Chapter 7 textbook notes

A basic capacity is...

how many pieces of information can be held at once for a few seconds

two types of episodic memory

(1) Memory for recurring events——— ones that children experience repeatedly in the course of their everyday lives; and (2) memory for significant one-time events that children integrate into their personal life stories

Culture, Schooling, and Memory Strategies

- Memory strategies are mostly useful for recalling isolated bits of information. - Western schooling gives little practice in using everyday cues: -- spatial location -- arrangements of objects People usually employ memory strategies when they need to remember information for its own sake. On many other occasions, memory occurs as a natural byproduct of participation in daily activities. In a study illustrating this idea, 4- and 5- year-olds were told either to play with a set of toys or to remember them. The play condition produced far better recall because the children engaged in many spontaneous organizations. These included using objects in typical ways (putting a shoe on a doll's foot) and narrating their activities: "I'm squeezing this lemon," or "Fly away in this helicopter, doggie" A repeated finding is that people in non-Western cultures who lack formal schooling rarely use or benefit from instruction in memory strategies because they see no practical reason to use these techniques. Tasks that require children to remember isolated bits of information, which are common in school, strongly motivate use of memory strategies. In fact, Western children get so much practice with this type of learning that they do not refine techniques that rely on cues available in every life, such as spatial location and arrangement of objects. For example, Guatemalan Mayan 9-year-olds do slightly better than their U.S. agemates when told to remember the placement of 40 familiar objects in a play scene. U.S. children often rehearse object names when it would be more effective to keep track of spatial relations. The development of memory strategies, then, is not just a matter of a more competent information-processing system. It is also a product of task demands and cultural circumstances.

Adults use two styles to help elicit autobiographical memories

1. elaborative style 2. repetitive style

Findings show that selective attention improves sharply between ages __________, with gains continuing into adulthood

6-10;

Robbie Case's (1992, 1998) neo-Piagetian theory

Accepts Piaget's stages but attributes change within each stage, and movement from one stage to the next, to increases in the efficiency with which children use their limited working-memory capacity. Each stage involves a distinct type of cognitive structure: in infancy, sensory input and physical actions; in early childhood, internal representations of events and actions; in middle childhood, simple transformations of representations; and in adolescence, complex transformations of representations. As children become more efficient processors, the amount of information they can hold and combine in working memory expands, making movement to a higher stage possible

Scientific Reasoning: During a free moment in physical education class, 13-year-old Heidi wondered why more of her tennis serves and returns passed the net and dropped in her opponent's court when she used a particular brand of balls. "Is it something about their color or size?" she asked herself. "Hmmmm..... or maybe it's their surface texture———that might affect their bounce." According to Deanna Kuhn, the heart of scientific reasoning is coordinating theories with evidence. A scientist can clearly describe the theory he or she favors, knows what evidence is needed to support it and what would refute it, and can explain how pitting evidence against theories has led to the acceptance of one theory as opposed to others. What evidence would Heidi need to confirm her theory about the tennis balls? Kuhn (2002) has conducted extensive research into the development of scientific reasoning, using problems that resemble Piaget's tasks in that several variables might affect an outcome. In one series of studies, third, sixth, and the ninth graders and adults were first given evidence, sometimes consistent and sometimes conflicting with theories, then questioned about the accuracy of each theory. For example, participants were given a problem much like Heidi's: to theorize about which of several features of sports balls———-size (large or small), color (light or dark), surface texture (rough or smooth), or presence or absence of ridges on the surface——- influences the quality of a player's serve. Next, they were told about the theory of Mr. (or Ms.) S, who believes that the ball's size is important, and the theory of Mr. (or Ms.) C, who thinks color matters. Finally, the interviewer presented evidence, placing balls with certain characteristics into two baskets, one labeled "good serve" and the other "bad serve"

Age-Related Change: Kuhn found that the capacity to reason like a scientist improves with age. The youngest participants often discounted obviously causal variables, ignored evidence conflicting with their own initial judgments, and distorted evidence in ways consistent with their theory. When one third grader, who judged that size was causal (with large balls producing good serves and small balls producing bad serves), was shown incomplete evidence (a single, large, light-colored ball in the good-serve basket and no balls in the bad-serve basket), he insisted on the accuracy of Mr. S's theory (which was also his own). Asked to explain, he stated flatly, "Because this ball is big...... the color doesn't really matter" These findings, and others like them, suggest that on complex, multivariable tasks, children——instead of viewing evidence as separate from and bearing on a theory———often blend the two into a single representation of "the way things are." Children are especially likely to overlook evidence that does not match their prior beliefs when a causal variable is implausible (like color affecting performance of a sports ball) and when task demands (number of variables to be evaluated) are high. The ability to distinguish theory from evidence and use logical rules to examine their relationship improves from childhood through adolescence, continuing into adulthood.

In elaborative style, adults follow the child's lead, discussing topics of interest to the child, asking varied questions, adding information to the child's statements, and volunteering their own recollections and evaluations of events. For example, after visiting the zoo, one parent asked her 4-year-old, "What was the first thing we did? Why weren't the parrots in their cages? I thought the roaring lion was scary. What did you think?" In this way, the parent helped the child reestablish and reorganize his memory of the outing. In contrast, adults who use the REPETITIVE STYLE keep repeating the same questions regardless of the child's interest, providing little additional information: "Do you remember the zoo? What did we do at the zoo? What did we do there? Preschoolers who experience the elaborative style recall more information about past events, and they also produce more organized and detailed personal stories when followed up 1 to 2 years later. Parents can be trained to use an elaborative style, and doing so enhances the richness of preschoolers' autobiographical memories.

As children talk with adults about the past, they not only expand their autobiographical recollections but also create a shared history that strengthens close relationships and self-understanding. In line with these ideas, parents and preschoolers with secure attachment bonds engage in more elaborate reminiscing than those with insecure bonds, who generally limit themselves to the repetitive style. And children of elaborative-style parents describe themselves in clearer more consistent ways. When, in past event conversations, a child discovers that she finds swimming, running, climbing, getting together with friends, and going to the zoo fun, she can begin to connect these specific experiences into a general understanding of "what I enjoy." The result is a clearer image of herself. Beginning in the preschool years, girls tend to have better organized and detailed autobiographical memories than boys. And compared with Asian children, Western children produce narratives with more talk about their own thoughts, emotions, and preferences——knowledge that contributes to an appreciation of the personal meaning of events and, therefore, to better recall. These fit with variations in parent-child conversations. Parents reminisce in greater detail and talk more about the emotional significance of events with daughters. And collectivist cultural valuing of interdependence leads many Asian parents to discourage children from talking about themselves. Chinese parents, for example, engage in less detailed and evaluative past-event dialogues with their preschoolers. Consistent with these early experiences, women report an earlier age of first memory and more vivid early memories than men. And Western adults' autobiographical memories include earlier, more detailed events that focus more on their own roles than do the memories of Asians, who tend to highlight the roles of others. Autobiographical memory becomes increasingly elaborate over middle childhood and adolescence. Teenagers expand greatly on the evaluative, personal meaning of autobiographical events——-a change that may reflect a more intense desire to make sense of past experiences in their quest for an identity. Nevertheless, few of us can retrieve autobiographical events that happened to us before age 3. Why do we experience this INFANTILE AMNESIA?

Three factors contribute to cognitive change

Brain development, practice with schemes and automization, and formation of central conceptual structures. BRAIN DEVELOPMENT Neurological changes, including myelination, synaptic growth, and synaptic pruning, improve the efficiency of thought, leading to readiness for each stage. According to Case, biology imposes s systemwide ceiling on cognitive development, At any given time, the child cannot exceed a certain upper limit of processing speed PRACTICE WITH SCHEMES AND AUTOMIZATION In Case's theory, Piagetian schemes are the child's mental strategies. Within each stage, through repeated use, the child's schemes become automatic, freeing working-memory resources for combining existing schemes and generating new ones. Notice how Case's mechanisms of cognitive change offer a clarified view of Piaget's concepts of assimilation and accommodation. Practicing schemes (assimilation) leads to automization, which releases working memory for other activities, permitting scheme combination and construction (accommodation) FORMATION OF CENTRAL CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURES Once the schemes of a Piagetian stage become automatic and brain development further increments processing speed, enough space in working memory is available to consolidate schemes into an improved representational form. As a result, children generate CENTRAL CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURES——-networks of concepts and relations that permit them to think about a wide range of situations in more advanced ways. Consequently, processing efficiency expands further. When children form new central conceptual structures, they move to the next stage of development.

Sustained, selective, and adaptable attention requires INHIBITION——- the ability to control internal and external distracting stimuli. Individuals who are skilled at inhibition can prevent the mind from straying to alternative attractive thoughts and can keep stimuli unrelated to a current goal from capturing their attention. By controlling irrelevant stimuli, inhibition frees working-memory resources for the task at hand and therefore, supports many information-processing skills

Besides helping children remember, reason, and solve problems, it assists them in managing their behavior in social situations. To get along with others, children must learn to restrain impulses and keep negative emotions in check. The ability to inhibit thoughts and behavior improves from infancy on. Between ages 3 and 4, for example, preschoolers perform considerably better in situations in which they must follow some commands but not others, as in the game "Simon Says". On more complex tasks requiring children to inhibit distracting stimuli, marked gains occur from early to middle childhood. Consider, for example, a task in which the child must tap once after the adult taps twice and tap twice after the adult taps once, or must say "night" to a picture of the sun and "day" to a picture of the moon. 3-and 4- year-olds make many errors. But by age 6 to 7, children find such tasks easy. They can resist the "pull" of their attention toward a dominant stimulus———-a skill that predicts social maturity as well as subsequent reading and math achievement, from kindergarten through high school. ERP and fMRI measures reveal a steady age-related increase in activation of the prefrontal cortex while children engage in these inhibitory tasks

On more complex planning tasks, further improvement occurs during middle childhood. When 5- to 9- year-olds were given lists of items to obtain from a play grocery store, older children more often took time to scan the store before shopping and also paused more, often to look for each item before moving to get it. Consequently, they followed shorter routes through the aisles. Planning in most everyday tasks requires children to coordinate attention skills with other cognitive processes. To solve problems involving multiple steps, children must imagine future possibilities, postpone action in favor of evaluating alternatives, organize task materials (such as items on a grocery list), and remember the steps of their plan so they can attend to each one in sequence. Along the way, they must monitor how well the plan works and revise it if necessary. Clearly, planning places heavy demands on working memory. Not surprisingly, even when young children do plan, they succeed only on tasks with a small number of steps

Children learn much from cultural tools that support planning——-directions for playing games, patterns for construction, recipes for cooking———-when they collaborate with more expert planners. When 4- to 7-year-olds were observed jointly constructing a toy with their mothers, the mother's provided basic information about the usefulness of plans and how to implement specific steps. "Do you want to look at the picture and see what goes where? What piece do you need first? After working with their mothers, younger children more often referred to the plan when building on their own. Having many opportunities to practice planning helps children understand its components and use that knowledge. Parents can foster planning by encouraging it in everyday activities, from loading the dishwasher to planning for a vacation. In one study, parent-child discussions involving planning at ages 4 to 9 predicted planning competence in adolescence. The demands of academic tasks———and teachers' explanations of how to plan——also contribute to gains in planning. The attentional strategies we have just considered are crucial for both school and life success. Unfortunately, some children have grave difficulties paying attention

Let's take a familiar set of tasks——-conservation——to illustrate Case's ideas. Imagine a 5-year-old who cannot yet conserve liquid but who has some isolated schemes: (1) After water is poured from a tall glass into a short glass, the height of the water level is reduced. (2) After water is poured from a thin into a wide glass, the width of the water increases. As the child gains experience in transferring liquids from one container to another, these schemes become automatic, and she combines them into a conserving response. A similar sequence occurs in other conservation situations————- involving, for example, mass and weight. Eventually the child coordinates several task-specific conserving responses into a new, broadly applicable principle: a central conceptual structure. When this happens, cognition moves from simple to complex transformations of representations, or from concrete to formal operational thought. Case and his colleagues have applied his theory to many tasks: solving arithmetic word problems, understanding stories, drawing pictures, sight-reading music, handling money, and interpreting social situations. In each case, children coordinate an increasing number of task dimensions with age. In understanding stories, for example, preschoolers grasp only a single story line. By the early school years, they combine two story lines into a single plot. Around age 9 to 11, central conceptual structures integrate multiple dimensions: Children tell coherent stories with a main plot and several subplots.

Case's (1998) theory offers an information-processing account of the CONTINUUM OF ACQUISITION———that many understandings appear in specific situations at different times rather than being mastered all at once. First, different forms of the same logical insight, such as the various conservation tasks, vary in their processing demands; those acquired later require that more information be held and combined in working memory. Second, children's experiences vary widely. A child who often listens to and tells stories displays more advanced central conceptual structures in storytelling than in other activities. And children who do not show central conceptual structures expected for their age can usually be trained to attain them. Therefore, Case's theory is better able than Piaget's to account for unevenness in cognitive development. Although Case's ideas remain to be tested with many more tasks, his theory is unique in offering an integrated picture of how children's processing efficiency, practice with strategies, and efforts to reorganize their thinking interact to produce development.

Eventually children figure out that letters are parts of words and are linked to sounds in systematic ways, as seen in the invented spellings typical between ages 5 and 7. At first, children rely on sounds in the names of letters: "ADE LAFWTS KRMD NTU A LAVATR" ("eighty elephants crammed into an elevator"). Over time, they grasp sound-letter correspondences and learn that some letters have more than one common sound and that context affects their use ( a is pronounced differently in "cat" than in "table") Literacy development builds on a broad foundation of spoken language and knowledge about the world. Over time, children's language and literacy progress facilitate each other. Phonological awareness——-the ability to reflect on and manipulate the sound structure of spoken language, as indicated by sensitivity to changes in sounds within words, to rhyming, and to incorrect pronunciation——-is a strong predictor of emergent literacy knowledge. When combined with sound-letter knowledge, it enables children to isolate speech segments and link them with their written symbols. Vocabulary and grammatical knowledge are also influential. And adult-child narrative conversations enhance diverse language skills essential for literacy progress. The more informal literacy experiences preschoolers have, the better their language and emergent literacy development and their later reading skills. Pointing out letter-sound correspondences and playing language-sound games enhance children's awareness of the sound structure of language and how it is represented in print. INTERACTIVE READING, in which adults discuss storybook content with preschoolers, promotes many aspects of language and literacy development. Adult-supported writing activities that focus on narrative, such as preparing a letter or a story, also have wide-ranging benefits. In longitudinal research, each of these literacy experiences is linked to improved reading achievement in middle childhood.

Compared to their economically advantaged agemates, preschoolers from low-income families have fewer home and preschool language and literacy learning opportunities——a major reason that they are behind in emergent literacy skills and in reading achievement throughout the school years. Age-appropriate books, for example, are scarce in their environments. In one survey of four middle- and low-income communities, the middle-income neighborhoods averaged 13 books per child, the low-income neighborhoods just 1 book for every 300 children. On average, a preschooler from a low-income family is read to for a total of 25 hours during early childhood, a middle-income child for 1000 hours. The gap in early literacy experiences translates into large differences in knowledge and skills vital for reading readiness at kindergarten entry. Kindergarteners who are behind in emergent literacy development tend to remain behind, performing poorly in reading in the early grades. Over time, skilled readers acquire wide-ranging knowledge more efficiently, progressing more rapidly than poor readers in all achievement areas. In this way, literacy deficiencies at the start of school contribute to widening achievement disparities between economically advantaged and disadvantaged children that often persist into high school. Providing low-income parents with children's books, along with guidance in how to stimulate emergent literacy, greatly enhances literacy activities in the home. And when preschool teachers were given a tuition-free college course on effective early childhood literacy instruction, they rapidly applied what they learned, offering many more literacy activities in their classrooms.

How Scientific Reasoning Develops: What factors support skill at coordinating theory with evidence? Greater working-memory resources, permitting simultaneous comparison of a theory and the effects of several variables, is vital. In addition, participants benefit from exposure to increasingly complex problems and instruction that highlights critical features of scientific reasoning——-for example, why a scientist's expectations in a particular situation are inconsistent with everyday beliefs and experiences. These findings explain why scientific reasoning is strongly influenced by years of schooling, whether individuals grapple with traditional scientific tasks (like the sports ball problem) or engage in informal reasoning——-for example, justifying a theory about what causes children to fail in school. Researchers believe that sophisticated METACOGNITIVE UNDERSTANDING is vital for scientific reasoning. Microgenetic research shows that when older children and adolescents regularly pit theory against evidence over many weeks, they experiment with various strategies, reflect on and revise them, and become aware of the nature of logic. Then they apply their abstract appreciation of logic to a wide variety of situations. The ability to think about theories, deliberately isolate variables, consider all influential variables, and actively seek disconfirming evidence is rarely present before adolescence. Though far more competent than children, adolescents and adults vary widely in scientific reasoning skills. Many continue to show a self-serving bias, applying logic more effectively to ideas they doubt than to those they favor. Reasoning scientifically requires the metacognitive capacity to evaluate one's objectivity——-to be fair-minded rather than self-serving. This flexible, open-minded approach is not just a cognitive attainment but a personality trait——-one that assists teenagers greatly in forming an identity and developing morally. Children and adolescents develop scientific reasoning skills in a similar step-by-step fashion on different kinds of tasks. In a series of studies, 10- to 20- year-olds were given sets of problems graded in difficulty. One set contained causal-experimental tasks like the sports ball problem, another contained quantitative- relational tasks like Piaget's pendulum problem, and still another consisted of verbal propositional tasks. In each type of task, adolescents mastered component skills in sequential order by expanding their metacognitive awareness. For example, on causal-experimental tasks, they first became aware of the many variables——separately and in combination——-that could influence an outcome. This enabled them to formulate and test hypotheses. Over time, adolescents combined separate skills into a smoothly functioning system, constructing a general model that they could apply to many instances of a given type of problem.

Do the metacognitive advances just described remind you of the concept of CENTRAL CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURES in Robbie Case's neo-Piagetian theory, discusses on page 283? Piaget also underscored the role of metacognition in formal operational thought when he spoke of "operating on operations." But information-processing findings confirm that scientific reasoning does not result from an abrupt, stagewise change, as Piaget believed. Instead, it develops gradually out of many specific experiences with different types of problems, each of which requires children and adolescents to match theory against evidence and reflect on and evaluate their thinking.

Utilization deficiency

slightly later, children execute strategies consistently, but their performance either does not improve or improves less than that of older children. For many 6- and 7-year-olds, opening only the relevant doors did not increase memory for object locations after the pictures were removed from the doors.

Why are young children not adept at rehearsal and organization? Memory strategies require extra space in working memory and time and effort to perfect. Even when school-age children use these strategies more often——-around age 7 for rehearsal and age 8 for organization———-many show CONTROL and UTILIZATION DEFICIENCIES. For example, 7- to 8-year-olds often rehearse in a piecemeal fashion. When given the word cat in a list of items, they say, "Cat, cat, cat." In contrast, older children combine previous words with each new item, saying "Desk, man, yard, cat, cat." This more active rehearsal approach, in which neighboring words create contexts for one another that trigger recall, yields much better memory. Similarly, younger children usually organize items by their everyday association: "hat-head," "carrot-rabbit." Older children group such items into TAXONOMIC CATEGORIES, based on common properties———clothing, body parts, food, animals. Placing more items in a few categories permits more efficient organization, dramatically improving memory. Experience with materials that form clear categories and adult demonstration and prompting to organize helps children use organization and, eventually, apply the strategy to less clearly related materials.

Furthermore, older children are more likely to apply several memory strategies at once, rehearsing, organizing, and stating category names. The more strategies they use, the better they remember. Although younger children's use of multiple memory strategies may have little impact on performance, their tendency to experiment is adaptive, allowing them to discover which strategies work best on different tasks and how to combine them effectively. For example, second to fourth graders know that a good way to study lists it to organize the items first, next rehearse category names, and then rehearse individual items. By the end of middle childhood, children start to use a third memory strategy, ELABORATION. It involves creating a relationship, or shared meaning, between two or more pieces of information that do not belong to the same category. For example, to learn the words fish and pipe, you might generate the verbal statement or mental image, "The fish is smoking a pipe." This highly effective memory technique becomes more common during adolescence as young people improve at holding two or more items in mind while generating complex, meaningful associations. In sum, older-school-age children and adolescents have become adept at strategic memorizing. But while doing schoolwork, they frequently engage in other pursuits——most often, media activities, such as text messaging and emailing friends, listening to music, and watching TV or videos.

Evaluation of the Information-Processing Approach: A major strength of the information-processing approach is its explicitness and precision in breaking down complex cognitive activities into their components. Information processing has provided a wealth of detailed evidence on how younger versus older and more-skilled versus less-skilled individuals attend, remember, reason, and solve problems. It also offers precise mechanisms of cognitive development. Finally, because of its precision, information-processing research has contributed greatly to the design of teaching techniques that advance many aspects of children's thinking. The principal limitation of the information-processing perspective stems, ironically, from its central strength: By analyzing cognition into its components, information processing has had difficulty reassembling them into a broad, comprehensive theory of development. As we have seen, the neo-Piagetian perspective is one effort to build a general theory by retaining Piaget's stages while drawing on information-processing mechanisms to explain cognitive change.

Furthermore, the computer metaphor, while bringing precision to research on the human mind, has drawbacks. Computer models of cognitive processing, though complex in their own right, do not reflect the richness of real-life learning experiences. They overlook aspects of cognition that are not linear and logical, such as imagination and creativity. Moreover, computers do not have desires, interests, and intentions, nor can they engage in interaction with others, as children do when they learn from parents, teachers, and peer. Perhaps because of the narrowness of the computer metaphor, information processing has not told us much about the links between cognition and other areas of development. In later chapters, we will look at findings of investigators who have applied information-processing assumptions to children's thinking about certain aspects of their social world. But in research on children's social and moral understanding, extensions of Piaget's theory still prevail. Despite its shortcomings, the information-processing approach holds great promise. The near future is likely to bring new breakthroughs in understanding mechanisms of cognitive development and neurological changes that underlie various mental activities, and in identifying teaching techniques that support children's learning.

When we must remember complex, meaningful material, we do not merely copy material into the system at storage and faithfully reproduce it at retrieval. Instead, we select and interpret information we encounter in our everyday lives in terms of our existing knowledge. Once we have transformed the material, we often have difficulty distinguishing it from the original. Constructive processing can take place during any phase of information processing. It can occur during storage. In fact, the memory strategies of organization and elaboration are within the province of constructive memory because both involve generating relationships between stimuli. Constructive processing can also involve RECONSTRUCTION of information, or recoding it while it is in the system or being retrieved. Do children reconstruct stored information? Clearly, they do. When asked to recall and retell a story, children, like adults, condense, integrate, and add information. By age 5 or 6, children recall important features of a story while forgetting unimportant ones, combine information into more tightly knit units, reorder the sequence of events in more logical fashion, and even include new information that fits with a passage's meaning

Furthermore, when children receive new information related to a story they previously recalled, they reconstruct the story further. In one study, before telling each of three stories, an adult gave kindergarteners information about a main character that was positive ("a nice" child), negative ("not a nice" child), or neutral. Children reconstructed the main character's behaviors to fit with prior information. Compared with those in the neutral condition, those in the positive condition offered a more positive account, those in the negative condition a more negative account. Seven to ten days later, a fourth story gave children additional information about the main character. In some conditions, the new information was consistent with the original information; in others, it conflicted——-for example, the "nice" child was now described as a "mean" child. Children again revised their recollections of the main character's behavior accordingly. In revising information in meaningful ways, children give themselves a wealth of helpful retrieval cues to use during recall. Over time, as originally provided information decays, children make more inferences about actors and actions, adding events and interpretations that help make sense of a story. This process increases the coherence of reconstructed information and, therefore, its memorableness. Gains in working-memory capacity and language skills, which support the organization and complexity of children's recollections, predict the extent to which 9- to 11-year-olds reframe their story recall in response to new information———overriding previously acquired events and viewpoints, elaborating on and integrating old and new details into a coherent picture. At the same time, as these findings reveal, much information children and adults recall can be inaccurate.

Tasks tapping everyday requirements for selective attention reveal similar trends. In one study, researchers showed 6- to 11- year-olds computer images of safe and dangerous road-crossing scenes, sometimes with and sometimes without visual and auditory distractors. Ability to distinguish safe from dangerous sites increased with age, even in the presence of distractors, and also correlated positively with scores on laboratory attention tasks. Older children are also better at flexibly adapting their attention to task requirements, switching mental sets within a task. When asked to sort a deck of cards with pictures that vary in both color and shape, children age 5 and older readily switch their basis of sorting from color to shape when asked to do so. Younger children persist in sorting in just one way, even though they know the rule system relevant to the task (pre-switch: red goes in this box, blue in that box; post-switch: circles go in this box, triangles in that box)

Furthermore, with age, children adapt their attention to changes in their own learning. When given lists of items to learn and allowed to select half for further study, first graders do not choose systematically, but third graders select those they had previously missed. In research presenting complex information, such as prose passages, the ability to allocate attention based on previous performance continues to improve into the college years. How do children acquire selective, adaptable attention? Gains in two components of executive function———inhibition and attentional strategies——-play vital roles.

The knowledge that makes up semantic memory does not require storage of when or where the information was acquired. In this way, it differs from episodic memory, recollections of personally experienced events that occurred at a specific time and place——-for example, what you did after you got up this morning or how you celebrated your high school graduation (such as categories and word meanings) in infancy, and by early childhood, their knowledge base is considerable. Although they have less than older individuals, the structure of their semantic knowledge and the cognitive processes that support its acquisition are similar to those of adults. Researchers agree that semantic memory develops earlier than episodic memory. Although infants and toddlers have some ability to encode unique events, their capacity to organize those events events temporally and to retrieve event details is limited. Not until 3 or 4 years of age do children seem to have a well-functioning episodic memory system. Semantic knowledge contributes vitally to the development of episodic memory. Children who have acquired substantial knowledge for interpreting personally experienced events are better able to recall those events than children with less knowledge. In addition to rapidly expanding semantic knowledge, 3- to 6- year-olds improve in memory for relations among stimuli. For example,in a set of photos, they remember not just the animals they saw but the contexts in which they saw them——-a bear emerging from a tunnel, a zebra tied to a tree on a city street. The capacity to bind together information supports the development of episodic memory in early childhood.

Furthermore, young children's sense of self must be sufficiently developed to support episodic memory. To recall events, children must link time- and place-specific information to the self——-to their own inner sense of " mental time travel" They must realize that the remembered event is actually something that they themselves previously experienced————a milestone attained early in the preschool years

According to C.J. Brainerd and Valerie Reyna's FUZZY-TRACE THEORY, when we first encode information, we reconstruct it automatically, creating a vague, fuzzy version called a GIST, which preserves essential meaning without details and is especially useful for reasoning. Although we can also retain a literal, verbatim version, we have a bias toward gist because it requires less space in working memory, freeing attention for the steps involved in thinking. For example, a person choosing among several recipes to prepare a dish for dinner relies on gist representations, noting which recipes are easier and have low-cost ingredients. But once he has selected a recipe, he needs verbatim information to prepare it. Because he is unlikely to have remembered those details, he consults the cookbook.

Fuzzy-trace theorists take issue with the assumption that all reconstructions are transformations of verbatim memory. Instead, they believe that both verbatim and gist memories are present but are stored separately to be used for different purposes. With age, children rely less on verbatim memory and more on fuzzy, reconstructed gists. To illustrate, researchers presented children with the following problem: "Farmer Brown owns many animals. He has three dogs, five sheep, seven chickens, nine horses, and eleven cows." Then they asked two types of questions: (1) questions requiring verbatim knowledge ("How many cows does Farmer Brown own, eleven or nine?") and (2) questions requiring only gist information ("Does Farmer Brown have more cows or more horses?)

Researchers have investigated each of the component processes of executive function. But they still have much to discover about how those components work together. And whereas some investigators view executive function as a unitary capacity, others see it as made up of multiple, distinct cognitive abilities that collaborate in goal-directed action. Indeed, research suggests that executive skills are, at best, weakly correlated with one another. Early childhood is a vital time for laying the foundations of executive function: Preschoolers make strides in focusing attention, inhibiting inappropriate responses, and thinking flexibly———-developments that parallel rapid synapse formation followed by synaptic pruning in the prefrontal cortex. During the school years——-a time of continued synaptic pruning and maturing of the prefrontal cortex———executive function undergoes its most energetic period of development. Children handle increasingly difficult tasks that require the integration of working memory, inhibition, planning, flexible use of strategies, and self-monitoring and self-correction of behavior. And executive function improves further in adolescence, when the prefrontal cortex attains an adult level of synapses.

Heritability evidence suggests substantial genetic contributions to individual differences in working-memory capacity and attentional processing, including inhibiting inappropriate responses. And molecular genetic analyses are identifying specific genes related to severely deficient functioning of executive components, such as control of attention and impulses, which contributes to learning and behavior disorders, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). But in both typically and atypically developing children, heredity combines with environmental contexts to influence executive function. In Chapter 2, we saw how prenatal iron deficiency places children at risk for lasting memory deficits. Prenatal teratogens can compromise executive function by impairing attention, impulse control, and memory. Finally, our discussion in this chapter will confirm that supportive parenting and educational experiences are essential for optimal development of executive components and their eventual synthesis into planning, flexible strategic thinking, and self-regulation.

Siegler found that strategy use for basic math facts——-and many other types of problems———-follows an OVERLAPPING-WAVES PATTERN. Performance tends to progress from a single incorrect approach, to a highly variable state in which children try different strategies, to use of a more advanced procedure. Even 2-year-olds solving simple problems such as how to use a tool to obtain an out-of-reach toy, display this sequence. While trying strategies, children observe which work best, which work less well, and which are ineffective. Gradually they select strategies on the basis of two adaptive criteria: ACCURACY and SPEED——-for basic addition, the min strategy. As children home in on effective strategies, they learn more about the problems at hand. As a result, correct solutions become more strongly associated with problems, and children display the most efficient strategy——-automatic retrieval of the answer

How do children move from less to more effective strategies? Often they discover faster, more accurate strategies by using more time-consuming techniques. For example, by repeatedly counting on fingers, Darryl began to recognize the number of fingers held up. And by alternating between counting from the lower digit and using min, Darryl directly observed min's greater speed and accuracy. Indeed, when given the same problems repeatedly over a short time interval, children regress from more advanced to less advanced approaches on as many as 40 percent of trials. The more variable their strategies, the better their eventual performance. Even on a single item, children may generate varying procedures as indicated by occasions in which their words and gestures differ

Now keep the items out of view, and ask the child to name the ones she saw. This more challenging task requires RECALL——-generating a mental representation of an absent stimulus. The beginnings of recall appear in the second half of the first year for memories that are strongly cued. Think back to the rapid gains in deferred imitation under way after age 6 months. Development of recall lags behind recognition from infancy on. In early childhood, young children's recall in tasks that require retention of pieces of information is far poorer than their recognition. At age 2, children can recall no more than one or two items, at age 4 only about three or four.

Improvement in recall over the preschool years is strongly associated with language development, which greatly enhances long-lasting representations of both lists of items and past experiences. Yet even when asked to recall an event that occurred weeks earlier, young children report only part of what could be remembered. In one longitudinal study, sixth graders were asked to tell what happened when they went to an archeological museum in kindergarten. They said less about the experience than when they had been asked the same question as kindergarteners, six weeks after the museum trip. But in response to specific retrieval cues, including photos of the event, sixth graders remembered a great deal. And in some respects, their recall was more accurate. For example, they inferred that adults had hidden artifacts in a sandbox for them to find, whereas in kindergarten they simply recalled digging for objects. Compared with recognition, recall shows far greater improvement because older children make use of a wider range of retrieval cues. With age, the long-term knowledge base grows larger and becomes organized into increasingly elaborate, hierarchically structured network. When representations of items or experiences are interconnected in long-term memory, many internal retrieval cues can be used to recall them later.

Mathematics teaching in elementary school builds on and greatly enriched children's informal knowledge of number concepts and counting. Written notation systems and formal computational techniques enhance children's ability to represent numbers, compute, and estimate. Over the early elementary school years, children acquire basic math facts through a combination of frequent practice, reasoning about number concepts, and teaching that conveys effective strategies. Eventually, children retrieve answers automatically and apply this knowledge to more complex problems. Arguments about how to teach math resemble those in reading, pitting drill in computing against "number sense," or understanding. Again, a blend of both approaches is most beneficial. In learning basic math, poorly performing students use cumbersome techniques or try to retrieve answers from memory too soon. They have not sufficiently experimented with strategies to see which are most effective and to recognize their observations in logical, efficient ways——for example, noticing that multiplication problems involving 2 (2 times 8) are equivalent to addition doubles (8 plus 8) are equivalent to addition doubles (8 plus 8). On tasks that reveal their grasp of math concepts, their performance is weak. This suggests that encouraging students to apply strategies and making sure they understand why certain strategies work well are essential for solid mastery of basic math. A similar picture emerges for more complex skills, such as carrying in addition, borrowing in subtraction, and operating with decimals and fractions. Children are taught by rote cannot apply the procedure to new problems. Instead they persistently make mistakes, following a "math rule" that they recall incorrectly because they do not understand it. Children who have rich opportunities to experiment with problem solving, to appreciate the reasons behind strategies, and to evaluate solution techniques seldom make such errors. In one study, second graders who were taught in these ways not only mastered correct procedures but even invented their own successful strategies——-some of them superior to standard, school-taught methods!

In a German study, the more teachers emphasized conceptual knowledge——-by having children actively construct meanings in word problems before practicing computation and memorizing math facts———-the more children gained in math achievement from second to third grade. Children with these learning experiences draw on their solid knowledge of relationships between operations (for example, that the inverse of division is multiplication) to generate efficient, flexible procedures. And because they have been encouraged to estimate answers, if they go down the wrong track in computation, they are usually self-correcting. Furthermore, they appreciate connections between math operations and problem contexts. They can solve a problem word problem (If Jesse spent 3.45 dollars for bananas, 2.62 dollars for bread, 3.55 dollars for peanut butter, can he pay for it all with a 10-dollar doll?") quickly through estimation instead of exact calculation. In Asian countries, students receive a variety of supports for acquiring mathematical knowledge and often excel at both math reasoning and computation. Use of the metric system, which presents ones, tens, hundreds, and thousands values in all areas of measurement, helps Asian children grasp place value. The consistent structure of number words in Asian languages (ten- two for 12, ten-three for 13) also makes this idea clear. And because Asian number words are shorter and more quickly pronounced, more digits can be held in working memory at once, increasing the speed of thinking. Furthermore, Children parents provide their children with extensive everyday practice in counting and computation———experiences that contribute to the superiority of Chinese over U.S. children's math knowledge, even before school children entry. Finally, compared with the United Stares, math lessons in Asian classrooms devote more time to exploring math concepts and strategies and less to drill and repetition. Asian countries consistently score at or near the top in international comparisons of high school achievement in math———and in other subjects as well.

Compared to their economically advantaged agemates, children from poverty-stricken families are more likely to score low on working-memory span tasks——-an important contributor to their generally poorer academic achievement. In one study, years of childhood spent in poverty predicted reduced working-memory capacity in early adulthood. Childhood physiological measures of stress (elevated blood pressure and stress hormone levels, including cortisol) largely explained this poverty-work-memory association. Chronic stress can impair brain structure and function, especially the prefrontal cortex and its connections with the hippocampus, which govern working-memory capacity.-

In a large British sample of over 3000 5- to 11-year-olds, nearly 10 percent were identified as having very low working-memory scores, the majority of whom were struggling in school. Clearly, interventions are needed that reduce memory loads so these children can learn. Effective approaches include communicating in short sentences with familiar vocabulary, repeating task instructions, asking children to repeat back crucial information to ensure they remember, breaking complex tasks into manageable parts, and encouraging children to use external memory aids (such as lists of useful spellings when writing, number lines when doing math) (Scaffolding)

Preschoolers were better at answering verbatim-than gist-dependent questions, whereas the reverse was true for second graders. Fuzzy-trace theory adds to our understanding of reconstruction by indicating that it can occur immediately, as soon as information is encoded. Fuzzy-trace research reveals that although memory is vital for reasoning, getting bogged down in details (as young children tend to do) can interfere with effective problem solving. And because fuzzy traces are less likely than verbatim memories to be forgotten, gists can serve as enduring retrieval cues, contributing to improved recall of details with age.

In such recall, however, gists heighten the chances of reporting false items consistent with the fuzzy meaning of an experience. After studying a list containing the words bed, rest, wake, tired, dream, blanket, nap, and snooze, adolescents and adults——-who are more skilled gist thinkers——-not only recall more items correctly than children but also mention more gist-related words not in the list, such as sleep. Children's false reports, in contrast, are frequently unrelated to a just-studied list——-for example, candy or fire following presentation of the sleep list. Fuzzy-trace theory helps explain why some memory inaccuracies decrease with age, which others increase.

Short-term and working-memory spans increase steadily with age———on a verbatim digit span task tapping short-term memory, from about two digits at 2 1/2 years, to 4 or 5 digits at 7 years, to 6 or 7 digits in adolescence and early adulthood; and on working-memory tasks, from 2 to about 4 to 5 items from early childhood to early adulthood. Still individual differences are evident at all ages, and they are of particular concern because working-memory capacity predicts intelligence test scores and academic achievement in diverse subjects in middle childhood and adolescence.

Indeed, children with persistent learning difficulties in reading and math are often deficient in working-memory capacity. And the poorer they perform on working-memory span tasks, the more severe their achievement problems, even after controlling for individual differences in intelligence. Reduced working-memory capacity creates a bottleneck for learning. In an observational study of 5-and 6-year-olds who scored very low in working memory capacity, the children often failed at school assignments that made heavy memory demands. They were unable to follow complex instructions, lost their place in tasks with multiple steps, and frequently abandoned work before finishing it. The children struggled because they could not hold in mind sufficient information to complete their assignments.

Court testimony often involves repeated questioning——-a procedure that by itself, negatively affects children's response consistency and accuracy. When adults lead witnesses by suggesting incorrect "facts," interrupt their denials, reinforce them for giving desired answers, or use a confrontational questioning style, they further increase the likelihood of incorrect reporting——-by children and adolescents alike. In one study, 4- to 7-year-olds were asked to recall details about a visitor who had come to their classroom a week earlier. Half the children received a low-pressure interview containing leading questions that implied abuse (" He took your clothes off, didn't he?"). The other half received a high-pressure interview in which an adult told the child that her friends had said "yes" to the leading questions, praised the child for agreeing ("You're doing great"), and, if the child did not agree, repeated the question. Children were far more likely to give false information——-even fabricating quit fantastic events——-in the high-pressure condition. And children who have constructed a false memory often continue to give false reports when later questioned by an impartial interviewer. By the time children appear in court, weeks, months, or even years have passed since the target events, and memory is likely to have decayed. When a long delay is combined with biased interviewing and with stereotyping of the accused("He's in jail because he's been bad", children can easily be misled into giving false information. The more distinctive and personally relevant an event is, the more likely children are to recall it accurately over time. For example, a year later, even when exposed to misleading information, children correctly reported details of an injury that required emergency room treatment. In many child sexual abuse cases, anatomically correct dolls are used to prompt children's recall. This method helps older children provide more detail about experienced events that otherwise might not be reported because of shame or embarrassment. However, it increases the suggestibility of preschoolers, prompting them to report physical and sexual contact that never happened.

Interventions; Adults must prepare child witnesses so they understand the courtroom process and know what to expect. In some places, "court schools" take children through the setting and give them an opportunity to role-play court activities. Practice interviews——in which children learn to provide the most accurate, detailed information possible and to admit not knowing rather than agreeing or guessing——-are helpful. For example, when 3- and 4-year-olds are trained to monitor the source of their memories (recall whether an event occurred in real life or on TV) and to reject misleading source information, they responded more accurately to questions about new events. At the same time, legal professionals must use interviewing procedures that increase children's accurate reporting. Unbiased, open-ended questions or statements that prompt children to disclose details——-"Tell me what happened" or "You said there was a man; tell me more about the man"——reduce the risk of suggestibility, even in young children. Also, a warm, supportive interview tone fosters accurate recall, perhaps by easing children's fears so they feel freer to counter an interviewer's false suggestions. If children are likely to experience emotional trauma or later punishment (as in a family dispute) for answering questions, courtroom procedures can be adapted to protect them. For example, children can testify over closed-circuit TV so they do not have to face an abuser. When it is not wise for a child to participate directly, expert witnesses can provide testimony that reports on the child's psychological condition and includes important elements of the child's story.

How, then, should we describe the difference between younger and older children understanding of cognitive capacities? Preschoolers view the mind as a passive container of information and have difficulty inferring what people are thinking about. In view of their limited awareness of how knowledge is acquired, it is not surprising that preschoolers rarely plan or use memory strategies. In contrast, older children regard the mind as an active, constructive agent that selects and transforms information. Language development (especially mental-state vocabulary) and capacity for more complex thinking contribute greatly to school-age children's more reflective, process-oriented view of the mind. So do relevant experiences. In a study of rural children of Cameroon, Africa, those who attended school had a more advanced awareness of mental activities than those who did not. In school, teachers often call attention to the workings of the mind by reminding children to pay attention, remember mental steps, share points of view with peers, and evaluate their own and others' reasoning

Knowledge of strategies: Consistent with their more active view of the mind, school-age children are far more conscious of mental strategies than preschoolers. When shown video clips depicting two children using different recall strategies and asked which one is likely to produce better memory, kindergarten and young elementary school children knew that rehearsing or organizing is better than looking or naming. Older children recognize more subtle differences——-that organizing is better than rehearsing. Between third and fifth grade, children develop s much better appreciation of how and why strategies work. Consequently, fifth graders are considerably better than younger school-age children at discriminating good from bad reasoning, regardless of its outcome (correctness of answer, happiness with a choice) When given examples varying in quality, fifth graders consistently rated "good" reasoning as based on weighing of possibilities (rather than jumping to conclusions) and gathering of evidence (rather than ignoring important facts), even if such reasoning led to an unfavorable result. Once children become conscious of the many factors that influence mental activity, they combine them into a more effective understanding. By the end of middle childhood, children start to consider how INTERACTIONS among multiple variables——-age and motivation of the learner, effective use of strategies, and nature and difficulty of the task———affect performance. In this way, metacognitive knowledge becomes more complex and integrated.

In Chi's study of chess-playing children, better memory was credited to a larger chess-related knowledge base. Experts also have more elaborately structured knowledge. In another investigation, researchers classified elementary school children as either experts or novices in knowledge of soccer and then gave both groups lists of soccer and no soccer items to learn. As in Chi's study, the experts remembered far more items in the soccer list (but not on the nonsoccer list) than the nonexperts. And during recall, the experts' listing of items was better organized, as indicated by clustering of items into categories. This greater organization at retrieval suggests that highly knowledgeable children apply memory strategies in their area of expertise with little or no effort———by rapidly associating new items with the large number they already know. Such AUTOMATIC recall lets experts devote more working-memory resources to using recalled information to reason and solve problems.

Knowledge, though powerfully influential, is not the only important factor in children's strategic memory processing. Children who are expert in an area are usually highly motivated as well. Faced with new information, they ask themselves, " What can I do to learn this more effectively?" As a result, they not only acquire knowledge more quickly but also ACTIVELY USE WHAT THEY KNOW to add more. In contrast, academically unsuccessful children fail to ask how previously stored information can clarify new information. This, in turn, interferes with the development of a broad knowledge base. In sum, extensive knowledge and use of memory strategies support one another

Most information-processing theorists view the mind as a complex symbol-manipulating system through which information from the environment flows, often using the metaphor of a computer. First, information is ENCODED——taken in by the system and retained in symbolic form. Then a variety of internal processes operate on it, RECODING it, or revising its symbolic structure into a more effective representation, and then DECODING it, or interpreting its meaning by comparing and combining it with other information in the system. When these cognitive operations are complete, individuals use the information to make sense of their experiences and to solve problems

Notice the clarity and precision of the computer analogy of human mental functioning. Researchers use computer-like diagrams and flowcharts to try to map the exact series of steps children and adults follow when faced with a task or problem. Some researchers do this in such detail that the same mental operations can be programmed into a computer. Then the researcher conducts SIMULATIONS to see if the computer responds as children and adults do on certain tasks. Other investigators intensively study children's and adults' thinking by tracking eye movements, analyzing error patterns, and examining self-reports of mental activity. Regardless of approach, all share a strong commitment to explicit models of thinking that guide the questions they raise about components of cognitive development and thorough testing of each component.

Knowledge and Semantic Memory

Our vast, taxonomically organized and hierarchically structured general knowledge system, consisting of concepts, language meanings, facts, and rules (such as memory strategies and arithmetic procedures) is often referred to as SEMANTIC MEMORY. In previous sections, we suggested that children's expanding knowledge promotes improved memory by making new, related information more meaningful so that it is easier to store and retrieve. A landmark study testing this idea looked at how well third-through eighth-grade chess experts could remember complex chessboard arrangements. The children recalled the configurations considerably better than adults who knew how to play chess but were not especially knowledgeable———findings that cannot be explained by the selection of very bright youngsters with exceptional memories. When participants were given a digit-span task, however, the adults did better.

Although metacognitive knowledge expands, school-age children and adolescents often have difficulty putting what they know about thinking into action. They are not yet proficient at COGNITIVE SELF-REGULATION, the process of continually monitoring and controlling progress toward a goal——-planning, checking outcomes, and redirecting unsuccessful efforts. For example, most third to sixth graders know that they should group items when memorizing, reread a complicated paragraph to make sure they understand it, and relate new information to what they already know. But they do not always do so. And as we saw in Chapter 6, many teenagers, though aware of the ingredients of good reasoning, fail to engage in effective decision making. To study cognitive self-regulation, researchers sometimes look at the impact of children's awareness of memory strategies on how well they remember. By second grade, the more children know about memory strategies, the more they recall——-a relationship that strengthens over middle childhood. And when children apply a strategy consistently, their knowledge of strategies strengthens, resulting in a bidirectional relationship between metacognition and strategic processing that enhances self-regulation. Why does cognitive self-regulation develop gradually? Monitoring and controlling task outcomes is highly demanding, requiring constant evaluation of effort and progress. Throughout elementary and secondary school, better self-regulatory skills predict academic success. Students who do well in school know whether or not their learning is going well. If they encounter obstacles, they take steps to address them——for example, organize the learning environment, review confusing material, or seek support from more expert adults or peers. This active, purposeful approach contrasts sharply with the passive orientation of students who achieve poorly.

Parents and teachers play vital roles in promoting children's self-regulation. In one study, researchers observed parents helping their children with problem solving during the summer before third grade. Parents who patiently pointed out important features of the task and suggested strategies had children who, in the classroom, more often discussed ways to approach problems and monitored their own performance. In another investigation, first-grade teachers who provided clear organizational information about classroom rules, procedures, and assignments had students who engaged in more independent work and who were advanced in reading progress. Finally, explaining the effectiveness of strategies——-telling children not just what to do but why to do it———is particularly helpful because it provides a rationale for future action. Applying What We Know above lists ways to foster children's cognitive self-regulation. Children who acquire effective self-regulatory skills develop a sense of ACADEMIC SELF-EFFICACY———confidence in their own ability, which supports future self-regulation. As we turn now to development within academic skill areas, we will encounter the importance of self-regulation again.

Attentional strategies

Patricia Miller and her colleagues gave 3- to 9-year-olds a task requiring a selective attentional strategy————-a large box with rows of doors that could be opened. On half the doors were pictures of cages, indicating that behind each was an animal. On the other half were pictures of houses, indicating that they contained household objects. Children were asked to remember the location of each object in one group, then given a study period in which they could open any doors they wished. Next they were shown pictures of each relevant object, one at a time, and asked to point to the object's location. The most efficient attentional strategy———-opening only doors with relevant pictures on them———emerged and became refined in the following sequence.

Over the past two decades, fundamental discoveries about the development of information processing have been applied to children's mastery of academic skills. In various academic subjects, researchers are identifying the cognitive ingredients of skilled performance, tracing their development, pinpointing differences in cognitive skills between good and poor learners. They hope, as a result, to design teaching methods that will improve children's learning. Reading Reading makes use of many skills at once, taxing all aspects of our information-processing system. We must perceive single letters and letter combinations, translate them into speech sounds, recognize the visual appearance of many common words, hold chunks of text in working memory while interpreting their meaning, combine the meanings of various parts of a text passage into an understandable whole. Because reading is so demanding, most or all of these skills must be done automatically. If one or more are poorly developed, they will compete for space in our limited working memories, and reading performance will decline. Becoming a proficient reader is a complex process that begins in the preschool years.

Preschoolers understand a great deal about written language long before they learn to read and write in conventional ways. This is not surprising: Children in industrialized nations live in a world filled with written symbols. Each day, they observe and participate in activities involving storybooks, calendars, lists, and signs and, while doing so, try to figure out how written symbols convey meaning. Children's active efforts to construct literacy knowledge through informal experiences are called EMERGENT LITERACY. Young preschoolers search for units of written language as they "read" memorized versions of stories and recognize familiar signs ("PIZZA"). But they do not yet understand the symbolic function of the elements of print. Many preschoolers think that a singer letter stands for a whole word or that each letter in a person's signature represents a separate name. In fact, initially preschoolers do not distinguish between drawing and writing. Around age 4, their writing shows some distinctive features of print, such as separate forms arranged in a line. But they often include picturelike devices, such as writing "sun" by using a yellow marker or a circular shape. They use their understanding of the symbolic function of drawings to make a " drawing of print." Preschoolers revise these ideas as their perceptual and cognitive capacities improve, as they encounter writing in many contexts, and as adults help them with written communication. Gradually, they notice more features of written language and depict writing that varies in function, as in the "story" and "grocery list"

But we must almost always go beyond passively maintaining verbatim information to actively thinking about that information. Consequently, most researchers endorse a contemporary view of the short-term store, which offers a more meaningful indicator of its capacity called WORKING MEMORY——the number of items that can be briefly held in mind while also engaging in some effort to monitor or manipulate those items. Working memory can be thought of as a "mental workspace" that we use to accomplish many activities in everyday life.

Researchers use a variety of tasks to assess working-memory capacity. A VERBAL MEMORY-SPAN TASK might ask children to repeat a sequence of numerical digits backward; memorize a list of words while also verifying the accuracy of simple math computations; or listen to a set of short sentences, remember the final word in each, and then repeat the words in correct order. In a VISUAL/SPATIAL-SPAN TASK, researchers might present children with a set of distinctly colored circles in an arrangement on a screen and then ask them to point to the spot in an identical empty grid where each circle was located. Working-memory span is typically about two items fewer than short-term memory span. Children's performance on working-memory tasks is a good predictor of their capacity to learn. Recall that the sensory register, though limited, can take a wide panorama of information. The capacity of working memory of far more restricted. But by engaging in a variety of basic cognitive procedures, such as focusing attention on relevant items and repeating (rehearsing) them rapidly, we increase the chances that information will be retained and accessible to ongoing thinking

Like adults, preschoolers remember repeated events——-what you do when you go to child care or get ready for bed———-in terms of SCRIPTS, general descriptions of what occurs and when it occurs in a particular situation. Young children's scripts begin as a structure of main acts. For example, when asked to tell what happens at a restaurant, a 3-year-old might say, "You go in, get the food, eat, and then pay." Although children's first scripts contain only a few acts, as long as events in a situation take place in causal order, they are almost always recalled in correct sequence. Still, to obtain young children's scripted reports, adults must work hard, asking questions and prompting. With age, scripts become more spontaneous and elaborate, as in this 5-year-old's account of going to a restaurant: " You go in. You can sit in the booths or at a table. Then you tell the waitress what you want. You eat. If you want dessert, you can have some. Then you pay and go home" Scripts are a special form of reconstructive memory. When we experience repeated events, we fuse them into the same script representation. Then any specific instance of a scripted experience becomes hard to recall. Try recalling what you had for dinner two or three days ago. Unless it was out of the ordinary, you probably cannot remember. The same is true for young children. In this way, scripts help prevent long-term memory from being cluttered with unimportant information.

Scripts help children (and adults) organize and interpret everyday experiences. Once formed, they can be used to predict what will happen on similar occasions in the future. Children rely on scripts to assist recall when listening to and telling stories. They also act out scripts in make-believe play as they pretend to go on a trip or play school. And scripts support children's earliest efforts at planning as they represent sequences of actions that lead to desired goals. Some researchers believe that the general event structures of scripts provide a foundation for organizing memory for unique events——-a special birthday party or weekend trip. When given general event cues (" Tell me what happened one time when you went to a birthday party") , children as young as 3 could retrieve specific memories. But when given other cues, such as emotion (" Tell me what happened one time when you were scared"), preschoolers had difficulty

Problems with certain features help children discover a better strategy. When Darryl opened a pair of bags, one containing ten marbles, the other two marbles, he realized that min would be best. Teaching children to reason logically with concepts relevant to the problems at hand also helps. First graders more often use min after realizing that regardless of the order in which two sets are combined, they yield the same results. Finally, when children are taught an effective strategy, they usually adopt it, abandoning less successful techniques. Sometimes, however, children do not immediately take advantage of new, more adaptive strategies. Using a new strategy taxes working memory, and children may resist giving up a well-established, nearly automatic procedure for a new one because gains in speed of thinking are small at first

Siegler's model reveals that no child thinks in just one way, even on a single task. A child given the same problem on two occasions often uses different approaches. Strategy variability is vital for devising new, more adaptive ways of thinking, which "evolve" through extensive experience solving problems. The model of strategy choice offers a powerful image of development that overcomes deficiencies of the stage approach in accounting for both diversity and continuous change in children's thinking. By exploiting the microgenetic method, researchers have captured periods of high variability in children's strategy use that contribute vitally to cognitive advances. Typical cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, which easily miss such periods, make cognitive change appear more abrupt (and therefore stagelike) than it actually is.

Effective strategy use

by the mid-elementary school years, children use strategies consistently, and performance improves. As we will soon see, this sequence also characterized children's use of memory strategies. Why, when children first use a strategy, does it not work well? Applying a new strategy generally requires so much effort and attention that little space in working memory remains to perform other parts of the task well. Another reason a new strategy may not lead to performance gains is that young children are not good at monitoring their task performance. Because they fail to keep track of how well a strategy is working, they do not apply it consistently or refine it in other ways.

The accuracy and completeness of children's episodic memories are central to their ability to recount relevant experiences when testifying in court cases involving child abuse and neglect, child custody, and other legal matters. Until recently, children younger than age 5 were rarely asked to testify, and not until age 10 were they assumed fully competent to do so. As a result of societal reactions to rising rates of child abuse and the difficulty of prosecuting perpetrators, legal requirements for child testimony have been relaxed in the United States. Children as young as age 3 frequently serve as witnesses. Compared with preschoolers, school-age children are better at giving accurate, detailed descriptions of past experiences and correctly inferring others' motives and intentions. Older children are also more resistant to misleading questions that attorneys may ask when probing for more information or trying to influence the child's response.

What makes younger children more prone to memory errors? The following factors are involved: Responding to interview questions is challenging for children whose language competence is not well-developed. Preschoolers are often unaware when they do not understand, and they answer the question anyway. Preschoolers are especially poor at SOURCE-MONITORING——-identifying where they got their knowledge, even minutes after they acquired it. They often confuse what they heard or saw on TV with what actually occurred. Accurately reporting certain temporal information is difficult for younger children. Before age 8 to 10, they are far better at providing the sequence of what happened than saying how often and on which dates an event occurred. Younger children are less skilled at INHIBITION——-ignoring irrelevant information——-which contributes to their greater willingness to accept adult suggestions that are inconsistent with experienced events. When an adult asks a yes-or-no question (Was he holding a screwdriver?"), younger children are more likely to agree, perhaps out of a desire to please. Preschoolers' bias toward verbatim representations (encoding specifics) leads them to forget more easily than older children, whose gist memories persist over time and serve as retrieval cues for details. (Older children are prone to memory inaccuracies consistent with their gists.) Because younger children are less competent at using narratives to report their autobiographical memories systematically and completely, they may omit information that they actually remember. Nevertheless, when properly questioned, even 3-year-olds can recall recent events accurately. And in the face of biased interviewing, adolescents and adults often form elaborate false memories.

The following sections address children's processing in major parts of the cognitive system———-how children encode information, hold and transform it in working memory so it will transfer to long-term memory, and retrieve it so they can think and solve problems. Attention is fundamental to human thinking because it determines which information will be considered in any task. Parents and teachers are well aware that young children spend only a short time involved in tasks, have difficulty focusing on relevant details, and find it difficult to switch mental sets (usually persist in one way of doing something). During early and middle childhood, attention improves greatly, becoming more sustained, selective, and adaptable.

Sustained, selective, and adaptable attention: during the first year, infants attend to novel and eye-catching events, orienting to them more quickly and tracking their movements more effectively. They also spend more time focused on complex stimuli, such as toys and videos, and display greater slowing of heart rate while engaged———a Physiological indicator of sustained attention. In toddlerhood, children become increasingly capable of intentional, goal-directed, behavior. Consequently, attraction to novelty declines (but does not disappear), and sustained attention improves further, especially during play. A toddler who engages in goal-directed behavior even in a limited way, such as stacking blocks or putting them in a container, must sustain attention to reach the goal. In a study of toddlers and young preschoolers, sustained attention during play with toys increased sharply between ages 2 and 3 1/2 years.

Mathematics Mathematical reasoning, like reading, builds on informally acquired knowledge. Recall from Chapter 6 that violation-of-expectation evidence suggests that babies have some basic number concepts, although the connection between these early discriminations and later quantitative development is not yet clear. Between 14 and 16 months, toddlers display a beginning grasp of ORDINALITY, or order relationships between quantities——for example, that 3 is more than 2 and 2 is more than 1. And 2-year-olds often indicate without counting that certain sets of items have "lots," "many," or "little" in relation to others. These attainments serve as the basis for more complex understandings. Sometime in the third year, children begin to count. By the time children turn 3, most can count rows of about five objects, saying the correct number words, although they do not know exactly what the words mean. For example, when asked for one, they give one item, but when asked for two, three, four, or five, they usually give a larger, but incorrect, amount. Nevertheless, 2 1/2- to 3 1/2-year-olds understand that a number word refers to a unique quantity——-that when a number label changes (for example, from five to six), the number of items should also change. By age 3 1/2 to 4, most children have mastered the meaning of numbers up to ten, count correctly, and grasp the vital principle of CARDINALITY——that the last word in a counting sequence indicates the quantity of items in a set. Mastery of cardinality increases the efficiency of children's counting. By age 4, children use counting to solve simple arithmetic problems. At first, their strategies are tied to the order of numbers as presented; when given 2 plus 4, they count on from 2. But soon they experiment with other strategies and master the min strategy, a more efficient approach. Around this time, children realize that subtraction cancels out addition. Knowing, for example, that 4 plus 3 is equal to 7, they infer without counting that 7-3 is equal to 4. Grasping basic arithmetic rules greatly facilitates rapid computation. Understanding basic arithmetic computation makes possible beginning ESTIMATION——the ability to generate approximate answers, which can be used to evaluate the accuracy of exact answers. After watching several doughnuts being added to or removed from a plate of four to ten doughnuts, 3- and 4-year-olds make sensible predictions of how many doughnuts are on the plate. Still, children can estimate only just beyond the limit of their calculation competence. For example, those who can solve addition problems with sums up to 10 can estimate answers with sums up to about 20. And as with arithmetic operations, children try out diverse estimation strategies, gradually moving to more accurate, efficient techniques.

The arithmetic knowledge just described emerges in many cultures around the world. But children construct these understandings sooner when adults provide many occasions for counting, comparing quantities, and talking about number concepts. Math proficiency at kindergarten entry predicts math achievement years later, in elementary and secondary school. As with emergent literacy, children from low-income families begin kindergarten with considerably less math knowledge than their economically advantaged agemates——a gap due to differences in environmental supports. For example, just a few sessions devoted to playing a number board game with an adult led to a dramatic improvement in number concepts and counting proficiency of 4-year-olds from low-income families. And in an early childhood math curriculum called a Building Blocks, materials that promote math concepts and skills enable teachers to weave math into many preschool daily activities, from block-building to art to stories. Compared with agemates randomly assigned to other preschool programs, economically disadvantaged preschoolers experiencing Building Blocks showed substantially greater year-end gains in math concepts and skills, including counting, sequencing, and arithmetic computation.

When applied to development, the store model suggests that several aspects of the cognitive system improve with age:

The basic capacity of its stores, especially working memory, the speed with which children work on information in the system, and EXECUTIVE FUNCTION——applying basic procedures and higher-level strategies in the service of goal-oriented behavior

Developmental increases in working-memory capacity in part reflect gains in processing speed. Efficient processing releases working-memory resources to support storage of information. The faster children can repeat to-be-learned information either out loud or silently to themselves, the larger their memory spans. Research confirms that with age, children process information more efficiently. In a series of studies, Robert Kail gave 7- to 22-year-olds a variety of cognitive tasks which they had to respond as quickly as possible. For example, in a name-retrieval task, they had to judge whether pairs of pictures were physically identical or had the same name (for instance, two umbrellas, one opened and one closed). In a mental addition task, they were given addition problems and answers, and they had to indicate whether the solutions were correct. And in a visual search task, they were shown a single digit and asked to signal if it was among a set of digits that appeared on a screen. On all tasks, processing time decreased with age. More important, the rate of change————a fairly rapid decline in processing time, trailing off around age 12———was similar across many activities.

The changes in processing speed have been found in Canada, Korea, and the United States. Similarity in development across diverse tasks in several cultures implies a fundamental change in efficiency of the information-processing system, perhaps due to myelination or synaptic pruning in the brain. Increased processing speed enables older children and adults to scan information more quickly, to transform it more rapidly, and therefore to hold more information in working memory at once. Efficient cognitive processing influences academic achievement indirectly———by augmenting working-memory resources and, thus, supporting many complex cognitive activities.

Control deficiency

Young elementary school children sometimes produce strategies, but not consistently. They have difficulty controlling, or executing, strategies effectively. For example, 5-year-olds began to apply a selective attentional strategy———opening only relevant doors———but, at times, reverted to opening irrelevant doors.

Organization

grouping related items together

Middle Childhood As children make the transition from emergent literacy to conventional reading, phonological awareness continues to predict reading (and spelling) progress. Other information-processing skills also contribute. Gains in processing speed foster school-age children's rapid conversion of visual symbols into sounds——an ability that also distinguishes good from poor readers. Visual scanning and discrimination play important roles and improve with reading experience. Performing all these skills efficiently releases working memory for higher-level activities involved in comprehending the text's meaning. Until recently, researchers were involved in an intense debate over how to teach children to read. Those who took a WHOLE-LANGUAGE APPROACH argued that from the beginning, children should be exposed to text in its complete form——-stories, poems, letters, posters, and lists——-so that they can appreciate the communicative function of written language. According to this view, as long as reading is kept meaningful, children will be motivated to discover the specific skills they need. Other experts advocated a PHONICS APPROACH, believing that children should first be coached on PHONICS——the basic rules for translating written symbols into sounds. Only after mastering these skills should they get complex reading material. Many studies show that children learn best with a mixture of both approaches. In kindergarten, first, and second grades, teaching that includes phonics boosts reading scores, especially for children who lag behind in reading progress. And when teachers combine real reading and writing with teaching of phonics and engage in other excellent teaching practices——encouraging children to tackle reading challenges and integrating reading into all school subjects——-first graders show far greater literacy progress.

Why might combining phonics with whole language work best? Learning relations between letters and sounds enables children to DECODE, or decipher, words they have never seen before. Children who enter school low in phonological awareness make far better reading progress when given training in phonics. Soon they detect new letter-sound relations while reading on their own, and as their fluency in decoding words increases, they are freer to attend to text meaning. Without early phonics training, such children (many of children whom come from poverty-stricken families) are substantial behind their agemates in text comprehension skills by third grade. Yet too much emphasis on basic skills may cause children to lose sight of the goal of reading: understanding. Children who read aloud fluently without registering meaning know little about effective reading strategies——-for example, that they must read more carefully if they will be tested than if they are reading for pleasure, that they must read more carefully if they will be tested than if they are reading for pleasure, that they must draw connections between parts of a passage to comprehend effectively, and that explaining a passage in their own words is a good way to assess comprehension. Providing instruction aimed at increasing knowledge and use of such strategies readily enhances reading performance from third grade on. Around age 7 to 8, children make a major shift———from "learning to read" to "reading to learn" As decoding and comprehension skills become efficient, adolescent readers actively engage with the text, adjusting the way they read to fit their current purpose——-at times seeking new facts and ideas, at other times questioning, agreeing with, or disagreeing with the writer's viewpoint.

Metacognitive knowledge

With age, children become increasingly conscious of their own capacities, of strategies for processing information, and of task variables that aid or impede performance. Listen closely to young children's conversations and you will find early awareness of mental activities. As their vocabularies expand, 2-year-olds' verbs include such words as WANT, THINK, REMEMBER, and PRETEND, which they use appropriately to refer to internal states. By age 3, children realize that thinking takes place inside their heads and that a person can think about something without seeing, talking about, or touching it. But preschoolers' understanding of the workings of the mind is limited. Three- and 4-year-olds conclude that mental activity stops while people wait, look at pictures, or read books——when no obvious cues indicate that they are thinking. Furthermore, children younger than age 6 pay little attention to the PROCESS of thinking but, instead, focus on outcomes of thought. When asked about subtle distinctions between mental states, such as KNOW and FORGET, they express confusion. And they often insist that they have always known information they just learned. School-age children have a more complete grasp of cognitive processes. Six- and 7-year-olds realize, for example, that doing well on a task depends on paying attention——-concentrating and exerting effort. Their understanding of SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE also expands: They realize that people can extend their knowledge not just by directly observing events and talking to others but also by making MENTAL INFERENCES. By age 10, children distinguish mental activities on the basis of CERTAINTY OF KNOWLEDGE. They are aware that if you "remember," "know," or "understand," you are more certain than if you "guess," "estimate," or "compare." They also grasp the interrelatedness of cognitive processes——-for example, that remembering is crucial for understanding and that understanding strengthens memory.

Recognition

a measure of memory in which the person need only identify items previously learned, as on a multiple-choice test. It is the simplest form of retrieval, since the material to be remembered is fully present during testing to serve as its own retrieval cue.As habituation research reveals, even young infants are good at recognition. The ability to recognize a larger number of stimuli over longer delays improves steadily with age, reaching a near-adult level during the preschool years. For example, after viewing a series of 80 pictures, 4-year-olds correctly discriminated 90 percent from pictures not in the original set. Because recognition appears early and develops rapidly, it is probably a fairly automatic process. Nevertheless, the ability of older children to apply strategies during storage, such as rehearsal and organization, increases the number of items recognized later

attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)

a psychological disorder marked by the appearance by age 7 of one or more of three key symptoms: extreme inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity

automatic processes

are so well-learned that they require no space in working memory and, therefore, permit us to focus on other information while performing them. Furthermore, the more information we process in working memory and the more effectively we process it, the more likely it will transfer to the third and largest storage area——-LONG-TERM MEMORY, our permanent knowledge base, which is unlimited. In fact we store so much in long-term memory that RETRIEVAL———getting information back from the system——-can be problematic. To aid retrieval of information, we apply strategies, just as we do in working memory. Information in long-term memory is CATEGORIZED by its contents, much like a library shelving system that allows us to retrieve items by following the same network of associations used to store them in the first place.

The more effectively the central executive joins with working memory to process information, the better learned those cognitive activities will be and the more————-we can apply them. Consider the richness of your thinking while you automatically drive a car.

automatically

Metacognition

awareness and understanding of one's own thought processes.

To manage the cognitive system's activities, the——————- directs the flow of information, implementing the basic procedures just mentioned and also engaging in more sophisticated activities that enable complex, flexible thinking. For example, the central executive coordinates incoming information with information already in the system, and it selects, applies, and monitors strategies that facilitate memory storage, comprehension, reasoning, and problem solving. The central executive is the conscious, reflective part of our mental system. It ensures that we harness our cognitive processes purposefully, to attain our goals.

central executive

As sustained attention increases

children become better at focusing on only those aspects of a situation that are relevant to their goals. To study this increasing selectivity of attention, researchers introduce irrelevant stimuli into a task and see how well children respond to its central elements. For example, they might present a stream of numbers on a computer screen and ask children to press a button whenever a particular sequence of two digits (such as "I" and then "9") appears.

In the store model, input in the information-processing system

enters the sensory register and is stored momentarily.

Scripts

general descriptions of what occurs and when it occurs in a particular situation

Retrieval

getting information out of memory storage

store model

information is to be held or stored in three parts of the system for processing. Size of the mental system increases with development. The sensory register, the short-term memory store, and the long-term memory store.

Planning

involves thinking out a sequence of acts ahead of time and allocating attention accordingly to reach a goal. With age, children's attention undergoes a profound advance that contributes greatly to executive function. The seeds of effective planning are present in infancy. When researchers showed 2- and 3-month-olds a series of pictures that alternated in a predictable left-right sequence, the babies quickly learned to shift their focus to the location of the next stimulus before it appeared. And recall 4- month-olds' ability to engage in predictive tracking of objects' movements. Even young infants' attention seems to be "future-oriented." But on relatively simple tasks requiring children to reason about how best to implement a future action, preschoolers have great difficulty generating a plan. In one study, 3- to 5-year-olds were shown a doll named Molly, a camera, and a miniature zoo with a path, along which were three animal cages. The first and third cages had storage lockers next to them; the middle cage, with no locker, housed a kangaroo. The children were told that Molly could follow the path only once and that she wanted to take a picture of the kangaroo, but there was no locker beside the kangaroo's cage in which to store the camera. Then they were asked, "What locker could you leave the camera in so Molly can get it and take a photo of the kangaroo? Below age 5, children were unable to plan effectively; they selected the two lockers with equal frequency. Yet in a task with the same elements that asked children to reason about the past——-Molly took the kangaroo's picture, stores the camera in a locker and after traveling the path can't find it, so at which location is she likely to recover it?———4-year-olds often succeeded. These findings———and others———-indicate marked gains in planning around 5 years of age. Apparently, reasoning about a sequence of future events, which the child has never before experienced, is more difficult than reasoning about a sequence of past events, which the child has directly observed.

Robert Siegler emphasizes that an important aspect of development is

learning good strategies for processing information.

ERP and fMRI measures of brain activity indicate that second-language processing is

less lateralized, and also overlaps less with brain areas devoted to first-language processing, in older than in younger learners.

verbatim digit span

longest sequence of items a person can repeat back in exact order

Autobiographical memory

made up of representations of one-time events that are long-lasting because they are imbued with personal meaning. How does memory for autobiographical events——-the day a sibling was born or the first time you took an airplane——-arise and persist for a lifetime? At least two developments make this possible. First, as noted earlier, children must have a sufficiently clear self-image to serve as an anchor for personally significant events. That is, they must be able to encode events as "something that happened to me"——— milestone reached around age 2 years. Second, children must integrate their experiences into a meaningful, time-organized life story. They learn to structure personally significant memories in narrative form by conversing about them with adults——-especially parents, who expand on their fragmented recollections.

As attention improves, so do _____

memory strategies——-deliberate mental operations we use to increase the likelihood of retaining information in working memory and transferring it to our long-term knowledge base. We saw that during the first two years, memory for objects, people, and events———as assessed in operant conditioning, habituation, and deferred-imitation studies———undergoes dramatic gains. With age, babies remember more information over longer periods. But relative to children and adults, infants and toddlers engage in little effortful, strategic memorizing. For the most part, they remember unintentionally, as part of their ongoing activities. And when memory strategies emerge in early childhood, they are not very successful at first. Not until middle childhood do these executive techniques take a giant leap forward.

As information flows sequentially through each, we can use——————-to operate on and transform it, increasing the chances that we will retain information, use it efficiently, and think flexibly, adapting the information to changing circumstances.

mental strategies

To study children's strategy use, Siegler used the———————, presenting children with problems over an extended time period. He found that children experiment with diverse strategies on many types of problems—__basic math facts, numerical estimation, conservation, memory for lists of items, reading first words, telling time, spelling, and even tic-tax-toe. Consider 5-year-old Darryl, who was adding marbles tucked into pairs of small bags that his kindergarten teacher had set out on a table. As a Darryl dealt with each pair, his strategies varied. Sometimes he guessed, not applying any strategy. At other times, he counted from 1 on his fingers. For example, for bags containing 2 plus 4 marbles, his fingers popped up one by one as he exclaimed, "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6!" Occasionally he started with the lower digit, 2, and "counted on" ("2, 3, 4, 5, 6"). Or he began with the higher digit, 4, and counted on ("4, 5, 6"), a strategy called min because it minimizes the work. Sometimes he retrieved the answer from memory

microgenetic research design

Scripts are schemas that encode:

our knowledge of stereotypical sequences of actions.

long-term memory

our permanent knowledge base

Production deficiency

preschoolers rarely engage in attentional strategies. In other words, they usually fail to produce strategies when they could be helpful. On the task just described, they simply opened all the doors

retrieving information

recognition, recall, reconstruction

Episodic memory

recollections of personally experienced events that occurred at a specific time and place

The ability to inhibit or minimize the intensity of emotions is called emotional:

regulation

Strategies for storing information

rehearsal, organization, elaboration

The ability to inhibit awareness of some stimuli in order to process others is termed ---, and it suppresses task-irrelevant cues in order to process the task-relevant cues in the limited attentional space.

selective attention

The ability to inhibit emotional impulses, in other words, to stop oneself from doing something attractive yet dangerous, seems to be related to which neurotransmitter?

serotonin

First information enters the sensory register

sights and sounds are represented directly and stored briefly. Look around you, and then close your eyes. An image of what you saw persists for a few seconds but then decays, or disappears, unless you use mental strategies to preserve it. For example, by ATTENDING to some information more carefully than to other information, you increase the chances that it will transfer to the next step of the information-processing system.

Rehearsal

the conscious repetition of information, either to maintain it in consciousness or to encode it for storage

working memory

the number of items that can be briefly held in mind while also engaging in some effort to monitor or manipulate those items

central executive

the part of working memory that directs attention and processing

cognitive self-regulation

the process of continually monitoring and controlling progress toward a goal- planning, checking outcomes, and redirecting unsuccessful efforts

Scripts are often culture-specific. This means that

the same behaviors may be perceived very differently in different cultures

Executive function

the set of cognitive operations and strategies necessary for self-initiated, purposeful behavior in relatively novel, challenging situations

Robert Siegler's (1996, 2006) model of strategy choice

uses an evolutionary metaphor———" natural selection"———to help us understand cognitive change. When given challenging problems, children generate a VARIETY of strategies, testing the usefulness of each. With experience, some strategies are SELECTED; they become more frequent and "survive." Others become less frequent and "die off." Like the evolution of physical traits, children's mental strategies display VARIATION and SELECTION, yielding adaptive problem-solving techniques——-one's best suited to solving the problems at hand.

In the second part of the mind, the short term memory store

we retain attended-to information briefly so we can actively "work" on it to reach our goals. One way of looking at the short-term store is in terms of its BASIC CAPACITY, often referred to as SHORT-TERM MEMORY: how many pieces of information can be held at once for a few seconds. Suppose you were asked to perform an operation on the following numerals: 1, 4, 2, 3, 6. If you could not briefly hold onto the digits, you would be unable solve the problem. In line with this example, a commonly used basic short-term memory task measures VERBATIM DIGIT SPAN———the longest sequence of items (such as a list of randomly ordered numerical digits) a person can repeat back in exact order. Among adults, average digit span is about SEVEN items.