Cognitive Develop. Exam 2

Evaluation of Piaget's Theory • Sensorimotor Period

o Underestimated children's understanding of object permanence • He thinks its 18 to 24 months (explicitly), Baillargeon with drawbridge study proves that they understand it implicitly at 4 ½ months o Infants can imitate facial expressions by 2 weeks • He argued that infants will only imitate things they already do and that they have to have some type of feedback Kids would imitate waggling their finger because they can see that happening • Meltzoff and Moore said they can do it as an infant (2 weeks) Adult would stick their tongue out and then baby would do it too, would do it without feedback

Children as Eyewitnesses • Encoding

Translating external info into mental representations • Has an impact on the quality and durability of what you store Verbatim representation: Exact representation of aspects of an event • Highly detailed and accurate • Fade quickly • Miss peripheral information Gist representation: Essence or main details of an event • Broad with minimum detail • Durable Adults use both types of encoding Children tend to encode all events as verbatim representations • All of their representations are less durable • Very narrow scope, so when you're thinking about a crime and ask what color shirt the guy was wearing they have no idea because they're focused on the central idea of the situation • Shifting from verbatim to gist and that could contribute to childhood amnesia

Folk Physics • Space

Gender differences • Early and persistent, but small • Males: Mental rotation and map reading • Females: Object/location memory • Why? Natural selection • Men and women did different things, men used their spatial abilities for navigation and hunting, females gathered food and used more fine motor skills and memory abilities Differential experiences • More exposure

Article summary

Imaginary Friends • Does not help/is not related with theory of mind or pro-social behavior • Is correlated with increased mental state talk and self-knowledge • Hierarchical relationships o More likely to have this with objects o You see increases in cognitive and social competence • Egalitarian relationships o More likely to have this with invisible friends o You see increases in coping strategies • Not related to a social deficit in teens Conventional figures • See decrease in belief with age (6 to 8 years old) • Belief depends on understanding of possibility and supernatural explanations • Depends on parents promotion of the idea • Belief is not related to cognitive development (piaget's stages)

• Understanding of Desires

o 12 months: Infants demonstrate an appreciation for desires as a means for guiding behavior • 2 kittens study Infants watched as an actor pointed to one of two stuffed kittens, pointed to one and said "oh look at that kitty" in a desiring way, the actor would come back with either one of the kitties, actor with ignored kitten made the infant surprised Understood that the desire for that one kitten should have driven their behavior o 18 months: Realize people may have desires different from their own • Goldfish cracker and broccoli study All kids said they would prefer goldfish over broccoli, would react favorably to one item, said can I have some 14 months shared item infant liked with adult 18 months shared item adult liked

Piaget's Theory • Assumptions

o Abrupt, sudden changes between stages • New abilities build on things that we used to have and is continuous that way • Transition phases: Children can do some tasks but not others, one foot in each stage o Qualitative differences • Type of thinking is different in each stage, don't just know more information but the way you think is different o Each stage is an organized whole • That mode of thinking applies to all tasks that you do and problems that you have, the way they think is going to be used with everything o Children are intrinsically active • Not passive consumers, not just waiting for adults around them to do things to stimulate them, but they seek out stimulation from the environment to learn more about the world around them

• Theory of Mind

o Basic skills required for the development of theory of mind • Viewing others as intentional agents People make things happen We do things because we have a goal, we do things on purpose • Ability to take the perspective of another person Figuring out what those intentions/goals are

• Basic Assumptions

o Capacity is limited • Especially short-term • Can only handle so much information • Space (only so much can fit in there), time (can only perform actions so fast and hold things for so long), or energy (ability to hold and process information all at one time) o Mental processes are on a continuum based on how much capacity they require • Automatic processes: Require no use of the short-term stores resources Occur without conscious awareness, it just happens Do not interfere with the execution of other processes (truly automatic) Do not improve with practice Not influenced by individual differences (education, knowledge, experiences) Ex: Awareness of frequency of occurrence • Awareness of how often things happen, how many times did you go to the bathroom today, automatically remember that without thinking about having to remember it For kids more things become automatic as time goes on • Effortful processes: Require a lot of mental resources Studying should be this type of process Something can shift from effortful to automatic

• Strategy Development

o Cognitive Evolution • Multiple strategies available • Strongest strategies survive Rehearsal might get cut because its not as effective • Change in strategy produces cognitive change Don't just start using effective strategies in the beginning, takes practice o Siegler's Adaptive Strategy Choice Model • There is an overlapping use of certain strategies, not a dramatic shift between strategies Just don't see that kids use one kind of strategies over and over and then switch to a different one, they overlap with each other and are using multiple at one time and then over time they shift use to one or the other, the strategies compete with each other for use, gradual change between the different ones

• Short-Term Store

o Contains • Select info from sensory register That you want to remember now and maybe later on too • Info received from long-term store Remembering a concept that you learned two years ago and pulling it out to use it now o Where active thinking occurs • Our consciousness, what we're processing right now o Encoded form/mental representation • This isn't an exact replica like in sensory store, this is a mental representation of previous information o Capacity is limited here • What is changing here as we get older to hold more info?

• Preoperational developments

o Deferred Imitation • Imitation of something the child witnessed hours or days ago • Imitation is not the big part of this, key is that it is deferred Had to mentally represent that action later in time and can now reproduce it o Symbolic Representation • One thing stands for another Pretending • Gets more advanced throughout this stage • Symbols: Personal representations Broom is a horse right now to them, not to everyone else, only for a short amount of time, not good for communication because they are personal • Signs: Symbols that have an agreed upon meaning A broom being a horse is different than the word dog meaning a physical dog Harder for them to grasp Longer lasting, more public representation Get this at the very end of this stage

• Understanding Beliefs

o Develops between 3 and 5 years o Appearance-reality tasks • Looks like 1 thing, really something else Apple shaped candle 3 year olds say apple, 5 year olds say candle o Surprising contents task • Frogs in a crayon box Mislead by the appearance of something, looks like one thing should be inside and its something different What did you think was in the box before I showed you? • 3 years olds: Fail and say frogs • 5 year olds: Pass and say crayons o Change-of-location task • Move object without character knowing • Where will she look first? 3 years olds: Fail and say current location 5 year olds: Pass and say original locations

• Why are pictures easier than models?

o Dual representation: Ability to think about an object in two different ways at the same time • Can't think of the model as an object and as a representation for the bigger room o Evidence: • 2 ½ year olds could use the scale model if they were not allowed to interact with it If they put it away from them and put it in a case, its less interesting to them in this way and is less like a toy • 3 year olds did worse if allowed to play with model first They think of it as more of a toy and start to fail the task • Shrinking machine experiment Children were made to believe that the model was the actual room shrunken down, show the machine that can make big things small and this helps kids with completing the task because its keeping the object one thing and not two different things of a model and an object • Scale errors View a small object just like the original of a big object • View a small pirate ship as a small version of the real thing and get frustrated that they can't fit in things • Put kids in a room with these real life toys (cars, slides) and let them play with them, take them out and some of the toys are smaller versions now (doll slides and cars) and children still try to play with them like they're the big size Appearance-Reality Distinction • Develops between 3 and 5 • Appearance-reality tasks o Looks like one thing, but really is something else • Take a sponge and spray paint it with grey paint to make it look like a rock • Ex: Candles that looks like an apple, from far away it looks like an apple but up close it looks like a candle 3 year olds fail, when asked what it looks like they say apple, and ask what it really is and three year olds still say an apple • Can't dually represent things and say that it looks like one thing but really is another 4 and 5 year olds pass, they say it really is a candle

• Gender differences • Cultural differences

o Girls are more likely to engage in symbolic play, play longer, and have more complex themes o Boys are more likely to engage in rough-and-tumble play o Themes: • Girls: Family, relationships • Boys: Adventure, aggression, weapons, dominance, super heroes Even if we try to not expose them to violence and aggressive things they are still drawn to things like superheroes and that is violent • Cultural differences o Types of toys • In other cultures they don't have as much variety in toys and use smaller versions of real tools depending on what parents do o Themes • More traditional and based on what their parents do

• Do children understand that mental representations underlie pretend behavior?

o Have to have knowledge of what you're pretending to be in order to pretend to be it • Lillard study Hopping troll: No knowledge of rabbits The troll lives in a land where there's no rabbits so has never seen a rabbit, no ones told them about rabbits, no mental representation of what a rabbit is, is the troll pretending to be a rabbit when it hops? 4 year olds say yes, they don't understand that pretending requires knowing about what you're pretending • 3 and 4 year olds believe that inanimate objects can pretend Take a rock and dress it up and ask the kids if the rock is pretending to be a girl and they say yes • Custer study Fisherman pretending to have fish on line Boot is actually on the line Which picture shows what he is thinking? • 3 year olds answer correctly, pick the one with the fish

• Factors influencing accuracy

o IQ • More accurate recall with higher IQ o Incentive • Incentive for accurate recall leads to more accurate recall o Level of stress • Intermediate levels are best o Emotional support/talk • How they've talked about it and how much support they have during the process o Background Knowledge • Knowledge can improve recall • But a well-established script can interfere with accurate recall You know how things go and the same things happen every time you do something, a child may remember something that usually happens rather than something that happened one time o Characteristics of the interview • Type of questions Open-ended leads to more accurate answers • Warmth of interviewer Kids like nice people so if they are then kids are more accurate • Frequency with which questions are asked Younger children are more likely to give-in to repeated questioning (think they are giving the wrong answers so they change their answer) • Props Anatomically correct dolls, ask kids where someone touched them (even if no one did), they automatically point to the genitals Produce significant false memories for kids

• Sensory Register

o Large amounts of info for short time o Exact representation, very accurate o Stays long enough to pass on to short-term store o Separate stores for each sense modality • Someone says something to you, you're not paying attention, decide to pay attention and you can kind of still hear it for a little bit to store it • Visual picture is burned into your mind for a second or so • Sperling Study Three rows of four letters each People would remember 3 or 4 items, but they felt like they saw them all Would play a sound with it, high medium or low tone If he played the high tone, remember the top row and so on Tone was always played after the picture was taken down People would recall that one line for whatever tone was played, we actually hold all of the info but by the time that you recall one you lose all of the rest of the info

• Where do babies come from?

o Level 1: Babies always existed • Were given to their mothers, the stork brings them • 3-7 years old o Level 2: Babies are made, but not sure how • 4-8 years old • Mom made me out of blood and bones that she had left over from my brother, kids make up things o Level 3: Recognize importance of a special relationship between a man and a woman • 5-10 years old o Level 4 and 5: Understand basic facts, but not biology • Sperm and egg meet and a baby is made • 10-13 years old o Level 6: Understand biology of how babies are made • 14 and up

• Factors Influencing Strategy Use

o Mental Capacity • Strategies are effortful and deplete resources • Older children's processing is more automatized and requires fewer resource o Knowledge Base • Knowledge impacts speed and efficiency of information processing in a domain Why you have to take courses in order because knowledge builds on itself • Chi Study Child experts outperform adult novices in memory of chess board configurations Configurations had to be possible in a real game of chess for the kids to outperform adults • Knowledge impairs correct recall in DRM tasks for adults, but not children Adults will think they saw sleep in a list of words relating to that category even though they didn't because they have organized ways of thinking o Metacognition • Knowledge of own cognition Awareness of your own thinking, your own thought processes, the ways you learn Each area of cognition has its own metacognition • Use to adjust inefficient thinking • Metamemory: Knowledge of what memory is, how it works, and what factors influence it We know that abstract words are harder to remember, we know shorter lists are easier to remember than long ones, you know what you need to remember for your exam and you know what strategies you need to use to remember those things Older children are better than younger children at monitoring their memory • They are not old enough to apply strategies to help them with their memory Flavell study • 4 year olds looked at 10 pictures • How many will you be able to remember? • Children are optimistic about their abilities (all 10!) o If you do it multiple times they know they did bad the first time but are still optimistic about the next time o May benefit from feedback about memory function • More realistic about other children • Metamemory gets better with age and encourages use of strategies due to awareness of improved recall

• Universality

o Piaget believed all children pass through the same stages in the same order o Also develop same basic forms of knowledge • All children are going to develop object permanence and an understanding of conservation o Cross-cultural studies • Against: Specific cultural experiences can affect development Could make them lag behind and make them have a different final development period • Depending on formal education, lack of it may lead to children never reaching formal operational • For: All cultures eventually acquire Piaget's forms of knowledge Everyone eventually learns object permanence and conservation No culture where the stages are reversed If you put the information in a form that they are used to and in context that they know then they do better

Evaluation of Piaget's Theory • Preoperational/Concrete Operational Period

o Piaget underestimated children's abilities • Egocentrism Tasks This requires spatial calculation which is very hard for kids, verbal communication, and memory Looking at the same object • Might be different if they are looking at different objects (dog or cat) and different if they have to rotate something Competing frames of reference • Children have to choose between what they see and what someone else is seeing, the one most salient to them is their own so they focus on that one Unable to express some concepts • Right or left, upside down or right side up • Conservation Tasks Reducing verbal demands improves performance • Invariance of number o Study done where they showed three year olds, habituate them to a number like 3, did it in the context of a game, some plates with mice on them are winners and some plates are losers, a plate with three toy mice were winners and ones with two mice are losers, once they realize this they change the length of the row of the mice or they took one mouse away, children were not affected by change in length (still understood that 3 was a winner) but if they took one away they were surprised by that and still wanted 3 to be the winner • Conservation of taste and weight o If you have three to five year olds watch you dissolve sugar in a cup and you can't see it anymore, even if the kids can't see it they say the water will now taste sweet, so understand that it is changed even though invisible, and get it that it should weigh more now with something in it

• How much and how accurate?

o Preschoolers do not spontaneously remember a lot of detail • Even immediate recall of events o What children freely recall is usually accurate (if no suggestion) • Stick with very open-ended questions instead of asking them straight forward questions (tell me everything that happened at preschool vs. did Susie take your book bag at lunch time) o Children focus on central ideas (not details) • Tell you that bobby took that bike, but not the color of the bike because encoding verbatim o General cues lead to higher recall of accurate and inaccurate information *** • They tell you more information but its going to be a mix of true and false information • False memories may stick around and be durable because they encode them as gist memories (they didn't happen) and true memories are encoded as verbatim and will not last as long ** • How long do they last? o Accuracy is the same if 1 month delay or less o Age differences when there are longer delays, around 5 months

Evaluation of Piaget's Theory • Formal Operational Period

o Recent studies have found lower levels of performance o Unfamiliar methods may have led to underestimation o Hints and training lead to improved performance o Content may influence performance • If it is in an area we are very familiar with we do better

• Long-Term Store

o Relatively permanent store with very large capacity • Strategies for how you do things, memories that are important to you o If information in the short-term store is encoded deeply enough, it will transfer to the long-term store

Folk Physics • Time

o Research suggests that infants understand temporal order • Infants recognize when words are spoken out of order By about 2 months old • Infants can detect patterns and anticipate events Presented photos in left to right pattern, would turn their heads when they expected the next picture By about 3 months • Infants can tell if a movie is playing backwards See in a movie water going out of a glass when poured and doesn't make sense • Infants can imitate sequences of actions in the correct order By 12 months How to interact with a baby, pick them up, put them on blanket, wrap it up, put it in bed Explicitly know it by then o Infants also understand duration of events • Colombo et al. Infants watched as lights were flipped on for 2 sec then off for 5 sec Repeated several times then did not turn lights back on after 5 sec Results: Heart rate slowed down if lights did not turn back on after 5 sec o Children have trouble estimating the sequence of reoccurring events • 2 and 3 year olds use time-related terminology, but often incorrectly • Better at estimating longer periods of time as they get older Increases steadily from 4 to 10 years old

• Why children use a strategy when it does not help

o Utilization deficiency • Use a strategy that does not improve performance Do not have (cognitive) resources to use it • Use it anyway, it decreases performance, but it could be effective if they had the resources Usually occurs with new strategies • As they're learning to use it you see a dip in performance Beneficial because they will eventually master the strategy Children may not realize the strategy is not helping

• Fantasy

o Ways of reasoning about physical world that violate known physical principles • Ex: Easter bunny, magic o Children say they do not believe in magic • But their behavior shows they do o Subbotsky study • 4 and 6 year olds told about a magic box that turns pictures into real objects • Would ask kids if this could really happen? • Kids say they did not believe it • Shown the box and objects created in the box • Left in room alone with good/bad pictures Interested if they would try to use it and what types of pictures they would use • 90% of children tried the box (with good pictures) • Told experimenter that "box does not work" and were upset about it o Harris et al study • 4 and 6 year olds asked to imagine that there was either a bunny or a monster in a box Kids said it was just pretend • Results: 4 of 12 kids in monster condition were scared and would not let experimenter leave them alone even though they said it was pretend 0 children in bunny condition were scared Half of the children said they wondered if there really was a bunny or monster inside the box o Belief is very fragile o Understanding fantasy can require advanced cognitive abilities • Bering and Parker study Children had to guess in which of 2 boxes a toy was hidden Half were told that Princess Alice would tell them if they picked the wrong box 7-9 year olds moved their hand to the other box if there was an unexpected event • They attributed the event to Princess Alice, but younger children did not

Executive Function Working Memory

o Working memory • Involves both storage and processing capacity • Older children can hold more in working memory than younger children May be because older children can rehearse faster • Baddeley's Working Memory Model Visual and spatial information is processed separately from verbal information Hale, Bronik, Fry study: 8 year olds, 10 year olds, undergrads, primary task was either visual (placement of x in tic tac toe boards) or verbal (remember digits), had secondary task to name the color (verbal) or they had to point to the color within an array of colors (spatial), if primary and secondary were the same then they did worse rather if both were different • For the youngest group, even if tasks were different that hurt them just as much, by 10 years old there is a clear separation of verbal and spatial but not before that

Formal Operational Period

• 11 or 12 years old to adulthood • Hypothetical Deductive Reasoning o Ability to generate and test hypotheses and to draw logical conclusions from the results o Consider all solutions, predict future, think about the future • Pendulum experiment o Have different variables to make the pendulum go faster, determine which variable is most important, have to go about it systematically and isolate the variables and test them each on their own o Length of string matters most • Colorless Liquid Task o Beaker of solution, add the different chemicals to make yellow, one of them prevented the solution from becoming yellow, had to combine certain ones to make yellow and isolate them to figure it out

Preoperational Period

• 2 years to 6 or 7 years • Mental representation • Defined by weaknesses o Centration • Tendency to focus on only one aspect of a problem • This is why they fail conservation tasks, because they focus on one feature (whatever is most salient to them) and miss the point of the problem • Conservation: Changes in physical appearance do not change amounts Glasses of water, only look at height of glass • Two trains problem Watch two trains moving across a screen, start from different points but travel same distance, ask which one traveled farther and they say the one that is over farther and don't consider other factors o Egocentrism • Inability to take other's perspectives Children's speech Inability to take another person's visual perspective • Different from being selfish because they don't understand that other people feel different from them • Three mountains problem Take children into a room and put these three mountains in front of them, have them walk all around it and see whole thing, child sits on one side and ask them to say what they see, then ask them what someone on a different side would see, if they're in this stage that person will see the same thing to them, but if aged out then they have a different opinion o Lack of Hierarchical Classification • Knowledge that a subclass cannot be larger than the superordinate class that includes it • Flower problem (class inclusion problem) 4 blue flowers, 12 yellow flowers, ask kids are there more yellow flowers or more flowers, they say more yellow because they don't understand that the category of flowers includes both kinds o Understanding of Relations • Ability to focus on the relation that is relevant in a situation Ignoring information that is irrelevant and focusing on what is relevant Ex: Seriation problem • Have kids order things from shortest to longest, early stage can't do this, then if they can you give them a new stick and tell them to put it in the order correctly, kids in this stage can't do this

Infantile Amnesia Cont.

• 3. Development of the self o Cannot be retrieved if no sense of self o Develops around 10 or 11 where they have a solid understanding of who they are • People think if you don't have this then you can't make memories before because you don't know what's important to you and why things matter • 4. Incompatibility o Early memories may be encoded differently than later memories • Incompatibility between the way infants encode information and how adults retrieve them later in life o Encoding specificity principle: Retrieval is best when you reinstate the conditions of encoding • If the situation of encoding matches the situation of retrieval, then this is best for retrieving memories • Children have a different world view than adults • Knowledge states are different between kids and adults • Verbal ability is different, when babies and kids not near as verbal as you are when you're an adult Hayne study • Kids who were around 2 years old (not very verbal), showed them a sequence of actions that would be hard for them to explain with their words what's going on • Tested them 6 to 12 months later, see if they could verbally and nonverbally express what happened at the beginning • Now they could explain those type of steps, but if they were nonverbal at the initial event they could only explain them nonverbally even though they now had the ability to verbalize things

Concrete Operational Period

• 6 or 7 years old to 11 or 12 years old • Children overcome weaknesses of the preoperational period o Less egocentric (pass 3 mountain problem) o Understand conservation problems o Solve class inclusion problems o Solve multiple classification problems o Complete seriation task o Understand transitive inference (A > B > C) • Limitations o Formal logic o Abstract thinking • Can mentally represent but only things that have to do with concrete reality

o Imaginary friend

• 65% of children up to age 7 had imaginary friends • Can be beneficial Tend to be more creative and tell better stories, better emotional understanding Processing emotional events, problem solving, express fear and insecurities, creativity, social skills, executive function (batman) • Children with imaginary friends are more likely to be first born or only children No indication of being social or not Girls are more likely to have them • Children behave as if they are real • Do they think they really exist? No • Taylor: Experimenter asks about imaginary friend Listen intently, ask questions, take notes Child will point out that it is not real

Executive Function o Attention

• Attention span increases as children get older Younger children have trouble paying attention and concentrating on tasks • Even in babies there's a difference, if toddlers have a good attention span then when they're older that will carry over too • Vurpillot study Used an eye tracker to follow attention Children were shown two houses, had different number of windows, would ask child if they were the same or different Results: • Younger children - random o Leads to poor memory • Older children - Systematic o Leads to better memory • Selective attention: Ability to attend to helpful information and ignore irrelevant information Get better with age and experience • Miller study Look at the box and there are ½ pictures of houses and ½ cages, under houses if you lift them up then will have household objects, under cages will be animals, their job is to remember the animals so only look in the cages Results: • Selective attention improved with age (3-8 years) • Younger children randomly attend o Poor memory • Older children selectively attend o Best memory

Sensorimotor Period

• Birth to 2 years • Infant uses senses and motor abilities to understand the world • Intelligence is limited to infant's own actions on the environment o Not mentally representing things yet so this is how they understand • 6 Substages of the sensorimotor period

o Conventional make-believe figures

• Children have trouble understanding that these are imaginary (especially Santa) • Why? Adults make them seem real 80% of kids believe in Santa, but 40% in things like monsters and fairies They are culturally supported • Child knows the things they make up are make believe, but have trouble when other people make things up

Pictures and Models

• Children understand that pictures represent something else by 19 months o Before 19 months, when you hand a baby a picture of something they try to interact with it as if it was real • Picture of a banana and try to eat it, interacting with it but does not understand that the picture represents something else • Understanding of scale models does not seem to develop until 3 years o DeLoache: Big and little snoopy • Hide the snoopy doll in a big room, using a scale model she would show children where she was hiding the snoopy doll in the room, using the scale model she would show the children how she would find little snoopy using the model, tell them to go find big (real) snoopy in the real room using the model • 3 year olds could find snoopy, but 2 ½ year olds could not • 2 ½ could use line drawing as a model (picture) but not a little room that she built

• Younger children are more susceptible to suggestion than older children or adults

• Children will follow the leads of the adult's questions o Can change their memories if there is leading questioning • We think we're being helpful when we say "did he take the bike?" but that is very suggestible to kids and they may say yes just because they're thinking about it o Did she touch you with a spoon? No. Did you like it when she touched you with the spoon? No. No, why not? I don't know. You don't know? No. What did you say when she touched you with the spoon? I don't like that. • Factors influencing suggestibility o Status of interviewer • If a policeman or lawyer is doing it then more intimidating and will follow their leading questioning o Child's knowledge base • Older children know more so that would let them be les suggestible o Cognitive factors o Overconfidence • Kids don't think they won't be suggestible but they are

Representation of Knowledge

• Declarative memory: Memory for facts and events (the things I can declare/explain) o Semantic: General Knowledge • Just facts I went to prom with this person in senior year o Episodic: Specific events/episodes (personal episode of your life) • Include context • What is episodic right now may change to semantic as we get older o These are explicit things, you can talk about it, you have conscious awareness of this • Nondeclarative memory: Knowledge of procedures and actions o Memory for how to do things o Riding a bike, hard to do this but it is a memory for that procedure o This is implicit, you just do these things without conscious awareness

Information-Processing Theories

• Everyone has same basic organization • Efficiency of the parts differ o The multi-store model of memory • Sensory store Use attention (what you pay attention to from all of the sensory info goes to STM) to go to Short Term Store (STM) • Short Term Store Use transfer to go to Long Term Store (LTM) • Long Term Store Can use retrieval to go back to STM from LTM

Folk knowledge

• How people "naturally" come to understand aspects of their world • 3 types o Folk psychology o Folk biology o Folk physics

Infantile Amnesia

• Inability to remember experiences before age 3 o If they do then it is really significant (injury, big move, birth of sibling) o Maybe you really don't remember and you just remember stories and pictures of the event too • Not due to inability to form long-term memories • Not due to passage of time • Freud: Repression of forbidden thoughts • 1. Brain development o Structures responsible for forming autobiographical memories are not fully formed o Prefrontal cortex and hippocampus are not fully formed yet • Adults with damage to the hippocampus lack the ability to form new memories so this would support this theory • 2. Social experiences o As children get older, parents talk more about past events • Children ask more about past events as they get older too, so this encourages this talk between kids and parents

Executive Function Inhibition Cognitive Flexibility

• Involves suppressing an active process Ex: Day-night task, Simon Says • Tell children that they have to say day when they see a picture of moon and stars, and opposite for night, they have to inhibit the response to want to say what they see • Preschoolers struggle with inhibition • Older children are better able to suppress a dominant response • Related to ToM and ability to deceive others The ability to think about other people's thoughts in comparison to their own thoughts may help them with these tasks To be able to withhold information from people helps with this too • Ability to shift between rules or tasks • Ex: Dimensional Card Sorting Task No matter what shape the item, put it with the color that matches with it Now we're not going to play color game, we're playing the shape game, put all bunnies with bunny box, changes the role of the boat Results: • 3 year olds struggle with switching; 4 year olds do not

Children as Eyewitnesses

• Lindenberg suggested 3 factors to consider o Memory processes o Focus of the study • What type of information do you need from the child? o Participant factors • Wanting to please the experimenter (want to comply) • Ability to pay attention • Their ability to process emotion

o Implicit understanding of false belief develops before explicit understanding

• Looking behavior: Eyes go to what they should say, but they still say the other one o Wellman et al. • 5 factors that help children Deception as the motive • Say Sally is trying to trick Anne by hiding her marble Child makes transformation • If the child does the action of moving the marble then they can do better • Memory Target object absent at questioning • Dual encoding, if they don't see the object in the new location then it could help them Protagonist's belief stated • She thinks that the marble is here, so where is she going to look for it? • Takes a lot of the demand of the task so could be easier Emphasize time frame • If you say first this happens, second this happens, where will she look for the marble first?

o Why do younger children fail?

• Memory deficit Remembering previous beliefs may be very hard • Dual encoding hypothesis Children have trouble representing something in two ways • Lack of executive function Inhibition: Regulating their behavior Cognitive abilities to plan and inhibit actions when they're not appropriate Introduce kids to this mean monkey, show they some cool stickers and some boring stickers, mean monkey always gets to choose first and is always going to choose the ones that you want, kids have to figure out that they need to trick the monkey, kids can't inhibit their behavior of wanting a certain sticker to complete this task • Parent-child attachment and parenting style Securely attached children are more likely to pass Authoritative parenting style is best because they explain the reason for certain behaviors and they show the influence/empathy of their behaviors on other people • Language skills May not understand exactly what you're asking • Frequency of mental-state talk When parents tell their children what they're thinking and ask their children what they are thinking it helps When they talk about emotions a lot that helps • Family size Children from larger families do better if they have older siblings Constantly having to take into account other people's perspectives, older siblings deceive younger siblings a lot too so they figure it out quicker • Frequency of adult interaction Parents are talking about things that kids don't think about, so they get an older perspective and hear it more often • Brain development Have to wait for a certain area of the brain to mature or become more specialized in order to understand these beliefs Right TPJ, right temporal partial junction • Less specialized in children, but it means that we have this special area so we are equipped to think about other people's ways of thinking

Conclusions

• Older children remember better than younger children • Why? o Brain development • Prefrontal cortex and hippocampus o Superior basic processes • Basic cognitive processes o Strategies • Older children use better ones and more efficiently o Metacognition • Reflecting on their own cognition, older children understand their own cognitive activities • When they can do this they can alter the way they think about things and do them better o Content knowledge

IP Theories vs. Piaget

• Piaget o Emphasis = Concepts (schemas) • Learn concepts to solve problems o Limitations (why kids are limited) • Primarily due to absence of knowledge, don't have the information or the representation of things • Secondarily due to what child is incapable of doing Absence of knowledge, don't have information or concept to pass a task o Don't understand the concept of conservation, not going to understand that 5 pennies are always 5 pennies and that change of the length of the row is compensated by the space between pennies • IP Theories o Emphasis = Process • Able to process more info in more efficient ways o Limitations (why kids are limited) • Primarily due to what child is incapable of doing • Secondarily due to absence of knowledge o Lack of processing capacity, have to understand that there are 5 pennies, rows are different but the same amount, lots of info to hold, may know the principles but can't give correct answer because no ability to hold that amount of info

Memory Development in Infancy

• Preference for Novelty o Preference for novelty paradigm: Infants familiarized with a stimulus then shown that familiar stimulus and a novel stimulus • Preference for the novel stimulus provides evidence for memory *** • Any type of preferences shows memory, even if kids choose the familiarized stimulus that shows they prefer it and remember it in some way • Babies that are 5 to 6 months old can remember a picture (shown for 5 to 10 seconds) and prefer it for up to 2 weeks • Conditioning o Conjugate-reinforcement procedure • Rovee-Collier study Place a kid in a crib, tie a ribbon connected to mobile to the baby's ankle, when the baby kicks the mobile moves, really kick and learn this connection, reinforcement for the child Bring them back after some delay and looking for this high-kicking reaction, if they come back and do this then they remember that their kicking is tied to the movement of the mobile Infants as young as 2 months remembered for up to 2 weeks Younger infants memories are very context dependent • Ex: Rovee-Collier: Kicking rate is higher after 24 hours if the context is the same o Change color on walls, pattern of bedding, change mobile objects • By 3 months, infants can generalize if they have experience with multiple contexts • Deferred Imitation o Imitating something you previously witnessed o Earliest sign of recall o Young infants can imitate events even after a 24 hours delay • At 6 weeks babies will imitate things they've seen an adult do, facial expressions

Executive Function

• Processes involved in regulating attention and deciding what to do with information o E.g. Working memory, inhibition, selective attention • Individual differences in executive function are related to a variety of high-level cognitive abilities o E.g. reading, math, ToM, IQ • 5 abilities associated with executive function o Speeding of processing • Young children need more time to complete tasks than older children Mental rotation, name retrieval of items, visual search tasks o Memory span • Number of unrelated items that can be recalled in exact order • Increases reliably with age • Adults can remember about 7 items, plus or minus 2

Piaget's Theory

• Question: Where does knowledge come from? o Knowing is an active constructive process • Its an interaction between the world/environment and the individual • They interpret the objects and events based on what they already know and what they have learned so far, influences their interpretation of the world around them • Method: Observed his 3 children o Noticed they had different types of thinking and representation of objects o Took notes about their errors and milestones at different ages with abilities to think

Piaget's Theory Abilities

• Schemes o Mental representations children form of objects and events • Ex: Grasping scheme • Assimilation o Fit new info into old scheme • Cars have two wheels and doors and drive on the road so anything in that category is a car even if it's a truck or dump truck • Sometimes this works and they get it right and can grow this scheme even more • Makes the world predictable and less scary • Accommodation o Update scheme based on new info • Interpret the dump truck as a car and mom says no look at the differences, look at a horse and call it a dog and mom says no • Narrow down old schema and add a new schema for the new information • Language errors have this happens, baby thinks its good to call every man dada but then they learn that's not right and has to update their schemas • Equilibration o Motivates use of assimilation and accommodation to get accurate schemes o Want to be in a state of equilibrium and want to know how the world works correctly with the right information o Balancing our mental model with how the world really works o Candle example, think firework is assimilated to their candle schema, someone says no its different and is accommodated to make a new schema for fireworks • Like that state of equilibrium where it all makes sense and hate the in between period where it does not make sense • State of equilibrium (desired) • State of disequilibrium (undesired) In the middle period when things don't make sense Either ignore this and don't care or they could try to assimilate it (make sense of it based on what they know and find the best match) or they could accommodate (update prior knowledge)

Symbolic Play

• Substituting one thing for another in a playful setting o Symbolic play begins between 15 and 18 months • Ex: Banana as a phone • One real toy/thing to represent something else o Peaks around 5 to 7 years • 10-33% of their time is in pretend play o Can be solitary or social • Solitary around 1 ½ but social around 3 o Sociodramatic play: Children take different roles and act out a story • Have to mentally represent the actions and thoughts of other people so it takes longer to develop

What are symbols?

• Symbols o An object that represents something else • Represents an event, an idea, another object • A word dog represents an actual dog • A scale model or a map to go find something o Basic understanding around 18 months • Representational insight o Knowledge that an entity can stand for something else • 18 months • One thing can stand for or represent something else

Folk Psychology

• Theory of mind: Understanding of mental activity o Memories o Perceptions o Intentions o Desires o Beliefs • Belief-Desire Theory of Mind o Proposed by Wellman o Actions are caused by two sources • Beliefs: Perception-based ideas about reality What we think is true based on what we perceive in the environment • Desires: Based on emotions and physiological states Representations of unsatisfied needs o Beliefs and desires lead us to action o For every action there is a reaction

Strategy Use

• Thoughts/actions performed deliberately to enhance memory o Learned and refined through experience o Older children use more effective strategies and use them more often o Improvement depends on experience • Why children do not use a strategy: o Mediational deficiency • Strategy would not help if they used it Use it, it doesn't help, next time they won't use it o Production deficiency • Strategy would help, they just don't use it They are not producing the use of a strategy, just don't think about it