Psych 125
Human Development
Christopher Gade
Office: 1031-G
Office hours: Tu 12-1:30 and by apt.
Email: gadecj@gmail.com
Class: T 1:30-4:20 Room 2210
Class Activity
• To explore today’s topic, we’re going to start
today’s class with an activity. Follow along as
fast as you can.
Stand up and clap two times!
• Spin around one time
• Hop on one foot three times
• Say the name of your best friend in the eight
grade aloud
• Say the name of the first US president aloud
Say the number of finger that I’m
holding up with my right hand!
7
How did you do all of this?
• Information processing – the act of attending to,
monitoring, processing, manipulating, and creating
strategies for handling stimuli from the environment
– Attention – the focusing of mental resources on stimuli
– Encoding – the organization and recognition of stimuli
– Memory – the retention of information from stimuli over
time
– Thinking – the processing and manipulation of memory
over time
How does this relate to development?
• As we age, the speed and ease with which we
perform these processes changes
– Automaticity – the ability to perform a cognitive
process with little or no effort
– The faster and the more automatic we are, the easier
it is to navigate in our environment
Looking Closer at the Steps: Attention
• Attention is often split up into four different types
– Selective attention – the ability to focus on a specific
stimulus while ignoring other stimuli
– Divided attention – the ability to focus on multiple
stimuli at the same time
– Sustained attention – the ability to maintain attention
for a prolonged period of time
– Executive attention – the ability to control and
allocate attention intentionally
• As we age, our attention capabilities change in a
number of ways
Attention Skills During Infancy
• Infants have the ability to focus their attention for a
short period almost immediately after birth
• Most attention is based on the novelty of stimuli
– Habituation – decreased responsiveness due to prolonged
or repeated exposure to a stimulus
– Dishabituation – an increase in attentiveness due to a
change in a familiar stimulus
• After about three months, infants start to gain the
ability to direct their attention at specific elements
• From three months on, infants also increase their
ability to prolong their attention to stimuli (starting
at 5 to 10 seconds)
Another Aspect of Attention in Infants
• Joint attention – the ability to focus on multiple
objects that are associated with each other
• Joint attention starts at about 8 months of age
• At 11 months of age, infants begin
to master “gaze following”
• This ability is critical in our
attempts to learn about our
environment
“Blorg”
• A lack of joint attention skills is
often used as an indicator of cognitive problems
Attention Changes in Childhood
• At childhood, our ability to maintain
our attention increases dramatically
– Television example
• We also master our ability to change our attention
from one stimulus to another
• However, we continue to struggle with some
critical aspects of attention
– Salience recognition – the ability to recognize the
critical aspects of a stimulus
– Planfulness – the ability to shift attention between
stimuli in a planned and advanced manner
Identify and Count the Number of
Differences Between the Pictures
Attention
during
Adolescence
• As we enter adolescence, we
become more capable of
directing our shift of attention
• We also focus our attention on
important details more easily
• We also begin to multitask
– Multitasking – the ability to
dedicate our attention to
multiple stimuli
– Note: as we age, we slightly
improve our ability to multitask,
but we never become great at
multitasking, we just become
more confident in our abilities
Attention in Adulthood
• Most of us become very good at attention skills when
we reach adulthood
• There are considerable differences in attention skills
of individuals based on training and general abilities
• As we get older, our attention abilities decrease
– Our ability to divide our attention becomes much worse
– We gradually lose the ability to ignore unimportant
information
– We also appear to lose our ability to maintain attention for
very long when information is difficult
– Experience and cognitive activity seem to have a large
impact on the rate of this decline
The Second Aspect of
Information Processing: Memory
• Just like attention, memory abilities change as we
age
– Capacity – the amount of information that we can
process
– Span – the length of time that we can process
information
– Organization
• Schemas – concepts of
information organization
that impact the way we
encode, store, and
retrieve information
– Speed/ease of retrieval
Different Stages of Memory
• Memory is often broken up into three different levels
– Sensory memory – the retention of information in our
immediate environment
• Lasts for only fractions of a second
• Information that we deem relevant in this stage progress to STM
– Short-term memory (working memory) – the retention of
and attention to information that we are currently using
• STM involves both current information AND past information
– Long-term memory – the retention of information that we
can recall readily, even if it isn’t a current need
• LTM is constantly changing due to new experiences and needs
Sensory input
External
events
Attention to important
or novel information
Sensory
memory
Encoding
Short-term
memory
Encoding
Retrieving
Long-term
memory
One Final Classification of Memory
• Implicit memory – memory of information
without conscious recognition
• Explicit memory – conscious memory based on
facts (true or false) and experiences (real or
imagined)
– Semantic and episodic differences
memories
Explicit (declarative)
With conscious recall
General knowledge
(“semantic memory”)
Personal events
(“episodic memory”)
Implicit (nondeclarative)
w/o conscious recall
Skills-motor
and cognitive
Dispositions, automatic
learned associations
Memory in Infants
• The majority of developmental psychologists over
the years argued that infants had no memory
• Nowadays, we tend to argue that infants have
very limited memory
– Memory at this time is implicit based
• Mobile experiment
– Memory span is very short, but improves
• 6 months  24 hours
• 20 months  1 year
– Infantile amnesia – the inability of adults to remember
anything from their infancy (0-3 years)
• Believed to be related to a lack of language skills and lack of
development in the frontal lobe and hippocampus
Memory in Childhood
• Children begin to master the ability
to store information in LTM
• They also improve on their ability
to access specific information in
their long-term memory as they age
• Short –term memory span also increases
– Note: even though their ability to remember
improves, the process of remembering information is
very difficult and often muddled or erratic in children
• False memories through suggestion studies
• Randomness of information that is remembered
– “tell me about your day”
– Memory or story-telling related?
Memory
after
Childhood
• As we age, studies show
that our working memory
skills and capacity improve
up to the age of 45, then
they slowly decline
• We appear to remember
less events about our own
experiences that occur after
about 50, and our ability to
remember events also
declines
• However, we seem to have
about the same memory
capacity for semantic
information throughout our
lifetimes
Problems with Memory as We Age
• Memory capacity and speed of access decline
with age, but there are some other interesting
changes to memory that we also find
• Source memory – the information about the
location, audience, and time associated with
the learning of information
• Prospective memory –
the ability to remember
to do something in the
future (involves routine)
Development in Other Thinking Skills
• Categorization – the ability to classify stimuli and
concepts into distinct groups
– We appear to possess this skill at a young age, and get
more specific through experience and demands
• Critical thinking – the ability to master the deeper
meaning of ideas
– Applications of learned information
– Connections between information
– We improve on with age, but experience is critical
• Problem solving – finding ways to appropriately
obtain a goal
– Children learn strategies through testing, adults tend to
rely on previous strategies that worked
Looking Back at an Old Concept
• Automaticity – the ability to
perform a cognitive process
with little or no effort
• The faster and the more
automatic we are, the easier it is
to navigate in our environment
• The older we get, the more automatic our
behaviors become
• This usually makes life easier, HOWEVER, this also
causes us to struggle with problem solving
• It also doesn’t help us at times with decision
making (especially when we’re teens)
The BENEFITS of Aging
• Unlike physical and health development, when we
age, there are some big benefits in our later years
– Expertise – having extensive, highly organized knowledge
and understanding of a particular domain
– Decision making: when given time, the elderly have the
ability to make much better decisions than their younger
counterparts
– education, health, and work effects: our
thinking abilities appear to be able to
maintain themselves fairly well
throughout life if we find ourselves in
environments that continue to push and
not damage our mental skills
Summing Things Up
• In this class, instead of looking at cognitive
development in specific stages, we examined how
our cognitive abilities grow and shift over the lifespan
– We saw that we become more diverse, fast, and efficient
with most cognitive abilities as we age
– We also saw that our experience and demands have a
great impact on how we develop and the extent of the
development
Moving on…
• In the next class we’ll explore the topic of
intelligence. Make sure that you have the
chapter read by then.
• Note: the next assignment will also be posted by
the end of this week. Please make sure to
download it and start on it as soon as possible.
Please remember, your person needs to go
through an entire lifetime, and you’re
responsible for EVERY section that’s on the
assignment.