Slide 1 8—Information Processing • • • • • • The Information-Processing Approach Attention Memory Thinking Metacognition Summary McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. The Information-Processing Approach • The Information-Processing Approach to Development – The information-processing approach focuses on how children process information about their world. – The approach analyzes how children manipulate information, monitor it, and create strategies for handling it. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. The Information-Processing Approach • The Information-Processing Approach (continued) – Effective information processing involves attention, memory, and thinking. – The flow of information takes many routes, processes may overlap, and they do not always occur in the same direction. – A computer metaphor can help to understand the process and the limitations, although children’s cognitive development results from their ability to overcome processing limitations. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. The Information-Processing Approach A Basic, Simplified Model of Information Processing • Refer to Figure 8.1 McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. The Information-Processing Approach • Cognitive Resources: Capacity and Speed of Processing Information – Developmental changes in information processing are influenced by increases in capacity and speed of processing, or cognitive resources. • Increase in capacity improves processing of information. • Reaction-time tasks are used to assess processing speed. • Speed improves throughout childhood and adolescence. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. The Information-Processing Approach • Mechanisms of Change – Robert Siegler (1998) described three mechanisms that work together to create changes in children’s cognitive skills: • Encoding: The process by which information gets into memory. • Automaticity: The ability to process information with little or no effort. • Strategy construction: The creation of new procedures for processing information. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. The Information-Processing Approach • Mechanisms of Change (continued) – Children’s information is characterized by selfmodification: Children learn to use what they have learned in previous circumstances to adapt their responses to new situations. • Metacognition: Cognition about cognition, or “knowing about knowing.” • Siegler: Children play an active role in their cognitive development. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. The Information-Processing Approach • Comparison with Piaget’s Theory—Like Piaget: – Some information-processing psychologists are constructivist and see children as directing their own cognitive development. – Information-processing psychologists describe ways in which children do and do not understand important concepts at different points in life and explain how more advanced understanding grows out of less advanced concepts. – Information-processing psychologists emphasize the impact that existing understanding has on the ability to acquire new understanding. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. The Information-Processing Approach • Comparison with Piaget’s Theory—Unlike Piaget: – Information-processing developmentalists view development as a gradually increasing capacity for processing information, which allows children to acquire increasingly complex knowledge and skills, rather than knowledge occurring abruptly in distinct stages. – Focuses on more precise analysis of change and on the contributions of ongoing cognitive activity. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Review and Reflect: Learning Goal 1 • Explain the information-processing approach – Review • What is the information-processing approach to development? • How do capacity and processing speed change developmentally? • What are three important mechanisms of change involved in information processing? • How can the information-processing approach be compared to Piaget’s theory? McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Review and Reflect: Learning Goal 1 – Reflect • In terms of ability to learn, are there similarities between how children process information and how a computer does? What might be some differences in the way that children and computers process information? McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Attention • What Is Attention? – Attention: The focusing of mental resources. • It improves cognitive processing for many tasks. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Attention • What Is Attention? (continued) – Attention is allocated in different ways: • Sustained attention (vigilance): The state of readiness to detect and respond to small changes occurring at random times in the environment. • Selective attention: Focusing on a specific relevant aspect of experience while ignoring those that are irrelevant. • Divided attention: Concentrating on more than one activity at the same time. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Attention • Infancy – Newborns can pay attention to a contour; older infants scan patterns more thoroughly. – 4-month-old infants can selectively attend to an object and sustain their attention. – Infants’ attention is strongly governed by novelty and habituation. • Habituation: Decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated presentations. • Dishabituation: Recovery of a habituated response after a change in stimulation . McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Attention • Childhood and Adolescence – Older children and more socially advantaged children are better at resisting interference of competing demands and at focusing attention. – Visual attention to television dramatically increases in the preschool years. – Preschoolers’ attention is related to achievement and social skills. – The shift to cognitive control of attention after age 6 or 7 allows children to pay more attention to relevant features than salient features of a task. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Attention • Childhood and Adolescence (continued) – The ability to direct selective attention, divide attention, and shift attention improves as children get older. – Improvements may be due to an increase in cognitive resources, automaticity, or increased skill at directing resources. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Review and Reflect: Learning Goal 2 • Define attention and outline its developmental changes – Review • What is attention? • How does attention develop in infancy? • How does attention develop in childhood and adolescence? McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Review and Reflect: Learning Goal 2 – Reflect • Imagine that you are an elementary school teacher. Devise some strategies to help children pay attention in class. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Memory • What Is Memory? – Memory is the retention of information over time. – Processes and Types of Memory • The basic processes required for memory are encoding, storage, and retrieval. • Short-term memory has a limited capacity for retaining information. • Long-term memory is a relatively permanent and unlimited type of memory. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Memory Processing Information in Memory • Refer to Figure 8.2 McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Memory – Processes and Types of Memory (continued) • Working memory is a mental “workbench” where information is manipulated and assembled. • Baddeley’s model of working memory has two short-term stores, one for speech and one for visual and spatial information, plus a central executive that monitors and controls the system. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Memory Working Memory • Refer to Figure 8.3 McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Memory • What Is Memory? (continued) – Constructing Memories • Schema theory: People mold memories to fit information that already exists in their minds; the process is guided by schemas, mental frameworks that organize concepts and information. • Fuzzy trace theory: When individuals encode information they create a verbatim memory trace (precise detail) and a fuzzy trace or gist (the central idea). McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Memory • What Is Memory? (continued) – Content Knowledge and Expertise • Experts are better than novices at: – Detecting features and meaningful patterns of information – Accumulating more content knowledge and organizing it effectively – Retrieving important aspects of knowledge with little effort McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Memory – Content Knowledge and Expertise (continued) • Experts use chunking—grouping bits of information into a higher-order unit that is remembered as a whole. • Experts have more elaborate networks of information. • Novices have to allocate considerable time to the task at hand, which restricts their time for comprehension. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Memory Memory for Numbers and Chess Pieces • Refer to Figure 8.4 McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Memory • Infancy – First Memories • Rovee-Collier: Infants of 2 to 6 months remember perceptual-motor information through ages 1-1/2 to 2. • Mandler: Infants in Rovee-Collier’s experiments display only implicit memory, i.e., memories of skills and routine procedures that are performed automatically without conscious recollection. • Explicit memory, conscious memory of facts and experiences, does not occur until the second half of the first year. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Memory The Technique Used in Rovee-Collier’s Investigation of Infant Memory • Refer to Figure 8.5 McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Memory • Infancy – Infantile (Childhood) Amnesia • Adults’ inability to remember little if anything from the first 3 years of their life. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Memory • Childhood and Adolescence – Young children remember a great deal of information if given appropriate cues and prompts, but less than adults because they are less expert in most areas. – Memory span tasks suggest that short-term memory increases during childhood. • Speed of processing increases. • Rehearsal of information improves. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Memory Developmental Changes in Memory Span • Refer to Figure 8.6 McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Memory • Childhood and Adolescence (continued) – Strategies—the use of mental activities to improve the processing of information—improve in these areas: • Organization: More likely to be used by older children and adults. • Elaboration: Adolescents are more likely to use elaboration spontaneously than children. • Imagery: Encouraging children to use imagery to remember verbal information works better for older children than younger children. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Memory Imagery and Memory of Verbal Information • Refer to Figure 8.7 McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Memory • Childhood and Adolescence (continued) – Reconstructive Memory and Children as Eyewitnesses • Children’s memories are constructive and reconstructive. • Children’s schemas affect how they encode, store, and retrieve memories. • Reconstruction and distortion are apparent in eyewitness testimony at trials. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Memory – Reconstructive Memory and Children as Eyewitnesses (continued) • Factors that influence the accuracy of young children’s memory: – Age differences in children’s susceptibility to suggestion – Individual differences in susceptibility – Interviewing techniques that produce substantial distortions about highly salient events McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Memory Suggestibility of Children at Different Grade Levels • Refer to Figure 8.8 McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Review and Reflect: Learning Goal 3 • Describe what memory is and how it changes – Review • What is memory? What are some important processes and types of memory? • How does memory develop in infancy? • How does memory change in childhood? McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Review and Reflect: Learning Goal 3 – Reflect • What is your earliest memory? Why do you think you remember this particular situation? McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Thinking • What Is Thinking? – Thinking • Manipulating and transforming information in memory. • In Baddeley’s model of working memory, thinking is the job of the central executive. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Thinking • Infancy – Concepts are categories that group objects, events, and characteristics on the basis of common properties. – Infants form concepts early in their development; as young as 3 months they form categories on the basis of perceptual features. – Jean Mandler: Early categorizations are best described as perceptual categorizations, which are based on similar perceptual features of objects and parts of objects; the ability to form conceptual categories, characterized by perceptual variability, begins around 7 to 9 months of age. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Thinking • Childhood – Critical thinking: Thinking reflectively and productively, and evaluating the evidence. – Jacqueline and Martin Brooks: Few schools teach students to think critically; instead they push for a single correct answer and have students recite, define, describe, state, and list. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Thinking • Childhood—Critical Thinkers: – Ask not only what happened, but how and why. – Examine “facts” for supporting evidence – Argue rationally rather than emotionally. – Recognize that there may be more than one good answer or explanation. – Compare various answers to find the best one. – Evaluate what is said rather than accepting it as truth. – Ask questions and speculate beyond what is known to create new ideas and new information. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Thinking • Childhood—Critical Thinking (continued) – Brown and Campione’s “Fostering a Community of Learners” (FCL) program encourages reflection and discussion including: • Online consultation • Reciprocal teaching, a teaching method in which students take turns leading small-group discussions • Using adults as role models McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Thinking • Scientific Thinking – Scientific reasoning often is aimed at identifying causal relations, which children typically do. • Children’s understanding of how events are caused carries more weight in their causal inferences than whether the cause happened immediately before the event. • Unlike scientists, children are more influenced by happenstance than overall patterns, and they maintain old theories regardless of the evidence. • Children also have difficulty designing experiments that distinguish among alternative causes. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Thinking • Solving Problems – Problem solving: Finding an appropriate way to attain a goal. • Use rules to solve problems. • Use analogies to solve problems. – Analogies involve correspondence in some respects between things that are dissimilar. • Use strategies to solve problems. – Teachers should model strategies, verbalize the steps, and guide the children to practice the strategy. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Thinking The Type of Balance Scale Used by Siegler (1976) • Refer to Figure 8.9 McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Thinking • Adolescence – Critical thinking skills are unlikely to mature in adolescence if a solid basis of fundamental skills is not developed in childhood. – Cognitive changes in adolescence include: • Increased speed, automaticity, and capacity of information processing. • More knowledge in a variety of domains. • Increased ability to construct new combinations of knowledge. • Greater range/more spontaneous use of strategies. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Thinking • Adolescence – Decision making (about the future, friends, education, relationships, etc.) increases in adolescence. – Older adolescents are more competent than younger adolescents, who are more competent than children. – Adolescents generate more options, use multiple perspectives, anticipate consequences, and consider the credibility of sources. – Emotions are likely to hamper decision-making ability. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Review and Reflect: Learning Goal 4 • Characterize thinking and its developmental changes – Review • What is thinking? • Can children engage in critical and scientific thinking? What are some ways that children solve problems? • What are some changes in thinking during adolescence? McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Review and Reflect: Learning Goal 4 – Reflect • Some experts lament that few schools teach students to think critically. Does your own experience support this view? If you agree with the experts, why is critical thinking not more widely or effectively taught? McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Metacognition • What Is Metacognition? – Metacognition is cognition about cognition, or “knowing about knowing.” – Metacognition includes knowledge about when and where to use particular strategies for learning or for solving problems. – Metamemory, individuals’ knowledge about memory, includes general knowledge about memory and knowledge about one’s own memory. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Metacognition • The Child’s Theory of Mind – Theory of mind • Awareness of one’s own mental processes and the mental processes of others – At ages 2 to 3, children begin to understand perceptions, desires, and emotions, but they have only a minimal understanding of how mental life is linked to behavior. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Metacognition • The Child’s Theory of Mind (continued) – By age 4 to 5, children begin to realize that the mind can represent objects and events accurately or inaccurately. • False beliefs: By the time they are 5 years old, most children realize that people have beliefs that are not true. • After the preschool years children have a deepening appreciation of the mind itself rather than merely of mental states. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Metacognition Developmental Changes in False-Belief Performance • Refer to Figure 8.10 McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Metacognition • The Child’s Theory of Mind (continued) – By middle and late childhood children see the mind as an active constructor of knowledge. – In middle and late childhood children move from understanding that beliefs can be false to an understanding of beliefs and mind as “interpretive.” McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Metacognition • Metacognition in Children and Adolescents – By 5 or 6, children know that familiar items are easier to learn than unfamiliar ones, shorts lists are easier than long lists, recognition is easier than recall, and forgetting becomes more likely over time. – By fifth grade, students understand that gist recall is easier than verbatim recall. – Preschoolers’ opinion of their memory abilities is inflated; in the elementary school years, evaluations of memory skills are more realistic. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Metacognition • Metacognition in Children and Adolescents (continued) – By 7 or 8, children appreciate the importance of cueing for memory. – Elementary-school-aged children improve in the metacognitive ability of consciously monitoring and controlling their thinking processes. – Self-regulatory learning: Self-generating and selfmonitoring thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to reach a goal. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Metacognition • Metacognition in Children and Adolescents (continued) – Adolescents are more likely than children to manage and monitor their thinking. – Adolescents are more introspective than children, turning inward to examine their thoughts and emotions, which helps them evaluate and monitor their academic learning. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Metacognition • A Model of Self-Regulatory Learning – Zimmerman, Bonner, and Kovach (1996) developed a model for turning low-self-regulatory students into students who engage in these multistep strategies: 1. Self-evaluation and self monitoring 2. Goal setting and strategic planning 3. Putting a plan into action and monitoring it 4. Monitoring outcomes and refining strategies McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Metacognition A Model of Self-Regulatory Learning • Refer to Figure 8.11 McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Review and Reflect: Learning Goal 5 • Define metacognition and summarize its developmental changes – Review • What is metacognition? • How does the child’s theory of mind change during the preschool years? • How does metacognition change during childhood and adolescence? McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Review and Reflect: Learning Goal 5 – Reflect • How might metacognition be involved in the ability of adolescents to have better study skills than children? McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Summary • The information-processing approach analyzes how individuals manipulate information, monitor it, and create strategies for handling it. • Attention, memory, and thinking are involved in effective information processing. • The computer is a model for how humans process information. • The information-processing approach examines beliefs that children’s cognitive development results from their ability to overcome processing limitations. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Summary • Cognitive resources (capacity and speed of processing) increase across childhood and adolescence. • Siegler states three important mechanisms are encoding, automaticity, and strategy construction. • Children’s information processing is characterized by selfmodification, which involves metacognition. • The information-processing approach sees development as a gradually increasing capacity for processing information, not as distinct stages. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Summary • Attention is focusing mental resources. • Three ways to allocate attention are sustained attention, selective attention, and divided attention. • Newborns can fixate on a contour; older infants scan a pattern more thoroughly. Attention in infancy is studied through habituation and dishabituation. • Preschoolers attend to salient stimuli; by age 6 or 7, there is a shift to more cognitive control of attention. • Selective attention improves through childhood and adolescence. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Summary • Memory is the retention of information over time. • Short-term memory involves retention of information for up to 15–30 seconds, assuming no rehearsal; long-term memory is relatively permanent and unlimited. • Working memory is a kind of “mental workbench” for manipulating and assembling information when making decisions, solving problems, and comprehending language. • People construct and reconstruct their memories. • Schema theory states that people mold memories to fit information that already exists. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Summary • Fuzzy trace theory states that memory is best understood by considering verbatim memory, trace, and gist. • Infants as young as 2 to 3 months display implicit memory (no conscious recollections); but explicit memory does not emerge until the second half of the first year. • Infantile amnesia describes the fact that adults rarely remember anything occurring prior to 3 years of age. • Use of cues and prompts helps younger children remember a great deal of information. • As children get older their memory improves as they use more gist, organization, elaboration, and imagery. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Summary • A current interest focuses on how accurate children’s longterm memories are and the implications of this accuracy for children as eyewitnesses. • Thinking involves manipulating and transforming information in memory. • Studies of concept formation and categorization suggest that infants form concepts early in their development, but they do not form conceptual categories until they are 7 to 9 months old. • Concepts become more differentiated over the first 2 years of life. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Summary • Critical thinking involves thinking reflectively and productively and evaluating the evidence. • Schools do not teach critical thinking. • Children have some similarities to scientists, but many differences as well. • The important aspects of solving problems involve using strategies, using rules, and using analogies. • Adolescence is an important transitional period in critical thinking and a time when decision making increases. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Summary • Metacognition is cognition about cognition, or knowing about knowing. • Young children are curious about the human mind, and this has been studied under the topic of theory of mind. • Metamemory improves in middle and late childhood, and again in adolescence. • Self-regulatory learning, which gives children responsibility for their learning, consists of the selfgeneration and self-monitoring of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to reach a goal. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.. Summary • High-achieving students are often self-regulatory learners. • One model of self-regulatory learning involves self-evaluation and self-monitoring, goal setting and strategic planning, putting a plan into action, and monitoring outcomes and refining strategies. • Self-monitoring increases during adolescence. McGraw-Hill © 2007 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved..