confident of
• What is transferred?
– How of transfer is not indifferent to whats
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Low road transfer
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High road transfer
• Varied practice
• Transfer occurs to the extent that a new
circumstance calls on a
• complex of procedures overlapping a
complex that was
• previously well-exercised
• extensive practice affects amount of
transfer.
• mindful, deliberate processes that
• decontextualize the cognitive elements
– candidates for transfer
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Automatization
Abstraction
• inhibits high-road transfer!
• components are
• product and process
• extracts from or identifies some generic or
basic qualities, attributes, or patterns of
elements
• both decontextualization and
rerepresentation
– inseparable
– unconscious
– in new, more general form
– that subsumes more cases
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Mindfulness
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Vygotsky: intellectualism
• volitional, metacognitively guided
employment
• nonautomatic processes
• typical of deeper processing, etc.
• Mindful abstraction
• Abstraction must be understood
• grasp relationship between
decontextualized representation and raw
instances
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Qualitative predictions
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Next week
• distant transfer through greater
abstraction
• Inert knowledge:
• only when acquisition process involves
active use of the
• information in a problem solving
manner
• relevant to the later context of use
information proved active rather than
inert.
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• Gathercole & Templeton
• Chapter 10: Problem Solving
• Present a 3-minute summary of your topic
and its significance to learning and
cognitive development
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