HDFS201 chapter 5, 6, 7

Visual Perception: Adulthood: Visual Acuity

Accommodation of they eye: the eye's ability to focus and maintain an image on the retina—declines most sharply between 40 and 59 years old. Presbyopia: loss of accommodation • Middle aged individuals begin to have difficulty viewing close objects • Increase in the eye's blind spot: the location where the retina does not register any light • Bifocals, reading glasses, laser surgery, or implantation of intraocular lenses • Laser surgery and implantation of intraocular lenses Late adulthood, more pronounced declines • Visual processing speed declines • Night driving is especialy difficult • Dark adaptation is slower • Reduction in the quality or intensity of light reaching the retina • Decline in motion sensitivity • Linked to a decline in cognitive functioning

Visual Perception: Infancy: Color Vision

Color vision improves over time 8 weeks: infants can discriminate some colors 4 months: color preferences

Visual Perception: Adulthood: Depth Perception

Declines in late adulthood Make it difficult for the older adult to determine how close or far away or how high or low something is Make steps or street curbs difficult

Visual Perception: Adulthood: Color Vision

Declines with age in older adults Yellowing of lenses in the eyes Green-blue-violet part of the color spectrum May have trouble accurately matching closely related colors such as navy socks and black socks

Adulthood Education

Educational experiences are positively correlated with scores on intelligence tests and information-processing tasks, such as memory exercises. Older adults with less education had lower cognitive abilities than those with more education.

Visual Perception: Infancy: Perception of Occluded Objects

In the first two months of postnatal development, infants don't perceive occluded objects as complete • They only perceive what is visible Learning, Experience, and self-directed exploration via eye movements play key roles in the development of perceptual completion

Knowledge and Memory

Knowledge that individuals posses about a specific topic or skill have an important influence on memory Knowledge influences what people notice and how they organize, represent, and interpret information. • This skill, in turn, affects their ability to remember, reason, and solve problems

Sensorimotor stage evaluation

Many researchers conclude that Piaget wasn't specific enough about how infants learn about their world and that infants, especially young infants, are more competent than Piaget thought. o The Nature-Nurture Issue Spelke endorses a core knowledge approach • States that infants are born with domain-specific innate knowledge systems. • Involving space, number sense, object permanence, and language • Strongly influenced by evolution, the core knowledge domains are theorized to be prewired to allow infants to make sense of their world. • In this approach, the innate core knowledge domain form a foundation around which more mature cognitive functioning and learning develop. • Piaget greatly underestimated the cognitive abilities of infants, especially young infants.

Visual Perception: Infancy: Visual Acuity

Newborns cannot see small things that are far away Vision estimated to be 20/240: can see 20 feet what a normal adult can see at 240 (an object 20 feet away is only as clear to the NB as it would be if it were 240 feet away) 6 months: 20/40 Show an interest in human faces soon after birth 3 months: infants can match voices to faces, distinguish between male and female, and discriminate between faces of their own ethnic group and others

Salient vs. relevant dimensions

Preschool children are likely to pay attention to stimuli that stand out, or are salient, even when those stimuli are not relevant to solving a problem or performing a task After age 6 or 7, children attend more efficiently to the dimensions of the task that are relevant, such as the directions for solving a problem. This shift reflects a shift to cognitive control of attention, so that children act less impulsively and reflect more

Memory teaching strategies

Repeat with variation on the instructional information and link early and often • Improve children's consolidation and reconsolidation of the information they are learning Embed memory-relevant language when instructing children

Visual Perception: Infancy: Perceptual Constancy

Sensory stimulation is changing but perception of the physical world remains constant Allows infants to perceive their world as stable Size constancy: the recognition that an object remains the same even though the retinal image of the object changes as you move toward or away from the object • The farther away, the smaller its image in our eye • Babies 3 months of age Shape constancy: the recognition that an object remains the same shape even though its orientation to us changes. • Babies 3 months of age

Correcting some misconceptions of preoperational stage

Some preoperational kids CAN solve conservation tasks- but they can NOT use reversible thinking So, you do NOT have to be concrete operational to solve conversation tasks Poor Classification Skills

Fuzzy Trace Theory

States that memory is best understood by considering two types of memory representations • Verbatim memory trace o Consists of the precise details of the information, whereas gist refers to the central idea of the information • Gist o Fuzzy traces are built up

Adulthood Health

Successive generations have also been healthier in late adulthood as better treatments for a variety of illnesses have been developed Hypertension has been linked to lower cognitive performance in a number of studies, not only in older adults but also in young and middle-aged adults. Age related cognitive decline in adults with mood disorders such as depression

Adulthood Work

Successive generations have also had work experiences that include a stronger emphasis on cognitively oriented labor

The Symbolic Function Substage of Preoperational Stage

The first substage or the preoperational thought Occurring roughly between ages 2 and 4. The young child gains the ability to mentally represent an abject that is not present. Egocentrism: the inability to distinguish between one's own perspective and someone else's perspective • Preschool children frequently show the ability to take another's perspective on some tasks but not others Animism: the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of action • A young child who uses animism fails to distinguish the appropriate occasions for using human and nonhuman perspectives

The intuitive thought substage of preoperational stage

The second substage of preoperational thought, occurring between approx.4 and 7 years old. Children begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to all sorts of questions By the age of 5, children have just about exhausted the adults around them with "why" questions. Signal the emergence of interest in reasoning and in figuring out why things the way they are. Substage called intuitive because young children seem so sure about their knowledge and understand yet are unaware how they know what they know.

Infancy Orienting/Investigative process

This process involves directing attention to potentially important locations in the environment (that is, where) and recognize their features (such as color and form) (that is, what) o 3 to 9 months, infants can deploy their attention more flexibly and quickly

Visual Perception: Infancy: Depth Perception

Visual cliff experiment 3 to 4 months: develop the ability to use binocular cues to depth

Working memory in children's cognitive and language development

WM and attention control predicted growth in emergent literacy and number skills in young children in low-income families A computerized WM intervention with 9 to 11 year old children improved their reading performance Assessments of WM in kindergarten was a key process in predicting math achievement at the end of the first grade WM capacity at 9 to 10 years old predicted foreign language comprehension two years later WM capacity predicted how many items on a to be remembered list that fourth grade children forgot

planfulness

When experimenters ask children to judge whether two complex pictures are the same, Preschool children tend to use a haphazard comparison strategy, not examining all of the details before making a judgment. Elementary school age children are more likely to systematically compare the details across the pictures, one detail at a time

*Schemes

Actions or mental representations that organize knowledge o As the infant or child seeks to construct an understanding of the world the developing brain creates schemes. o Behavioral schemes (Physical activities) characterize infancy o Mental schemes (cognitive activities) develop in childhood. o Examples: Baby Schemes: simple actions performed on objects such as sucking, looking and grasping Older children schemes: strategies and plans for solving problems Adulthood: ranges from driving a car to balancing a budget to the concept of fairness • SCHEMA: an organized pattern of perception and/or behavior

Visual Perception: Adulthood: Diseases of the Eye

Cataracts, glaucoma, macular degeneration

habituation

Decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated presentations of the stimulus

Visual Preference method

Fantz's research method studying whether infants can distinguish one stimulus from another by measuring the length of time they attend to different stimuli

Adolescence Cognitive Control

Involves exercising effective control in a number of areas, including focusing attention, reducing interfering thoughts, and being cognitively flexible. o Increases in adolescence and emerging adulthood o Controlling attention is a key aspect of learning and thinking in adolescence and emerging adulthood. o Cognitive flexibility: involves being aware that options and alternatives are available and adapting to the situation. o Having confidence in their ability to adapt their thinking to a particular situation, and aspect of Self-efficacy, also is important in being cognitively flexbile.

Accommodation

Making changes in your behavior, or structures, to adjust to environmental demands occurs when children adjust their schemes to take account of new information and experience Ex: learns the difference between cars, trucks, motorcycles, etc.

Hearing: Adolescence

Most adolescents' hearing is excellent o HEAR (hearing education and awareness for rockers) was found by rock musicians whose hearing has been damaged by exposure to high-volume rock music o Listen to loud music in ear buds can also produce hearing problems

Substages of Sensorimotor Stage

Simple Reflexes, First habits and primary circular reactions, secondary circular reactions, coordination of secondary circular reaction, tertiary circular reactions/novelty/curiosity, internalization of schemes

Gross Motor Skills

Skills that involve large-muscle activities such as moving one's arm and walking

Cochlear Implants

Small, electronic devices that directly stimulate the auditory nerve o Now provided routinely to congenitally deaf children

Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

a general, unifying story of how biology and experience sculpt cognitive development. • Stressed that children actively construct their own cognitive worlds (information is not just poured into their minds from the environment)

Otitis Media

a middle-ear infection that can impair hearing temporarily o Can interfere with language development and socialization

Semantic memory

a person's knowledge about the world

memory

a retention of information over time

Reflexes

allow infants to respond adaptively to their environment before they have had the opportunity to learn • Rooting and Sucking: survival value • Some—coughing, sneezing, blinking, shivering, and yawning—persist throughout life. • Other, disappear several months following birth, as the infant's brain matures and voluntary control over many behaviors develops o Rooting and Moro disappear after 3-4 months • New Perspective on infant ____: they are not automatic of completely beyond the infant's control o Infants can deliberately control such movements as alternating their legs to make a mobile jiggle or change their sucking rate to listen to a recording

Information processing approach

analyzes how individuals encode information, manipulate it, monitor it, and create strategies for handling it. • Effective information processing involved attention, memory, and thinking • Robert Siegler emphasizes that mechanism of change play especially important roles in the advances children make in cognitive development. o Three mechanisms work together to create changes in children's cognitive skills: Encoding, Automaticity, and Strategy Construction o Encoding: o Automaticity o Strategy construction

Concepts

are cognitive groupings of similar objects, events, people, or ideas Without concepts, you would see each object and event as unique and you would not be able to make any generalizations Infants are creating concepts and organizing their world into conceptual domains that will form the backbone of their thought throughout life: Jean Mandler

Working Memory

as a kind of mental "workbench" where individuals manipulate and assemble information when they make decisions, solve problems, and comprehend written and spoken language. More active and powerful in modifying information than short-term memory

Perceptual categorization

categorizations are based on similar perceptual features of objects, such as size, color, and movement, as well as parts of objects, such as legs for animals o 7 to 9 months can make Conceptual categories

Scaffolding

changing the level of support • Over the course of a teaching session, a more skilled person (a teacher or advanced peer) adjusts the amount of guidance to fit the child's current performance. o When the student is learning the task, the skilled person may use direct instruction o As the student's competence increases, the person gives less guidance • Dialogue is an important tool of scaffolding in the ZPD. • Children have a rich but unsystematic, disorganized, and spontaneous concepts

Divided Attention

concentrating on more than one activity at the same time • Example: listening to music while you're reading

*Habituation

decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated presentations of the stimulus

Expertise

extensive, highly organized knowledge and understanding of a particular domain

Selective Attention

focusing on specific aspect of experience that is relevant while ignoring others that are irrelevant • Example: focusing on one voice among many in a crowded room or a noisy restaurant

Pincer grip

grasp small objects with their thumb and forefinger

Palmer Grasp

grasping with the whole hand

Childhood and Adolescence fine motor skills

improvement o 3: pick up the tiniest objects between their thumb and forefinger, build high block towers o 4: fine motor coordination has become much more precise (want it to be perfectly stacked) o 5: improved further (hand arm fingers all move together) o increased myelination of the central nervous system is reflected in the improvement of fine motor skills o 6: hammer, paste, tie shoes, fasten clothes o 7: steadier. Prefer a pencil to a crayon o 8 to 10: can use their hands independently with more ease and precision (write words) o 10 to 12: show manipulative skills similar to the abilities of adults

Joint Attention

in which two or more individuals focus on the same object or event o Requires (1) an ability to track another's behavior, such as following the gaze of someone; (2) one person directing another's attention; and (3) reciprocal interaction o Early in infancy, JA usually involves a caregiver pointing or using words to direct an infant's attention o Joint attention increases infants' ability to learn from other people o JA skills in infancy are associated with the development of self-regulation later in childhood.

Metamemory

individuals' knowledge aobut memory, is an especially important form of metacognition. o Includes general knowledge about memory, such as knowing that recognition tests are easier than recall tests o Also encompasses knowledge about one's own memory, such as knowing whether you have studied enough for an upcoming test

Fine Motor Skills

involve finely tuned movements (buttoning a shirt, typing)

Strategies to improve long term memory

involve the use of mental activities to improve the processing of information. For memory, rehearsing information and organizing are two typical strategies that older children and adults use to remember information more effectively Imagery: Creating mental images is another strategy for improving memory; works better for older children than younger children Elaboration: involves engaging in more extensive processing of information • Benefits their memory • Thinking of examples and self-reference are effective ways to elaborate information • Adolescents are more likely to use elaboration than children

Short term memory

involved retaining information for up to 30 seconds without rehearsal of the information Using rehearsal, individuals can keep information in short-term memory longer

Intermodal Perception

involves integrating information from two or more sensory modalities, such as vision and hearing • Most perception is intermodal • Intermodal perceptions exist even in NB • Become sharpened with experience of life. • When you look at and listen to what is going on, you do not experience just the sounds or just the sights; you put all of these things together. o You experience a unitary episode

Thinking

involves manipulating and transforming information in memory. We think in order to reason, reflect, evaluate ideas, solve problems, and make decisions

Perceptual-motor coupling

is necessary for the infant to coordinate grasping

Episodic memory

is retention of information about the where and when of life's happenings • Autobiographical memories are stored as episodic memories

Strategy construction

is the creation of new procedures for processing information. Self-modification: children learn to apply what they have learned in previous circumstances to adapt their responses to a new situation. • Metacognition: "thinking about thinking or knowing about knowing". Best way to understand how children learn is to observe them while they are learning • Microgenetic method to obtain detailed information about processing mechanisms as they are occurring moment to moment.

Piaget's Concrete Operational Stage

lasts from 7 to 11 years. Children can perform concrete operations, and they can reason logically as long as reasoning can be applied to specific or concrete examples o Concrete operations: operations that are applied to real, concrete objects • Allow the child to consider several characteristics rather than to focus on a single property of an object • The ability to classify or divide things into different sets or subsets and to consider their interrelationships • Seriation • Transitivity • Less Egocentrism • Rarely confuse appearances with reality • REVERSIBLE THINKING • Better Perspective-Taking • Conservation • Class-Inclusion • Thinking limited to the concrete and the real

Cognitive mechanics

linked to biological foundations and brain development, have been hypothesized to decline in middle and late adulthood. Cognitive processes that are components of cognitive mechanics include processing speed, attention, and some aspect of memory.

Implicit memory

memory without conscious recollection—memories of skills and routine procedures that are performed automatically

Adulthood Cognitive Training

o 1) Training can improve the cognitive skills of many older adults but, o 2) There is some loss in plasticity in late adulthood

Executive Function

o An umbrella-like concept that encompasses a number of higher-level cognitive processes linked to the development of the brain's prefrontal cortex. o Involves managing one's thoughts to engage in goal-directed behavior and exercise self-control o Self-control/inhibition: Children need to develop self-control that will allow them to concentrate and persist on learning tasks, to inhibit their tendencies to repeat incorrect responses, and to resist the impulse to do something now that they later would regret o Working memory: Children need an effective working memory to effectively process the masses of information they will encounter as they go through school and beyond o Flexibility: Children need to be flexible in their thinking ot consider different strategies and perspectives

Theory of Mind and Autism

o Approx. 1 in 150 children are estimated to have some type of autism. (can be diagnosed by the age of 3 and sometimes earlier) o Children with autism show a number of behaviors different from other children their age, including deficits in social interaction and communication as well as repetitive behaviors or interests. o Children with autism might have difficulty understanding others' beliefs and emotions not solely due to theory of mind deficits but to other aspects of cognition such as problems in focusing attention, eye gaze, face recognition, memory, language impairment, or some general intellectual impairment.

The Development of Posture

o As a foundation, motor skills require posture control Ex. Before you can walk, you need to be able to balance one leg o More than just holding still and straight o _________: a dynamic process that is linked with sensory information in the skin, joints, and muscles, which tell us where we are in space; in vestibular organs in the inner ear that regulate balance and equilibrium; and in vision and hearing o NB cannot voluntarily control their posture Within a few weeks, they can hold their heads erect 2 months: can sit while supported on a lap/sear 6/7 months: independently sit

Children's Long-term memory

o Autobiographical Memory: involves memory of significant events and experiences in one's life "Who was your first grade teacher and what was she like?" From 3 to 5 years old, they increasingly remember events as occurring at a specific time and location, and include more elements that are rich in detail in their narratives Middle and late children and adolescence are more broad and elaborate with their autobiographical narratives. o Eyewitness Testimony Should children be allowed to testify in court? The accuracy of a young child's eyewitness testimony may depend on a number of factors such as the type, number, and intensity of the suggestive techniques the child has experienced

Assessing Infant Perception

o Behavioral Change (e.g. facial expression when you give a baby a food that they may not like they'll make a bad face, sucking rate Neutral sucking and Nonneutral sucking, orienting) o Preferential Looking Duration of looking at one of a stimulus pair Robert Frantz(coined this term)looking booth, up in the ceiling he could put different stimuli and observe the babies eyes, which stimuli do babies look at the longest? Palkowitz doesn't think its "preference" he thinks the infants distinct between the different stimuli Habituation-Learning to be bored the diminishing of a physiological or emotional response to a frequently repeated stimulus Operant Conditioning Learn to react to one stimulus o Positive or Negative Discriminate second stimulus Evoked Potentials: Record brain's response to stimuli

First Memories

o Carolyn Rovee-Collier: infants can remember perceptual-motor information Places a baby in a crib underneath an elaborate mobile and ties on end of a ribbon to the baby's ankle (experiment) At 2 ½ months the baby's memory is detailed o Most of young infants' conscious memories are fragile and short-lived, except for memory of perceptual-motor actions (substantial) o 6 to 12 months, the maturation of the hippocampus and the surrounding cerebral cortex in the brain, especially the frontal lobes, makes the emergence of explicit memory possible. Implicit memory Explicit memory

Adulthood Cognitive neuroscience and aging

o Changes in the brain can influence cognitive functioning, and changes in cognitive functioning can influence the brain When older adults do not regularly use their working memory, neural connections in the prefrontal lobe may atrophy. Cognitive interventions that activate older adults' working memory may increase theses neural connections o Neural circuits in specific regions of the brain's prefrontal cortex decline, and this decline is linked to poorer performance by older adults on complex reasoning tasks, working memory, and episodic memory tasks o Better memory performance in older adults was linked to higher levels of activity in both hemispheres of the brain in processing information o Functioning in the hippocampus declines but to a lesser degree than the functioning of the frontal lobes o Patterns of neural decline with aging are larger for retrieval than encoding o Older adults often show greater activity in the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain on simple tasks (less effective as demands increase) o Younger adults have better connectivity between brain regions

Scientific Thinking

o Children ask fundamental questions about reality and seek answers to problems that seem utterly trivial or unanswerable to other people o Scientific reasoning often is aimed at identifying causal relations

Solving Problems

o Children face many problems that they must solve in order to adapt effectively, both in school and out of school. o Problem solving involves finding an appropriate way to attain a goal o Developing effective strategies is a key aspect of problem solving o Children need to be motivated to learn and to use the strategies

Other Visual Characteristics

o Color perception and discrimination from 6 months pc (cones) o At birth reds and greens most pronounced (black/white sharpest contrast) o Yellows come in shortly after, chemicals are diff. o Depth perception present early on-nature/nurture controversies o Monocular and binocular cues

Adulthood Memory

o Declines in working memory during late adulthood Continues to decline from 65 to 89 years old Less efficient inhibition in preventing irrelevant information from entering working memory and their increased distractibility. o Declines in processing speed in middle and late adulthood may play a role in working memory decline as well Younger adults have better episodic memory than older adults Older adults often take longer to retrieve semantic information, but usually they can ultimately retrieve it Tip of the tongue (TOT) phenomenon: individuals can't quite retrieve familiar infomraiton but have the feeling that they should be able to retrieve it. Implicit memory is less likely than explicit memory to be adversely affected by aging. o Reminiscence bump: Adults remember more events from the second and third decades of their lives than from the other o Failures of source memory increase with age in the adult years o Decline in prospective memory with age

Visual Development (last to develop)

o Dominant human sense, we depend on it A LOT o By 6th month pc rods & cones on retina (not that important to know) o Pattern of development is important not ^ o By 7th month pc eyes anatomically complete and functional Startle Blink/turn away from bright light o Myelination of optic nerve by birth (but thin), complete by 2.5 months o Structures do not develop at same rate ** o Lens, cornea, retina relatively large (size wise) o IN CONTRAST Iris, ciliary muscles and DEPTH immature: "short eyeball" o Bigger muscles more bending---small muscles less bending o You focus on something from a distance, you can't bend the lens because its big, you have poor clarity vision as a newborn, changes very quickly o Eye of newborn is about .5 size o Immature accommodation-bending of lens^^ o Newborn have "fixed focal distance" 8-10" also avg distance from mother's breast to face if it's further than 8-10" it is blurrier, if it is closer to 8-10" its blurrier so the face of a mother is a perfect image for a baby while breast feeding Implications for acuity-visual clarity (how sharp is your vision)

Hearing: The fetus

o During the last two months of pregnancy, as the fetus nestles in its mother's womb, it can hear sounds such as the mother's voice, music, and so on. o Fetus can hear at 33 to 34 weeks into the prenatal period

Processes of Memory

o Encoding, storage, and retrieval are the basic processes required for memory o Encoding: Getting information into memory o Storage: Retaining information over time o Retrieval: Taking information out of storage

Dynamic systems theory

o Esther Thelen o *Infants assemble motor skills for perceiving and acting o To develop motor skills, infants must perceive something in the environment that motivates them to act and then use their perceptions to fine-tune their movements o When infants are motivated to do something, they might create a new motor behavior o New behavior result of many converging factors: Development of the nervous system The body's physical properties and its possibilities for movement The goal the child is motivated to reach The environmental support for the skill • Example: babies learn to walk only when maturation of the nervous system allows them to control certain leg muscles, when their legs have grown enough to support their weight, and when they want to move o Assemble adaptive patterns by modifying their current movement patterns o Even universal milestones are achieved through this process of adaptation o NOT PASSIVE PROCESS: infant actively puts together a skill to achieve a goal within the constraints set by the infant's body and environment

Orientation Points to Ponder with Sensation/Perception

o Everything we experience comes through our sensory apparatus at some time o The brain interprets sensory input o The senses are well developed PRENATALLY Starts early on Differences in maturity level Don't decline at the same time Touch is the first sense to develop and the last sense to go o Sensory capacities are geared toward the SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT People don't do well alone How we interact with others o Lifespan changes are not uniform Some senses decrease in the opposite order like sight and hearing

Piaget's Contributions

o Founder of the study of children's cognitive development o Long list of masterful concepts of enduring power and fascination: assimilation, accommodation, object permanence, egocentrism, conservation, and others. o Current vision of children as active, constructive thinkers

Metacognition Developmental changes

o From 18 months to 3 years old, children begin to understand three mental states Perception: by 2 years old, children recognize that another person will see what's in front of her own eyes instead of what's in front of the child's eyes, and by 3 years of age, they realize that looking leads to knowing what's inside a container Emotions: The child can distinguish between positive and negative emotions. "Tommy feels bad." Desires: All humans have some sort of desires. Toddlers recognize that if people want something, they will try to get it. "I want my mommy" o At 7 years of age and beyond, there are important developments in the ability to understand the beliefs and thoughts of others

Gross Motor Development in Adolescence and Adulthood

o Gross motor skills typically improve during adolescence. o Peak performance before age 30 o After 30, most biological function begin to decline Biological functioning declines at about .75 to 1% per year Cardiovascular functioning, muscle strength, bone tissue, neural function, balance, and flexibility o Physical activity and weight loss helped to preserve mobility in older, obese adults in poor cardiovascular health o Risk of falling increases in older adults (greater for women than for men) o Falls are the leading cause of injury death among adults who are 65 years and older

Fine motor skills in infancy

o Hardly any control over _____ ______ ______ at birth, but NB do have many components of what will bcome finely coordinated arm, hand, and finger movements o Reaching and grasping marks a significant milestone o Cues from muscles, tendons, and joints, not sight of the limb, guide reaching by 4 months old Palmer grasp, pincer grip, perceptual-motor coupling

Hearing: Adulthood and Aging

o Hearing can start to decline by the age of 40. o Sensitivity to high pitches usually declines first Low pitched sounds does not seem to decline o Men usually lose their sensitivity to high pitched sounds sooner than women do o Only 19% of individuals from 45 to 54 years of age experience some type of hearing problem o 63% of adults age 70 and older had a hearing loss defined as an inability to hear sounds softer than 25dB with their better ear o Moderate loss: inability to hear sounds softer than 40 dB with their better ear o 15% of the population is estimated to be legally deaf, usually due to degeneration of the cochlea. o Hearing loss was associated with a reduction in cognitive functioning in older adults. o Perceptual difficulties associated with hearing loss affect language comprehension and memory for spoken language in older adults o Devices used to minimize problems created by hearing loss 1) Hearing aids that amplify sounds to reduce middle-ear-ased conductive hearing loss 2) Cochlear implants that restore some hearing following neurosensory hearing loss

Equilibration and Stage Development

o In trying to understand the world, the child inevitably experiences cognitive conflict, or Disequilibrium The child constantly encounters inconsistencies and counter examples to his or her existing schemes. Example: if a child thinks pouring water from a tall glass into a short and wide glass changes the amount of water they might wonder where the extra water went... the puzzle creates disequilibrium. An internal search for equilibrium creates motivation for change o There is a considerable movement between states of cognitive equilibrium and disequilibrium as assimilation and accommodation work in concert to produce cognitive change o Equilibrium: mechanism by which children shift from one stage of thought to the next o Result: children go through four stages of development o Cognition is qualitatively different in one stage compared with another

Adolescence Decision Making

o Increased decision making o Older adolescents are described as more competent than younger adolescents o Dual-process model: states that decision making is influenced by two cognitive systems—one analytical and one experiential—which compete with each other. Emphasizes that it is the experiential system—monitoring and managing actual experiences—that benefits adolescents' decision making, not the analytical system In this view, adolescents don't benefit from engaging in reflective, detailed, higher-level cognitive analysis about a decision, especially in high-risk, real-world contexts

Adolescence Critical Thinking

o Increased speed, automaticity, and capacity of information processing, which free cognitive resources for other purposes o Greater breadth of content knowledge in a variety of domains o Increased ability to construct new combinations of knowledge o A greater range and more spontaneous use of strategies and procedures for obtaining and applying knowledge, such as planning, considering the alternatives, and cognitive monitoring.

Visual Perception: Childhood

o Increasingly efficient at detecting the boundaries between colors at 3 to 4 o 4 to 5: eye muscles usually are developed enough that they can move their eyes efficiently across a series of letters o First grade: can focus their eyes and sustain their attention effectively on close-up objects. o Signs of visual problems? Rubbing the eyes Blinking or squinting excessively Appearing irritable when playing games that require good distance vision Shutting or covering one eye Tilting the head or thrusting it forward when looking at something

Critical Thinking

o Involves grasping the deeper meaning of ideas, keeping an open mind about different approaches and perspectives and deciding for oneself what to believe or do o Midfulness—being alert, mentally present, and cognitively flexbile while going through life's everyday activities and tasks— is an important aspect of thinking critically

Prospective memory

o Involves remembering to do something in the future

Learning to Walk

o Locomotion and postural control are closely linked o ______: baby must be able to balance on one leg as the other is swung forward and to shirt their weight from one leg to the other o Key skill is to stabilize balance on one leg long enough / shifting weight without falling. o Practice is important in the development of a new motor skill

Hearing in infancy

o Loudness: immediately after birth, infants cannot hear soft sounds quite as well as adults can; a stimulus must be louder to be heard by a newborn than by an adult By 3 months: infants' perception of sounds improves although some aspects of loudness perception do not reach adult levels until 5 to 10 years of age o Pitch: Infants are also less sensitive to the pitch of a sound than adults are Pitch is the perception of the frequency of a sound Infants are less sensitive to low-pitched sounds and are more likely to hear high-pitched sounds. By 2, considerable improvement in their ability to distinguish sounds with different pitches o Localization: Even NB can determine the general location from which a sound is coming, but by 6 months of age hey are more proficient at localizing sounds (detecting their origins)

Adulthood Decision Making

o Many older adults preserve decision-making skills reasonably well. o Reduction in effective decision making in risky situations during late adulthood was linked to declines in memory and processing speed.

Memory span

o Memory-span task: simply hear a short list of stimuli—usually digits— presented at a rapid pace, then you're asked to repeat them. o Suggests that short-term memory increases during childhood

Adulthood use it or lose it

o Mental activities that are likely to benefit the maintenance of cognitive skills in older adults include reading books, doing crossword puzzles, and attending lectures and concerts.

cultural variations in gross motor development

o Mothers in developing countries tend to stimulate their infants' motor skills more than mothers in more developed countries African, Indian, Caribbean cultures: mothers massage and stretch their infants during daily baths o Stretching, stroking, massaging, exercise: often reach motor milestones earlier

Gross Motor Development in the Second Year

o Motor accomplishments of the first year bring increasing independence, allowing infants to explore their environment more extensively and to initiate interaction with others more rapidly o In the second year, toddlers become more motorically skilled and mobile o Motor activity vital to the child's competent development and few restrictions (except for safety) should be place on their adventures

Childhood Gross motor development

o Moving in the environment becomes more automatic o 3 years: hopping, jumping, and running back and forth. Pride and accomplishment o 4 years: enjoying the same activity as 3. More adventurous Scramble over low jungle gyms o 5 years: even more adventurous Run hard, enjoy races, climbing o Middle and late childhood: their motor development becomes much smoother and more coordinated than it was in early childhood Running, climbing, skipping rope, swimming, bicycle riding, and skating Organized sports

Smell

o NB can differentiate odors o A decline in sensitivity to odors may occur as early as the twenties o Beginning in the 60s, the decrease in sensitivity to smells becomes more noticeable to most people o 80 years and older experience a significant reduction in smell o A decline in the sense of smell can reduce the ability to detect smoke from a fire o Decline in the olfactory system can reduce older adults' enjoyment of food and their life satisfaction • Olfactory epithelium begins 30 days PC and olfactory nerve and centers of brain complete by 3rd trimester when nostrils open • Preemies respond to odors • By 6 days after birth can distinguish mother's smell by breast pads • By 14 days for axillary odors • Little decline with age

Adulthood Practical Problem Solving and Expertise

o Nancy Denney Found that the ability to solce such practical problems improved throught the forties and fifties as indiciduals accumulated practical experience. o Other studies concluded that both problem solving and decision making effectiveness remained stable in early and middle adulthood, then declined in late adulthood. o Expertise: extensive, highly organized knowledge and understanding of a particular domain o Experts vs. Novices: Experts are more likely to rely on their accumulated experience to solve problems Experts often process information automatically and analyze it more efficiently when solving a problem in their domain than novices do E have better strategies and shortcuts to solving problems in their domain than N do E are more creative and flexible in solving problems in their domain than N do.

*Nature/Nurture in Perceptual development

o Nature: Senses appear to be innate(genetic) or develop (mature) very quickly, natural o Nurture: Born a blank slate, visual and auditory development require stimulation-and all senses benefit from environmental embeddedness o Nativists: Natural understanding at birth Relatively universal patterns of decline o Empiricists: Infant tabula rasa Old age: individual patterns of decline o Accumulation of evidence: Infants seek the stimulation they need o Infants combine perception with action for exploration (sensory-motor or sensorimotor) Sensory is closely tied to intellectual development, social cognition • Much of early perception develops from innate (nature) foundations, and the basic foundation of many perceptual abilities can be detected in NB, whereas other unfolds maturationally. • However, as infants develop, environmental experiences (nurture) refine or calibrate many perceptual functions, and they may be the driving force behind some function

Changes in Acuity

o Newborn visual acuity is somewhere between 20/260 and 20/260 (legally blind) (<20/200 in best eye after correction) ---based on old Snellen charts the "E" charts o 20/20 vision is perfect, 20 ft away from the Snellen Chart and can see perfectly o Changes rapidly as eyeball deepens and ciliary muscles develop o 20/100 by 6 months o 20/20 by a year o Peaks in adolescence o Fairly stable until 50 or so- then there is a decline o Near point gets farther-how close something can be to your eyes and still be in focus Corrective lenses to solve issue

Adulthood Executive Function

o Older adults are less effective at engaging in cognitive control than when they were younger. o Cognitive flexibility: older adults don't perform as well as younger adults at switching back and forth between tasks or mental sets. o Cognitive inhibition: older adults are less effective than younger adults at inhibiting dominant or automatic responses o Variability in executive function among older adults

Postformal thought

o Reflective, relativistic, and contextual As young adults engage in solving problems, they might think deeply about many aspects of work, politics, relationships, and other areas of life. They find that what might be the best solution to a problem at work might not be the best solution at home. Postformal thought holds that the correct answer to a problem requires reflective thinking and may very from one situation to another o Provisional Many young adults also become more skeptical about what is presented as absolute truth and seem unwilling to accept and answer as final They come to see the search for truth as an ongoing and perhaps never-ending process o Realistic Young adults understand that thinking can't always be abstract. In many instances, it must be realistic and pragmatic o Recognized as being influenced by emotion Emerging and young adults are more likely than adolescents to understand that their thinking is influenced by emotions. Too often, negative emotions produce thinking that is distorted and self-serving at this point in development • 10 Item Complex Postformal Thought Questionnaire reflects on three main categories of postformal thinking o Taking into account multiple aspects of a problem or situation o Making a subjective choice regarding a particular problem or situation o Perceiving underlying complexities in a situation

Childhood and adolescent attention

o Salient vs relevant dimensions o Planfulness • In central European countries, kindergarten children participate in exercises designed to improve their attention • Computer exercises also recently have been developed to improve children's attention • Preschool children's ability to control and sustain their attention is related to school readiness. • Older children and adolescents are better than younger children at tasks that require shifting attention • Divided attention in adolescents' multitasking • Controlling attention is a key aspect of learning and thinking in adolescence and emerging adulthood

Constructing Memory

o Schema theory: people mold memories to fit information that already exists in their minds Schemas: mental frameworks that organize concepts and information Schemas influence that way people encode, make inferences about, and retrieve information. Accurately predicts that people don't store and retrieve bits of data in computer-like fashion • We reconstruct the past rather than take an exact photograph of it, and the mind can distort an event as it encodes and stores impressions of it

Taste (gustation)

o Sensitivity to taste is present even before birth o Human NB learns tastes prenatally through the amniotic fluid and in breast milk after birth. o Significant reduction in the ability of older adults to recognize sweet, salty, sour, and bitter tastes. • Prenatal swallowing and sucking rates • Prefer sweet tastes to bitter tastes • Measures: Facial expression, sucking rate, duration, swallowing, spitting... AVIDITY • Mouthing and the oral stage (third hand) Developmental changes in taste • Taste buds present and functional before 4th months PC • Preference for sweetness at birth o Saltiness (Somewhat later) • Avoidance of sour and bitter • 18-50 greatest acuity • Gibson- experiential explanations • After 50 < sweet and salt, > bitter • Some loss of taste buds

Source memory

o The ability to remember where one learned something

Infantile Amnesia

o The few reported adult memories of life at age 2 or 3 are at best very sketchy (not remembering your 3rd birthday party) o Causes? The immaturity of the prefrontal lobes of the brain—regions that are believed to play an important role in memory for events

Piagetian Concepts: Organization

o The grouping of isolated behaviors and thoughts into a higher-order system o Example: if a child only has a vague idea about how to use a hammer they may also have a vague idea about how to use other tools. After learning how to use each one, the child relates these uses, organizing his knowledge.

Changes in Speed of Processing Information

o The speed with which cognitive tasks are completed improves dramatically across the childhood years. o Processing speed continues to improve in early adolescence. o Does speed decline in adulthood? Begins in middle adulthood and continues into late adulthood Likely due to a decline in functioning of the brain and central nervous system Linked to a breakdown in myelin in the brain Important indicator is older adults ability to drive a vehicle

sensorimotor stage: object permanence

o There is no differentiation between the self and world; objects have no separate, permanent existence (to infants) o By the end of the sensorimotor period, objects are both separate from the self and permanent o Object permanence: the understanding that objects continue to xist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched o One of the infants most important accomplishments

Gross Motor Development in the First Year

o Timing of these milestones may vary by as much as two to four months o Experiences can modify the onset of these accomplishments o Some infants do not follow the standard sequence of motor accomplishments o Infants develop new skills with the guidance of their caregivers in a real-world environment of objects, surfaces, and planes ORDER: prone/lift head, prone/chest up/use arms for support, roll over, support some weight with legs, stand with support, pull self to stand, walk using furniture for support, stand alone easily, walk alone easily

Adult fine motor skills

o Undergo a decline and middle and late adulthood as dexterity decrease

Visual Perception: Adulthood

o Vision changes little after childhood until the effects of again emerge o With aging, declines in visual acuity, color vision, and depth perception occur o Several Diseases of the eye also may emerge in aging adults

Centration and the Limits of Preoperational Thought

oCentration: a centering of attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others Most clearly evidenced in young children's lack of conservation, the awareness that altering an object's or a substance's appearance does not change its basic properties. Failing the conservation of liquid task is a sign that children are at the preoperational stage of cognitive development

Moro Reflex

occurs in response to a sudden, intense noise or movement. o When startled, the NB arches its back, throws back its hear, and flings out its arms and legs o Believed to be a way of grabbing for support while falling; it would have had survival value for our primate ancestors

*Sensation

occurs when information interacts with sensory receptors—the eyes, ears, tongue, nostrils, and skin. o The sensation of hearing occurs when waves of pulsating air are collected by the outer ear and conducted through the bones of the inner ear and cochlea: where mechanical vibrations are converted into electrical impulses The electrical impulses more to the auditory nerve: which transmits them to the brain. o The sensation of vision occurs as rays of light contact the eyes and become focused on the retina where light is converted into electrical impulses. Then the electrical impulses are transmitted by the optic nerve to the visual centers of the brain

Sucking Reflex

occurs when newborns suck an object placed in their mouth Enables newborns to get nourishment before they have associated a nipple with food; it also serves as a self-soothing of self-regulating mechanism

Grasping Reflex

occurs when something touches the infant's palms the infants respond by grasping tightly o Becomes incorporated into a more complex voluntary action (voluntary grasps)

Rooting Relfex

occurs when the infant's cheek is stroked or the side of the mouth is touched Response: the infant turns its head toward the side the was touched in an apparent effort to find something to suck

Executive Attention

planning actions, allocating attention to goals, detecting and compensating for errors, monitoring progress on tasks, and dealing with novel or difficult circumstances

Assimilation

processing the environment in terms of preexisting structures Occurs when children use their existing schemes to deal with new information or experiences Ex: all moving vehicles are "cars"

Theory of mind

refers to awareness of one's own mental processes and the mental processes of others. o Studies view the child as "a thinker who is trying to explain, predict, and understand people's thoughts, feelings, and utterances" o Linked to cognitive processes

Long term memory

relatively permanent and unlimited

Concrete Operational Stage: Transitivity

the ability to logically combine relations to reach certain conclusions

Sustained Attention

the ability to maintain attention to a selected stimulus for a prolonged period of time • Also called vigilance

Concrete Operational Stage: Seriation

the ability to order stimuli along a qualitative dimension (such as length)

Automaticity

the ability to process information with little or no effort Practice allows children to encode increasing amounts of information automatically. Information processing becomes more automatic, we can complete tasks more quickly and handle more than one task at a time

Explicit memory

the conscious recollection of facts and experiences Babies do not show explicit memory until the second half of the first year, then it improves substantially during the second year

Attention

the focusing of mental resources o Improves cognitive processing for many tasks o Infants tend to attend to events of intermediate complexity o Individuals can allocate their attention in different ways

Adolescent Egocentrism

the heightened self-consciousness of adolescents, which is reflected in their belief that others are as interested in them as they are themselves, and in their sense of personal uniqueness and invincibility. o Imaginary audience: the aspect of adolescent egocentrism that involved feeling that one is the center of everyone's attention and sensing that one is on stage. o Personal fable: the part of adolescent egocentrism that invoved an adolescent's sense of personal uniqueness and invincibility. o Two dimensions of the view invulnerability is a unitary concept Danger invulnerability: involves adolescents' sense of indestructibility and tendency to take on physical risks Psychological invulnerability: captures an adolescent's felt invulnerability related to personal or psychological distress

Crystallized Intelligence

the individual's accumulated information and verbal skills, has been proposed to increase through the middle and late adulthood years

*Perception

the interpretation of what is sensed. o The air waves that contact the ears might be interpreted as noise or as musical sounds o The physical energy transmitted to the retina of the eye might be interpreted as a particular color, pattern, or shape, depending on how it Is perceived

Fluid Intelligence

the person's ability to reason abstractly, has been theorized to decrease in the middle and late adulthood years

Encoding

the process by which information gets into memory Changes in children's cognitive skills depend on increased skill at encoding relevant information and ignoring irrelevant information.

Dishabituation

the recovery of a habituated response after a change in stimulation.

Dishabituation

the recovery of responsiveness after a change in stimulation

Gibsons' Ecological view

we directly perceive information that exists in the world around us o Perception being us into contact with the environment in order to interact with and adapt to it. o Perception is designed for action o Perception gives people such information as when to duck, when to turn their bodies to get through a narrow passageway, and when to put up their hands to catch something o All objects and surfaces have affordances Opportunities for interaction offered by objects that fit within our capabilities to perform activities We know when it is safe/unsafe to walk on a certain surface We directly and accurately perceive these affordances by sensing information from the environment and from our own bodies through muscle receptors, joint receptors, and skin receptors What affordances can infants or children detect and use? Visual preference method Habituation Dishabituation

Cognitive Pragmatics

which are associated with experience and culture, have been proposed to increase during middle and late adulthood. Components of cognitive pragmatics include reading and writing skills, language comprehension, professional skills, and wisdom.

Piaget's Preoperational Stage (textbook notes)

which lasts from approx. 2 to 7 years, is the second Piagetian stage. o In this stage, children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings. o They form stable concepts and begin to reason o Cognitive world is dominated by egocentrism and magical beliefs o Preoperational emphasizes that the child does not yet perform operations Operations: reversible mental actions that allow children to do mentally what before they could do only physically. o Preoperational thought is the beginning of the ability to reconstruct in thought what has been established in behavior. o The Symbolic Function Substage o The Intuitive Thought Substage

Cataracts

• A thickening of the lens of the eye that causes vision to become cloudy, opaque, and distorted. • By age 70, 30% of individuals experience a partial loss of vision due to cataracts • Treated with glasses then a surgical procedure • Diabetes is a risk factor for the development of cataracts

Major Piagetian Concepts

• ALL BIOLOGY!!! • ORGANIZATION • ADAPTATION o Assimilation and Accommodation always simultaneous occur which allows you to bring intelligence! • Intelligence= organization and adaptation o Adaptation= assimilation and accommodation Implications... • Piaget's ideas of assimilation and accommodation apply across life: • The things you are learning now will continue to shape the way you process information for the rest of your life! • You will assimilate new experiences through the foundations that are being established now

Piaget's view on cognitive changes in adulthood

• According to Piaget, adults and adolescents use the same type of reasoning (qualitatively the same way) • Many individuals don't' reach the highest elvel of their formal operational thinking until adulthood • Also, many adults do not think in formal operational ways.

Perceptual-Motor Coupling

• Action can guide perception, and perception can guide action o Perception and action are coupled o Action educates perception

Adult Cognitive Performance

• Adults o Likely to use formal operations in a field of expertise o Use concrete operations in less familiar areas • Performance o Likely to be highly inconsistent across content areas unless the person has had a chance to build knowledge and skills Thinking • Expertise o Extensive, highly organized knowledge and understanding of a particular domain o Expertise shows up more among middle-aged or older adults • Distinguishing novices from experts: o Experts rely on accumulated knowledge to solve problems o Experts have better strategies and shortcuts o Experts are more creative flexible in problem solving

Piaget's Preoperational Stage (class notes)

• Ages 18 or 24 months to 7 years • Internalized representations but thinking is IRREVERSIBLE, illogical, and "magical" • EGOCENTRISM o Thinking what you know, everyone knows, etc. o Limitations in perspective taking Interpersonal limitations Special limitations o Piaget's "Three Mountains" Task to Evaluate Spatial Egocentrism • SYNCRETISM • ANIMISM o Giving lifelike characteristics to inanimate objects • CENTRATION o Something new catches your attention • STATIC IMAGERY o Dropping stick • Poor Conservation Skills o Correct ways to solve conservation tasks One-to-one correspondence • "Counting" • Most 5 year olds Identity • "You didn't drop or spill any" • "You didn't add any of take ay away" Reversible thinking • "All you'd have to do is pour it back, and you'd see it's the same" Only reversible thinking "graduates" you to concrete operations o Correcting some common misconceptions Some preoperational kids CAN solve conservation tasks- but they can NOT use reversible thinking So, you do NOT have to be concrete operational to solve conversation tasks Poor Classification Skills

Assumptions about Piagetian Stages

• Assumes that is stages are UNIVERSAL (everyone goes through them no matter what your situation—we now it's not EXACTLY true... but pretty close) • INVARIANT: it's the same for everybody (no variability) • IRREVERSIBLE: means it's by choice • Ages are VERY approximate- the SEQUENCE of development is more important

Adulthood Attention

• Attentional skills are often excellent in early adulthood and divided attention and multitasking applies to many adults • Older adults may not be able to focus on relevant information as effectively as younger adults. • Older adults have deficiencies in executive attention • Older adults tend to be less adept at exercising selective attention than younger adults are • Older adults perform the same with vigilance and sustained attention as younger adults

Metamemory in children

• By 5 or 6 years of age, children usually know that familiar items are easier to learn than unfamiliar ones, short lists easier than long ones, that recognition is easier than recall, and that forgetting becomes more likely over time • Young children's metamemory is limited. o They don't understand that related items are easier to remember than unrelated ones or that remembering the gist of a story is easier than remembering information verbatim. • By 5th grade, students understand that gist recall is easier than verbatim recall • Preschool children have an inflated opinion of their memory abilities

Macular Degeneration

• Causes deterioration of the macula of the retina, which corresponds to the focal center of the visual field. • Have relatively normal peripheral vision but be unable to see clearly what is right in front of them. • 1 in 25 individuals from 66 to 74 years of age and 1 in 6 of those 75 old and older • Detected early= laser surgery • Is difficult to treat and thus a leading cause of blindness in older adults

Adult decrements in perception occur

• Changes in perception are usually gradual and minor • Usually become noticeable in the 40's • By age 65, most have some impairment • Compensations and adjustments easily made • Two kinds of changes o Rising sensory thresholds

Criticisms of Piaget's Theory

• Children's performance is sometimes best explained by components not directly part of his theory o Ex. Language development, motivation, initiative o Non-comprehensive • Children's performance not as consistent as theory would suggest o Intra-Individual differences o Stages not "tight" • Ages may not be "right" o Inter-Individual difference • Underplay of sociocultural difference o Non-universal o Biggest/most important criticism o Estimates of Children's Competence, Stages, Effects of Training, Culture and education are all things being put into question o Neo-Piagetians: argue that Piaget got some things right but that his theory needs considerable revision. They give more emphasis to how children use attention, memory, and strategies to process information. More accurate portrayal of children's thinking require attention to children's strategies; the speed at which children process information; the specific task involved; and the divisions of problems into smaller, more precise steps

*Changes in Eye/Vision with age

• Cornea thins, less moisture • Iris looses some color o Eye color can change • Pupil decreases after 20 o Less light is entering through the focus point, more light coming in the iris vision becomes more diffuse • Lens continues to grow thicker • Lens yellows (separate from cataracts) o Less light is coming in! • Ciliary muscles begin to turn to connective tissue after 30 • Retinal sensitivity decrease after 60 o Your retina is sensitive to one foci of light • Rhodopsin regeneration longer

Glaucoma

• Damages the optic nerve because of the pressure created by a buildup of fluid in the eye • 1% of individuals in their 70s and 10 % of those in their nineties have it • Treated with eye drops • If untreated; it destroys a person's vision

Vygotsky's Contributions

• Development as an apprenticeship • Social context-expert partner • ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT o The difference between what can be done alone versus in apprenticeship • SCAFFOLDING o Differences in assistance offered by teacher, dependent on learner's needs • Another developmental theory that focuses on children's cognition is Vygotsky's theory. • (Like Piaget) Vygotsky emphasized that children actively construct their knowledge and understanding • In Vygotsky's theory, children are more often described as social creatures than in Piaget's theory o They develop their ways of thinking and understanding primarily through social interaction.

Information Processing Key Characteristics

• Emphasis on processing, manipulating, monitoring and strategizing about information • Not a stage approach: stresses CONTINUITY of development o Same basic processes always present, just change in efficiency or amount (not so much in KIND)

Piaget's Sensorimotor Stage

• First 18-24 months of life (approx.)) • Action Oriented Intelligence o Explore the environment and that action leads to intelligence • No "HARD EVIDENCE" of internalized representations • Development of the OBJECT CONCEPT o Passive reaction to a disappearing object o Out of sight out of mind • Development of DEFERRED IMITATION o Infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences (such as seeing and hearing) with physical, motoric actions—hence the term "sensorimotor"

*Touch

• First sense to develop, last to leave • Most complex and most important • Least understood • Tactile derivation is social deprivation • Reflexes and touch • Virtually no decline when skin thickness etc. taken into account o Infancy NB do respond to touch NB can feel pain Circumcisions: amazing resilience o Adulthood Changes in touch and pain are associated with aging Could detect touch much less in the lower extremities (ankles, knees, etc.) than in the upper extremities (wrists, shoulders, etc.) Decline in touch sensitivity are not problematic Older adults are less sensitive to pain and suffer from it less than younger adults do

Audition

• Frequency- "pitch" o Range 20 (lowest pitch sound you can hear)-20,000(highest one you can hear) Hz o Middle C 262 Hz (pretty low) o Most sensitive 100-4000 Hz (pretty restrictive range) o Human speech 200-2000 Hz • Amplitude: "loudness/intensity" o Decibels are logarithmic (10dB=2x)

Executive Function

• Higher-level cognitive processes linked to development of brain's prefrontal cortex • Managing one's thoughts to engage in goal-directed behavior and to exercise self-control • Information processing mechanisms that, together are important in: o Regulating behavior o Planning o Performing complex cognitive tasks • Each component predictive of cognitive performance in wide range of tasks • Taken together, predict IQ, reasoning, and school grades • Brain based, in prefrontal cortex • Working memory • Inhibition • Switching o Shifting flexibility form different tasks, rules, or mindsets

Speed of Processing Information

• How fast we process information often influences what we can do with that information. • Processing speed can be assessed using a reaction-time task in which individuals are asked to push a button as soon as they see a stimulus such as a light. • Does Processing Speed Matter? o How quickly children can process information is linked with their competence in thinking

Auditory threshold

• How loud must a sound be in order to be detected? o Infants 20-30dB (Hear all normal conversation) o Adults 5-10dB o Age 55 15-20 dB o Age 75 30dB At age 75 you hear at the same level as a newborn • Actually interacts with frequency • Much worse in "high pitches", especially with age • Some "low pitch" loss in relatively severe cases OSHA (Occupational Safety & Health Administration) sound level guidelines

Piaget's Formal Operational Stage

• Hypothetical thinking/abstract reasoning • Scientific Problem Solving • Conclusions based on logic, not experience • Ability to separate form and content of problem • Adolescence • Everyday functioning not always here • Later qualitative shifts beyond this • Appears between 11 and 15 years old. Individuals move beyond concrete experiences and think in abstract and more lofical ways. • Adolescents develop images of ideal circumstances • They begin the entertain possibilities for the futre and are fascinated with what they can becomes. • Can use more systematic and logical reasoning in solving problems • Abstract, Idealistic, and Logical Thinking o Adolescents use Hypothetical-deductive reasoning: they develop hypotheses, or best guesses, and systematically deduce, or conclude, which is the best path to follow in solving the problem • Adolescent Egocentrism

The Zone of Proximal Development

• Importance of social influences, especially instruction, to children's cognitive development is reflected in his concept of the zone of proximal development • Vygotsky's term for the rage of tasks that are too difficult for the child to master alone but that can be learned with guidance and assistance from adults or more-skilled children. o The lower limit of the ZPD is the level of skill reached by the child working independently o The upper limit is the level of additional responsibility the child can accept with the assistance of an able instructor • Captures the child's cognitive skills that are in the process of maturing and can be accomplished only with the assistance of a more-skilled person • "Buds" or "flowers" of development

Metacognition

• Includes thinking about and knowing when and where to use particular strategies for learning or for solving problems • Conceptualization of ___________ includes several dimensions of executive function, such as planning (deciding how much time to spend focusing on a task), evaluation (monitoring progress toward task completion), and self-regulation (modifying strategies as work on the task progresses) • Metamemory • _________ helps people to perform many cognitive tasks more effectively • _______ played an important role in adolescents' ability to generate effective hypotheses about solving problems

Component of Intellect

• Information or facts (or trivia) • Thinking/problem solving • Memory • Attention • Information Processing • Language interfaces • "Intelligence" • Creativity

Self understanding is a part of TOM, EF, and metacognition

• Know how you best work • Know your rhythms • Know your "sweet sports" and needed "supports" • Plan and monitor how you are progressing on big tasks • Use the strategies that enhance your performance most often • Keep aware and update yourself understanding

Vygotsky Language and Thought

• Language is a problem-solving tool • Children use speech not only for social communication but also to help them solve tasks • Believed that young children use language to plan, guide, and monitor their behavior. • Private Speech: the use of language for self-regulation o An important took of thought during the early childhood years • Language and thought initially develop independently of each other and then merge. • All mental functions have external, or social, origins. • Children must.. o Use language to communicate with others before they can focus inward on their own thoughts o Communicate externally and use language for a long period of time before they can make the transition from external to internal speech Occurs between 3 and 7 years (involves talking to ones self) • Children who use a lot of private speech are more socially competent than those who don't o Private speech represents an early transition in becoming more socially communicative o When they talk to themselves, they are using language to govern their behavior and guide themselves

Metacognition in adolescence and adulthood

• Metacognition is increasingly recognized as a bery important cognitive skill not only in adolescence but also in emerging adulthood. • Adolescents have an increased capacity to monitor and manage cognitive resources to effectively meet the demands of a learning task. • Metacognitive skills such as planning, strategizing, and monitoring, is important for college student's ability to think critically • An important aspect of cognitive functioning and learning is determining how much attention will be allocated to an available resource. • By middle age, adults have accumulated a great deal of metacognitive knowledge that they can draw on to help them combat a decline in memory skills. • Older adults tend to overestimate the memory problems they experience on a daily basis

Auditory Changes

• Mild hearing impairments common: Deafness rare • Presbycusis: loss of high frequency sounds • More men affected • Loud sounds (music) cause loss • Speech Perception difficulty due to hearing loss • Serious difficulty for novel of complex stimuli • Poor listening conditions contribute

Piaget's background information

• No other theory has had so much impact on understanding of development • Scope of theory Broad • Biological background o Got his PhD at around age 20 WOW • Got interested in origins of intelligence o By observing his children • "The worst possible way to build a theory" • PROFESSOR LIKES HIM

Evaluating Vygotsky's Theory

• Not evaluated as thoroughly as Piaget's theory • Vygotsky's view of the importance of sociocultural influences on children's development fits with the current belief that it is important ot evaluate the contextual factors in learning. • Vygotsky's is a Social constructivist approach: emphasizes the social contexts of learning and the construction of knowledge through social interaction. • Piaget's endpoint= formal operation thought • Vygotsky's endpoint can differ, depending on which skills are considered to be the most important in a particular culture. • For Piaget, children construct knowledge by transforming, organizing, and reorganizing previous knowledge. • For Vygotsky, children construct knowledge through social interaction • Criticisms: o Vygotsky was not specific enough about age-related changes, o Not adequately describing how changes in socioemotional capabilities contribute to cognitive development o He overemphasized the role of language in thinking o His emphasis on collaboration and guidance has potential pitfalls

Development as Adaptation

• Piaget defined "intelligence" as adaptation to the environment • Adaptation linked in different ways to "survival of the fittest", development in general, and "successful aging"

Auditory Changes over life-span

• Pitch discrimination improves with age • Sound localization requires motor control and separation of ears • Role of ears infections in speech perception o Speech perception and speech production difficulty • <20% have hearing problems before age 55 o Audition is second to last to come and the first to go • 75% of adults over 75 have hearing loss o Cohort effects in this that are now diminishing • Hearing and social competence issues

Cognitive Change in Adulthood

• Post formal thought o Thinking that is reflective, relativistic, and contextual Recognition that the correct answer to a problem requires reflective thinking and may vary from one situation to another Become more skeptical about the truth and seem unwilling to accept an answer as final Understand that thinking can't always be abstract; in some instances, it must be realistic and pragmatic Understand that thinking is influenced by emotions Problem finding • Young adults are more likely to use postformal thought than adolescents o Research has yet to document that postformal thought is a qualitatively more advanced stage than formal operational thought

Equilibration

• Process of achieving mental stability where internal thoughts are consistent with the evidence received from the external world

Hearing (Audition)

• Psychophysiological and behavior measures • 1947 Bernard & Sontag- prenatal hearing o Making loud noises in front of pregnant woman to see how the fetus was startled HEY THEY CAN HEAR • All preemies can hear o Hearing comes on relatively early compared to vision o Amniotic fluid in newborn's ears: rapid improvement in first few days As it drains, hearing improves

Information Processing Changes with Development

• RETRIEVAL STRATEGIES improves • MONITORING: evaluation of progress towards goal • SELECTIVE ATTENTION improvements • Increased Processing Capacity (RAM) • Increased AUTOMATIZATION • Expanded Knowledge Base • Advanced METACOGNITION

A working definition of Successful aging

• Reaching age 70 while meeting these four criteria o No major chronic disease, such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes or cancer; o No cognitive impairment, meaning memory loss or worsening of basic thinking skills; o No major disabilities that limit the ability to walk around freely and conduct normal daily activities; o No major problems with mental health, such as anxiety or depression.

Cognitive Changes in Adulthood: Realistic and Pragmatic thinking

• Some developmentalists propose that as young adults move into the world of work, their way of thinking does change. o One idea is that as they face the constraints of reality that owkr promotes, their idealism decreases. • Schaie argued that adults do progress beyond adolescents in their use of intellect

Pattern Perception

• Subcortical wiring for o Contrast (light from dark) (3D images) o Contour (infants turn in more to curve surfaces than straight surfaces) o Movement • "Faceness" these three are the recipe for a human face o babies turn into face-like patterns rather than other patterns

TOM and EF contemporary research

• TOM and EF as important in all realms of human functioning • Embedded in interactions of brain structures being stimulated/shaped by appropriate social interaction • Predict positive development across domains • Persons with challenging pasts or developmental disabilities compromised TOM and EF which limit functional capacity

Piaget and Education

• Take a constructivist approach: o Emphasized that children learn best when they area ctive and seek solutions fro themselves o Students learn best by making discoveries, reflecting on them, and discussing them, rather than by blinding imitating the teacher or doing things by rote • Facilitate rather than direct learning: o Effective teachers design situations that allow students to learn by doing o Promote students' thinking and discovery o Teachers listen, watch, and question students, to help them gain better understanding • Consider the child's knowledge and level of thinking: o Students to not come to class with empty minds: concepts of space, time, quantity and causality o Teachers need to interpret what a student is saying and respond in a way that is not too far from the student's level o It is important to examine children's mistakes in thinking to help guide them to a higher level of understanding • Promote the student's intellectual health o Emphasized that children's learning should occur naturally. o Children should not be pushed and pressure into achieving too much too early in their development, before they are maturationally ready • Turn the classroom into a setting of exploration and discovery o The teachers emphasize students' own exploration and discovery. o The classroom are less structured than what we think of as a typical classroom o Workbooks and predetermined assignments are not used o Rather, the teachers observe the students' interest and natural participation in activities to determine what the course of learning will be.

Information Processing Memory

• The retention of information over time • Sensory Register: fraction of second • Working Memory (STM) o 15-30 seconds without rehearsal • LTM: relatively permanent and unlimited • Penfield's exploratory work and implications

Cognitive changes in adulthood: Cognition and Emotion

• To understand cognitive changes in adulthood it is necessary to consider how emotional maturity might affect cognitive development. • They conclude that although emerging and young adults become more aware that emotions influence their thinking, at this point thinking is often swayed too strongly by negative emotions that can produce distorted and self-serving thinking

Theory of Mind

• Understanding your thinking and cognitive abilities and challenges • Understanding that others think both similarly and differently • Gradual breakdown of egocentrism • Develops as a result of social-cognitive mechanisms: o Shared attention in infancy o Taking the perspective of others o Anticipating another's behavior

Problem Solving

• Use of the information-processing system to achieve a goal or arrive at a decision • Executive control processes (executive function) o Guide the election, organization, manipulation, and interpretation of information throughout • Parallel processing o Carrying out multiple cognitive activities simultaneously

Vygotsky's Teaching strategies

• Use the child's ZPD in teaching: o Teaching should begin near the zone's upper limit, so that the child can reach the goal with help and move to a higher level of skill and knowledge. o Offer just enough assistance o "What can I do to help you?" o Observe the child's intentions and attempts and provide support when needed o When the child hesitates, offer encouragement and encourage the child to practice the skill. • Use more-skilled peers as teachers o Remember that it is not just adults who are important in helping children learn. o Children also benefit from the support and guidance of more-skilled children • Monitor and encourage children's use of private speech o Be aware of the developmental change from externally talking to oneself when solving a problem during the preschool years, to privately talking to oneself in the early elementary school years o In the elementary school years, encourage children to internalize and self-regulate their talk to themselves • Place instruction in a meaningful context o Eduactors today are moving away from abstract presentations of material, instead providing students with opportunities to experience learning in real-world settings. • Transform the classroom with Vygotskian ideas. o The Kamehameha elementary education program (KEEP) is based on Vygotsky's theory. The ZPD is the key element of instruction in this program Children might read a story and then interpret its meaning Many of the learning activities take place in small groups All children spend at least 20 minutes each morning in a setting called "center one." Scaffolding is used to improve children's literary skills.

relationships matter

• We are born "social animals" o Born with this predisposition • Simplest way to quiet an infant is by touch • Relationships are important things to "invest in" for your own development as well as others' • Both peer and intergenerational relationships salient in shaping development • ALL of development can be characterized as coming to know about yourself, and the differences between self and others, with increasing focus on others, across maturity o All of development is figuring out relationships

Cognitive changes in adulthood: Reflective and Relativistic Thinking

• William Perry also described changes in cognition that take place in early adulthood • Adolescents often view the world in terms of polarities—right/wrong, we/they, or good/bad. • As youth age into adulthood, they gradually move away from this type of absolutist thinking as they become aware of the diverse opinions and multiple perspectives of others. • Other developmentalists also argue that reflective thinking is an important indicator of cognitive change in young adults