Exam 3
Intermodal Perception (broad)
The coordination of info from different sensory modalities (Adults may choose to use this in a way of directing a person attention to a bus coming)
Astigatism
The cornea on the surface of the eye is uneven, refracting light in multiple places on the retina
When can most infants discriminate depth
As soon as they can crawl
Workspace limitation
As working memory is limited, children will only be able to retain a few items of info at the same time
At what age do babies begin to respond differently do various emotional expressions
At about 2-3 months, babies begin to respond differently to various emotional expressions. For example, if mother expresses sadness, babies look away, or show increased mouth movements. If mother expresses anger, some babies cry vigorously, others show "frozen" look
Did nativists claim many perceptual abilities were present before, at, or after birth
At birth
Degree of differentiation
At first, the baby focuses on fairly big chunks or only the prominent features of things. Over time, the child focuses more and more on details, on finer gradations, on more difficult discriminations
Do babies prefer to look at attractive or less attractive faces
Attractive faces (they tend to be symetrical)
At what age do infants start to loose the sound and sight discrimination that adults have
Around 1 year
When does kinetic cues develop
As early as 2-3 months
At what age are infants able to use tools
11 months
At what age can infants understand and judge peoples indentions based on their actions
11 months
At what age do babies use use their caregivers' emotional cues to help them figure out what to do and how to feel in new situations
12 months
At what age do babies understand preferences
18 months
At what age are babies making connections between the senses
2 months
What does 20/20 vision mean
20/20 vision means you can see something that is 20 feet away that the average person can also see at 20 feet
Nolting children performance strategy- age 3 & 4
3-4-year-olds only considered whether orange was present of absent in each set. They could only succeed if one set of glass had some orange in it the other did not. If both sets included glasses of orange, they will say that both jugs would task more strongly of orange juice
When do binocular cues develop
4 months
At what age do infants understand that things occur in sequences
5 months
At what age can babies differentiate between happy sad voices, happy surprised and fearful faces
5-6 months
Nolting children performance strategy- age 5&6
5-6-year-olds chose the set that had more glasses of orange (so in the image they would make the incorrect prediction)
When does monocular cues develop
5-7 months
Nolting children performance strategy- age 7&8
7-8-year-olds compared the number of glasses of water and orange in each set, and if one set had more glasses of orange than glasses of water, they said that the jug receiving that set would taste more strongly of juice. If both or neither set had more glasses of orange, the children just guessed
At what age can babies show hand dominance
9 months
Nolting children performance strategy- age 9&10
9-10-year-olds were able to use more appropriate strategies to select the correct set of glasses § Ex: by subtracting the number of classes with water from the number with orange and choosing the set with the larger remained- this works for many but not all problems)
Visual Acuity
A measure of how well an individual can detect visual detail
Constructive Memory
A person's ability to infer, extrapolate or invent info that might never have been directly experienced
Development of Event (episodic) Memory- 2 components
An event must be attended to and perceived for it to be remembered We must make some sense of the event so that it can be represented in our minds and later recalled
Way of Studying Early Sensory/Perceptual Skills- High Amplitude (non-nutritive) Sucking
A sound is presented to the infant every time a strong or high amplitude suck occurs. Infants quickly learn that their sucking controls the sounds, and they will suck more strongly and more often to hear sounds they like the most. The number of high-amplitude sucks produced is used as an index of interest. The sucking rate can also be measured to see if an infant notices when new sounds are played
Sensation
A way that info about the environment is picked up by sensory receptors and transmitted to the brain
Cognitive Interview- Context reinstatement
A witness is asked to reconstruct the original context of the event by describing their scene (ex: by closing their eyes and visualizing) and how they felt at the time
Cognitive Interview- Report everything
A witness is encouraged to report as much as possible, even if some details are only partially remembered or not considered important
What is another name for memory
Applied cognition
Source monitoring
Ability to recall the origin of memories o Children can sometimes have troubles with source monitoring and whether something actually happened or something they thought had happened
At what age should infants get 20/20 vision
About a year
What does it mean when newborns have limited ability to detect color
Adams et al (1994) found newborn infants could distinguish between red and white, but not white an other colors. By 2 months infants can discriminate several other colors than white, including orange, blue some greens and purples. By 4 months infants color vision approaches an adults in being able to discriminate colors
What are affordances
Affordances are what an environment offer or provider for an organism; they are opportunities for action
Amodal Perception
Amodal perception is the perception of the whole of a physical structure when only parts of it affect the sensory receptors (ex: May be an early achievement as young as newborn to 4 weeks old)
What are babies born with
Babies are born with the capacity to think, reason, observe, and search for the truth (To learn about the world and itself)
Do babies prefer to look at female or male faces
Babies prefer to look at female faces
What do babies prefer to look at
Babies seem to prefer patterns with curved edges rather than straight edges. From as young as 2 days old, they prefer patterns that are symmetrical. By about two months, they prefer complex over simple patterns. Again, something happening at two months.
Do babies use social referencing
Babies use a lot of social referencing
Retinal disparity
Because our eyes are set apart, both eyes receive slightly different retinal images. The closer the object is to you, the more different these two images are. You can demonstrate this by aligning an object with your finger from about 20 feet away. Now open and close each eye. The image appears to shift.
How do we know infants have sensory abilities at birth
Because they respond to light, sound, smell, tough and taste
The 3 perceptual skills we use to judge distance/depth
Binocular cues (2-eyed cues- think of binoculars) monocular cues (where the eyes function as one) kinetic (movement) cues
Tabula Rasa
Blank slate, on which experiences and sensory inputs become fused into 'one blooming, buzzing confusion' and that it is only later through experience, that children can discriminate among them,
Why do children have retrieval problems
Brainerd's (1983) research showed children have a retrieval problem because when they were retrieving the wrong info (their own previous response (as the basis for their predictions and ignoring the frequency info
Info Processing Perspectives on Development- Short term memory span increases with age
But surely we do more with our short-term memory than just briefly hold simple information? We can also do something with it. We can operate on this information
What does Gibson say happens when children move around
By moving around children learn to detect info that specifies objects, events, and layout in the world that they can use in daily activities
New rule for what babies look at (when they get older and better understand their environment)
Identify things
What did Case say in regards to children info processing abilities and limitations
Case (1978) suggested that info processing limitations restricted younger children to the less effective strategies due to minimum info in working memory Case (1985) concluded that one of the main constraints on children's performance was their info processing capacity.
Are children competent witnesses
Children are competent witnesses when interviewed competently
Computational limiation
Children may encode all relevant info about a problem and retain it in working memory, but they may not have appropriate strategies in the long-term memory that can apply the encoded info § Ex: they may not be able to solve the mathematical problem because they do not know a procedure for multiplying 2-digit numbers
Storage limitation
Children may have encoded al the info, and have retrieved the appropriate strategies from long term memory, but they may not be able to retain all the relevant info in working memory while they carry to the calculation § Ex: while children are calculating (12x34) they may forget the info relating to the rest of the original equation (they needed to divide by 5) and be unable to complete the problem
Retrieval limitation
Children may have the necessary strategies in long term memory, but when they try to retrieve the strategy from their long term storage, they retrieve an inapposite strategy, § Ex: instead of retrieving the procedures for multiplication, they retrieve the procedures for division
Components of eyewitness memory
Children's background knowledge of the event The interviewers approach Use of repeated questions Age differences in suggestibility
What does conditioning allow infants to do?
Conditioning allow an infant to have some control over their environment (These responses reflect an infant's understanding of patters and relationship within the found and are the first signs of learning)
Cognitive Interview parts
Context reinstatement Report everything Variety of perspectives Temporal order
Perceptual Consistency
We perceive a given object as the same, even through its apparent size, shape and colour changed in this way
What did Rovee-Collier (1999) simple conditioning technique Conjugate Reinforcement Method show
Demonstrate memory over relatively long periods for very young infants. In this, you tie a ribbon to the baby's ankle which is connected to a mobile; infants quickly learn if they kick their feet they can make mobile move
Schema
Denotes what is known about a scene, place, or object along with refers to an organized grouping of an object o Young children can have established schema for objects or places that are well known
What are negatives of using scripts
Dependence on script based knowledge can also lead to inaccurate assumptions when recalling info when specific events do not correspond to the script.
Script
Describes a sequence of actions that are appropriate in a particular context and which lead to a specific goal o Ex: you might have a script for going to a restaurant (how to enter, eating, leaving)
How to achieve best evidence when using children as eyewitnesses- Rapport state
Discusses neutral topics to relax child and so they understand it is ok to say they do not know
What is important to keep in mind with what babies see and their first few weeks of life
During the first weeks of life babies are making connections and the more a baby sees the more connections they make
Why are edges important for infants
Edges helps distinguish where one object begins and the other ends
What are the types of info processing limiations
Encoding Computational Retrieval Storage Workspace
What are the 3 basic procedures involved when we process info
Encoding Storage Retrieval
What plays a big role in infant's perceptual ability
Environment plays a big role on an infant's perceptual ability. People living in different environments are thereby able to pick up different abilities
What two types of memories are in explicit memories
Episodic (experienced events) Semantic (knowledge and concepts)
What are most of our memories called
Episodic (specifically, the things that happen to us during the course of everyday life)
What have experimenters found in terms of infants range of perceptual abilities
Experiments have found children are born with a wider range of perceptual abilities that empiricists suggested, and infants' capacity to learn rapidly from experience is greater than the nativists propose
What two things go into long term memory
Explicit (declarative) and implicit (non-declarative) memories
Old rule for what babies look at (when they are younger)
Find things
Reasons for Infantile Amnesia- Freud's repression hypothesis
Freud proposed that events of infancy & early childhood are rife with sexual overtones towards one's parents and just are generally so traumatic that they are repressed. That is, we stuff them way down into the unconscious part of our minds so that we can protect our adult egos from such traumatic and threatening memories. There is no evidence of this. Nor is there good evidence of repressed memories of traumatic events (uncovered through hypnotic techniques).
Galvanic skin response
Galvanic skin response (skin moisture assesses autonomic system arousal) was used as a measure of memory recognition. Using this method, they showed that the 10 year-olds recognized classmates, without any awareness of it (that is, they could not explicitly recall any faces).
Depth perception and the visual cliff
Gibson and Walk (1960) used the visual cliff to investigate infant's depth perception. o Children 6-14 months would cross the table but were not willing to cross the cliff At 5 months old children would cross over the cliff and their heart rate did not increase that much as those of a 9-month-old showing younger infants have less depth perception
Organization
Grouping info together is another aspect of encoding (o Info that is linked together will encode more efficiently than info that is not encoded together, due to it being linked in a meaningful way)
Why is habituation important
Habituation is important because it means an infant can concentrate on an object and over time lose interest and then seek new stimuli (Habituation in effect is a consistent encouragement to explore new things)
Sensory Memory info
Has huge capacity but extremely brief duration. Think of it as just a very brief memory trace
Long term memory
Has, at least theoretically, an infinite capacity. These memories tend to be durable, although as we'll see in the topic on memory, they are not completely pristine
Infentile Amnesia
Having fragmented and fuzzy remembering of events where we often lack autobiographical memories
Way of Studying Early Sensory/Perceptual Skills- Preferential Looking
Here the baby is shown two pictures or two objects, and the researcher keeps track of how long the baby looks at each one. If many infants are shown the same pair of pictures and consistently look longer at one picture compared to the other it tells us not only that babies see some difference between the two, but it also may reveal something about the kinds of objects or pictures that capture their attention
What sounds do babies have a hard time hearing
High pitched sounds
What does working memory do (short term memory)
How info is processed in working memory will determine whether it is transferred into long term memory
Social referencing example
If a stranger comes to visit and mom responds with positive emotion, the baby responds to those cues and reacts to this with equivalent emotion. If a stranger comes and mom is concerned or afraid, the baby will also react with a similar emotion.
What is the difference in developmental change between implicit and explicit memory
Implicit memory does not show much developmental change, but explicit memory changes significantly
How does the processing capacity change from younger to older children
Increased processing capacity, older children also have other abilities that contribute to strategy use and successful recall o Ex: older children may use elaboration to connect diverse words
Do infants have an early preference for patterns
Infants have an early preference for patterns. (infants can discriminate between pattern and unpattern shapes, as infants grow they prefer more complex patterns)
What did Bower (1965) show in terms of size consistency
Infants responded on the basis of the size of the object rather than the size of the retinal image, concluding infants have size constancy
Conditioning
Infants will learn to carry out behaviors if those behaviors are reinforced Some experimenters have used infants' responses in a manner similar to the habituation and dishabituation paradigm described above
Info Processing Perspectives on Development- Short term/working memory=bottleneck
Info needs to be funneled and only so much can be held there at one time
Short term memory
Information that gets attended to goes to the short-term memory store. Short-term memory has a limited capacity and a brief duration (about 30 seconds or so). It can hold George Miller's magical number 7 plus or minus 2 chunks of information. (number of chunks you can hold in mind at any given point in time- chunk is the smallest amount of info)
What are the two parts of the phonological loop
Inner voice/Articulatory control Inner ear/phonological storage
Why is the cognitive interview important
It is also effective with children with the improvement of the free recall strategies o Children do discuss more inaccurate info, but it may be due to the interviewer not wanting the children to guess o This is still the most effective way to interview children o Context reinstatement can be useful for children o This can be difficult for children and requires a certain amount of concentration and some self-awareness of memory process so some researchers have investigated whether alternative measures might also help children's recall
Did Descartes and Kant argued that infants' capacity to perceive space is innate or learned through experiences
It is innate
What is the significance of infants having higher auditory acuity than vision
It show that it is a more important skill for them
Who argued that newborns had tabula rasa
John Locke
Metacognition
Knowing one's own abilities and limitations
Elaboration
Making associations between items to help recall them better
Procedural memory
Memories for knowing how..... to tie your shoes, tell time, drive a car, etc. Once these memories are established, they are usually thought of as implicit (not available to conscious awareness) and thus can only be assessed indirectly (autopilot)
Episodic memory
Memories of personally experienced events or episodes (the autobiography in your head). We will explore this in more depth in the chapter on memory.
What do many researchers say in terms of learning and applying memory strategies
Most researchers suggest there is a gradual progression in how effectively children apply memory strategies
Intermodal Perception (specific)
Newborns can detect "arbitrary" auditory-visual relations that are presented during a period of familiarization (a particular shape paired with a particular sound). Most intermodal relations in the world, however, are quite specific rather than arbitrary
What are newborns tracking ability like
Newborns track very poorly. They can see best if the object is moving slowly. Interestingly, around 2 months a shift occurs, and tracking becomes lot more skillful fairly rapidly. Other sensory skills show dramatic improvement at this age as well—in fact, researchers sometimes call this period the 2-month shift
What is an example of size consistency
We perceive a car the same even though it is moving farther away
Components of eyewitness memory- The interviewers approach
Not surprisingly, children recall more when the interviewer is warm and supportive and establishes a good rapport prior to asking questions.
When do we get info processing limitations
Often because something may be to complex for the processing space of working memory
What have researchers shown with newborns perceptual abilities and their experiences
On the other hand, perceptual abilities may be only partially developed or not developed at all at birth, and are dependent on learning from their experiences
Energy metaphor
Only have so much mental energy to devote to storage or execution of cognitive operations · Remember, you don't multitask, you switch back and forth between tasks · It's a myth we do not multi task, instead we switch from one task to another
How is organization best achieved
Organizing a set of items is achieve best if the items are grouped into a small number of categories containing sever items, each. Young children may use a larger number of categories with small numbers of items.
How does our perception improve
Our perception improves not by filling in the saw auditory stimulus by adding words or applying schemes, not by cognitive gluing together the notes, buy by listening to the music and directing our attention. We attend to relational info- distinctive features and pattern conserving relationships among the past not to but and precise of info
Where do our perceptions come from
Our perceptions come from multiple sources which are made up of vision, auditory, touch, taste, and smell
What does perception do
Perception essentially forms a bridge between the study of physiological changes (the sensory systems and brain) and cognitive development. Without perception, cognitive changes could not happen
How does the perceptual process occur
Perceptual processes form a part of virtually every task the child must do, of every motor or cognitive skill that is developed. For example, in order to identify a caregiver, the child must discriminate among voices, faces, and even smells. To recognize faces, she must pay attention to and remember individual features or patterns of features of a particular face.
What do preferences indicate in children
Preferences indicate the aspects of the environment that an infant finds most stimulating at the time
When does most research show auditory perception exists
Prenatally
What two types of memories are in implicit memories
Procedural (skills and action) Emotional Conditioning
What did psychologists at the Gestalt school believe in terms of infants perceptual abilities
Psychologists of the Gestalt school supported the idea that certain perceptual abilities were present at birth because of the structural characteristics of the nervous system. Due to the blank slate children try to organize their perceptual world.
What are the 4 systematic patterns or dimensions of change in perceptual skills or strategies that produce development
Purposefulness of perceptual activity Awareness of the meaning of perceptual info Degree of differentiation Ignoring the irrelevant
How to achieve best evidence when using children as eyewitnesses (stages)
Rapport state Free narrative Open ended questions Specific questions Closure
What face recognition skills do infants have
Recent research has shown infants have good face recognition skills and can learn faces rapidly
What have recent theorists said about short term memory
Recent theorists have placed emphasis on the 'capacity' of short terms memory and more emphasis on short term memory as the consciously part of info processing is constrained by the number and the processes begins carried out at the same time. Some processes take more energy than others.
Storage
Refers to how (in what form) the encoded information is stored in memory
Retrieval
Refers to how you gain access to information stored in memory-getting information out when you need it
What have researchers shown with newborns and shape and size constancy
Researchers show newborn infants have shape and size constancy and their experiences would not be affected by being able to have these abilities
What are binocular cues (2-eyed cues- think of binoculars)
Retinal disparity Convergence
Phonological loop- Inner ear/phonological storage
Saying the item in your head
What type of knowledge is stored in long term memory
Semantic memory Episodic memory Procedural memory
Info Processing Perspectives on Development
Short term/working memory=bottleneck Metaphors can be used to describe the idea of limited capacity Short term memory span increases with age More contemporary work examines changes in working memory Baddeley and Hitch's Model of working memory
Info Processing Perspectives on Development- Metaphors can be used to describe the idea of limited capacity
Space metaphor Energy metaphor Time metaphor The point of this is that most of us have enough mental space or energy to, say, walk and chew gum at the same time, but add to that a multi-digit arithmetic problem and we stop chewing or we slow down. Our mental capacity has been taxed
What are examples of tools that infants use
Spoons, hands
How does Gibson see stimulation
Stimulation is a field of available info absent affordances to be differentiated. Stimulation carries many levels of info. At the simplest most concrete level, a child discriminate objects by one or more distinctive features or attributes that differentiate them
What taste to babies prefer
Sweet and savory (numami)
What types of math is understood at the basic level for infants at age 6
The ability to understand addition is when you add two things together, subtraction is when you take something away, things are bigger only when they are in a 2:1
Ignoring the irrelevant
The child becomes slowly more efficient at focusing on the essentials in some situation and ignoring everything else The ability to focus and ignore irrelevant information is an example of an executive function. Executive functions mostly involve the frontal lobes, which as you know are the last parts of the brain to mature
How do babies see in color
The cones, which are the type of retinal cells that are responsible for perceiving color, are clearly present by 1 month, and probably even at birth
Habituation/dishabituation
The habituation/dishabituation paradigm shows that not only can the baby discriminate between two stimuli, but also that they remember something about the stimuli (one physically present, other present in memory). Thus, habituation is also a measure of memory because the baby has to remember the habituated stimuli for dishabituation to occur.
How does Gibson say humans evolve
The human species evolved in adoptive ways of perceiving the world. Each species is specialized for perceiving complex relations among stimuli specifying critical info in its environment
Nearsightedness (Myopia)
The image fall short of the retina, causing blurry vision from a distance
Farsightedness (hyperopia)
The image falls beyond the retina and up-close blurry vision occurs
Perception
The interpretation by the brain of this sensory input (Through perception we gain an understanding about the events, objects and people that surround us)
Why is known info about children limited
The known information is limited because children cannot directly express what they are experiencing
Rehearsal
The mental repetition of info
Convergence
The more our eyes converge (or turn toward each other) the closer the object is to us. We have muscles in our eyes which detect this convergence and send a signal to the brain indicating the distance an object is to us.
The basic idea of the neo piagetians
The neo-Piagetians view the stage-related changes that we see in Piaget's theory as caused by differences in information processing capacity or efficiency of processing. These are very complex theories, so here are the broad strokes
What is the ecological approach
The notion that info for perception is specified in stimulation, and the active nature of human perceivers
Awareness of Capacity
The older children are the better they are at accurately being able to identify their own skills in memorization o When children are repeatedly tested they are better able to form realistic expectations
Way of Studying Early Sensory/Perceptual Skills- Habituation/Dishabituation
The researcher presents the baby with a particular sight or sound over and over until the baby habituates to it (which is just a fancy way of saying she becomes accustomed to it). Habituation occurs when the baby stops responding, gazing, or showing interest in it. Then, the baby is presented with another sight, sound or object that is slightly different from the original one and she is observed to see if she shows renewed interest (or dishabituates). If the baby does show renewed interest, you know he or she perceives the slightly changed stimulus as "different" in some way from original.
What is the acuity of a newborn's vision
The unanimous conclusion is that newborn's acuity is in the range of 20/400 to 20/600.
Cognitive Interview- Variety of perspectives
The witness is asked to report the evens from different perspectives
Cognitive Interview- Temporal order
The witness retains the evens in different order (ex: from the last thing that happened to the first)
What smell do babies prefer
Their mothers
Summary of Memory development in infancy
There are a host of studies using reinforcement techniques, deferred imitation and other methods which show that infants are able to form some kinds of LTMs from early in life.
What are kinetic (movement) cues
These come from either your own motion or the motion of some object. For example, if you are in a moving car and you look out the window, closer objects appear to whiz by you compared to objects further away
Is infants lesser visual qualities detrimental to them
These differences may not be detrimental, although this difference may reduce the range of stimuli, they can experience which may help them to focus on the most important aspects of their environment during the first few months of life
What are effortful processes
These require mental effort, can interfere with other processes, and can improve with practice. Think of when you first learned a skill, like driving a stick shift, or learning to read. It was very effortful when you first started, but then, with practice, the skill became much more automatic and effortless
Why are certain laws and principles important for infants
They help define what is and is not possible, when you use multiple laws at once infants are often perplexed
Do babies prefer to look at faces or non-faces
They prefer to look at faces
Shape Constancy
We see the shape of an object as the same even when its orientation changes
Way of Studying Early Sensory/Perceptual Skills- Physiological Measures
This approach examines how the brain responds to different stimuli. It assesses the areas of the brain that light up when the infant is engaged in certain activities
How do we hear sounds
This is another sensory skill of which we are usually unaware. Because our two ears are separated, sounds arrive at one ear slightly before the other which helps you determine the location of the sound. It's only if the sound comes from a source equidistant from the two ears (that is, the sound arrives at same time to both ears) does this system fail
Components of eyewitness memory- Age differences in suggestibility
This is the single most investigated area of eyewitness memory. The simple fact is that people of all ages report more inaccurate memory when asked misleading questions.
Way of Studying Early Sensory/Perceptual Skills- Operant Conditioning
This is used a lot in speech perception research. As an example, the sight of an interesting toy might be used as a reinforcer. Then the researcher conditions the infant to turn his head to look at the toy when he hears a particular sound. After the learned response is well established, the experimenter varies the sound in some systematic way to see if the baby still turns his head or not. If he does not turn his head to the new sound, it indicates that the baby does differentiate among the various sounds.
Eleanor and James Gibson's theory of perceptual development
This means that we (and other animals) exist and develop within an environment. We evolved and develop in order to act on things (and with people) in our environment. Perception is designed for action. In short, Gibson said what we perceive are possibilities for action—i.e., surfaces for walking, handles for pulling, space for navigating, tools for navigating, etc
How do babies best understand objects
Through observations and experiments
How are many babies first experiences experienced
Through tracking with their eyes what is going on around them
What is the best developed sense
Touch
Encoding
Transforming a sensory input into some kind of representation that you can place into memory (that is, putting what you "see" or "hear" into a mental form that can be stored in memory)
What are automatic processes
Uncontrolled, often implicit, once formed often requires little or no short term memory capacity
What is the most important sense for adults'
Vision
What does it mean when our memories are constructive and (reconstructive) in nature
We always interpret our experiences as a function of what we already know about the world, and thus our memory for events is always colored by our previous knowledge
Purposefulness of perceptual activity
We now know that even the newborn explores the world around herself in an apparently nonrandom way, using some rules or strategies that I talked about before. As the child gets older, her rules become more flexible, more intentional, more adapted to the setting.
Space Metaphor
We only have so much mental space in which to store or operate on information
What are monocular cues (where the eyes function as one)
We use these when the object is further away and retinal disparity/convergence does not occur. Examples include: linear perspective, interposition (partial overlap), texture gradient
What did Ornsteind et al. find in terms of rehearsal
What Ornsteind et al. found is developmental changes had less to do with this as they how effective children could apply rehearsal strategies along how as children grew older they developed strategies in more sophisticated ways
What 4 questions does Gibson ask?
What do children perceive? How do they pick up this info? What action or interaction takes place? What are the consequences for knowledge?
What is consciousness
When children try and understand the world and discover the world around them
How to achieve best evidence when using children as eyewitnesses- Free narrative
When the interviewer asks a child to report as much as they can and only prompts the child with neutral topics "tell me more"
How to achieve best evidence when using children as eyewitnesses- closure
When the interviewer should summarize with evidence, ask the child if she has any questions, thank the child, give advice about getting help if need be and then return to neutral topics
Neo Piagetians- Pascual Leone (capacity model)
With age children can keep more things in the mind at once (· The central idea behind limited capacity theories is that the Piagetian stages reflect age-related changes in memory capacity, called M-space (which essentially reflects the # of items a child can hold in ST/WM memory at any given time). · All together, a child's cognitive capacity is represented by M, which is a combination of a constant, "a", shared by all children, and "k", which changes with age. So, M = a + k, for any given child with the value of k increasing with age)
Do children have better or worse visual acuity compared to adults
Worse visual acuity- it tends to be fuzzier and blurrier
Phonological loop- Inner voice/Articulatory control
You can hear the items/sounds in your head without saying them out loud
Time metaphor
You can perform mental operations or skills only so fast
Semantic memory
Your fund of knowledge (the encyclopedia in your head) EX: knowing that Madison is the capitol of WI o Info that is just known ex: what a dog is
The (classic) information processing model of memory
o A. Information moves through the system serially- linear way o B. There are separate memory stores and processes (Sensory memory, short-term memory, long-term memory)
Components of eyewitness memory-Use of repeated questions
o As part of the legal system, kids may be repeatedly asked about what happened. o When younger children (3-5 yr) are asked the same or similar questions in a single session or over multiple sessions, they are more likely to change their answers compared to older children (>6 yrs). o Why? It's probably because young children assume they're giving the wrong answer if they're asked same question over & over again—they change their answer to please the interviewer.
At what distance can babies respond to human faces
o At 12 inches away babies can see contrasts of light and dark o The clearest view is from 6 inches away o We think babies are able to see faces quickly because of survival needs
Encoding limitation
o Children may not encode the appropriate info about the problems. Ex: (12x34)/5, a child might not encode the multiplication symbol correctly, and add the figures in the bracket rather than multiply them. o It may because children listen to the question of the ask, they fail to encode the crucial info about the required comparison.
Deferred imitation tasks show
o Infants watch the experimenter demonstrate some novel behavior with an unfamiliar toy. The experimenter puts something in a cup, turns it over a few times, then moves the cup around, and finally empties the cup of the object. o Then, after a delay, babies are given the toy and their behavior is compared to a control group who was not exposed to the model. o The results show that infants can form long term memories (LTM) for these novel actions which can last for up to a year.
When children do remember false information, does it actually change their long-term memory of that information? How persistent is this false memory?
o Let's say the child says the bike was blue when it was actually green. Will that child remember, later on, the misinformation? Or will it be forgotten? The answer depends most importantly on the amount of time between first interview and later interviews. o With fairly short delays (a few weeks or less), they tend to NOT recall their earlier false memories. But with longer delays, or when children are merely asked to recognize and not recall something, these false memories tend to persist and sometimes become very resistant to forgetting.
Why can't we remember events from our infancy and early childhoods
o The best evidence indicates that we cannot reliably recall things that happened before about age 3. o Also, we have difficulty remembering events that happened between ages of 3 & 4 and what we do remember is often fragmented and fuzzy. It's really not until about age six that we that we can reliably remember episodes in our lives.
Info Processing Perspectives on Development- Baddeley and Hitch's Model of working memory
o The central executive guides and directs information in WM. There are two temporary stores: the phonological loop (which codes verbal information) and the visual-spatial sketchpad (codes visual information and imagery—think of it as the "minds eye"). The most recent research suggests that age differences in verbal memory span (recall of digits or words) is primarily caused by developmental differences in the phonological loop With children, there is a direct relationship between the speed with which they can say words and memory span. With age, children are able to read or say words faster and memory span increases accordingly
What factors have an influence on our ability to recall
o The child's intelligence level—higher IQ's have higher recall o Moderate level of stress during event— moderate stress (vs. very high or low) facilitates recall o Emotionally supportive caregiver—emotionally supportive mothers who, for example, discuss an upcoming medical procedure w/their kids results in the child's more accurate recall of the procedure than those who are less supportive o Incentives given during interview-if given incentives to be accurate in their recall tend to be more accurate than those not given incentives
Newborns vision
o They cannot follow a moving object very smoothly; they then to follow a moving object by making jerky eye movements o Can have less effective scanning abilities o Newborns have a limited ability to detect color
Info Processing Perspectives on Development- More contemporary work examines changes in working memory
o Think of WM as the "workbench" of memory. STM simply holds information; working memory not only temporarily holds information but also does something with it. (this is where we usually are) o Memory span tasks assess the capacity of STM. WM tasks involve holding and doing something with the information. (Try doing a multi-digit multiplication problem in your head). o Working memory increases with age
In what two ways can memory development be referred to as
o To refer to the strategies used in specific problem-solving tasks o To refer to general strategies that can be applied across a range of different tasks
Components of eyewitness memory- Children's background knowledge of the event
o Used two kinds of recall questions: open-ended question ("Tell me what happened during your checkup?") and cued ("Did the doctor check any parts of your face, or your head, your eyes?") · For both age groups, recall was higher for present typical than atypical events, for both open and specific recall. This likely reflects the positive effects of the child's knowledge base using a "going to the doctor" script. · When asked specific questions about things that did NOT happen—if did not check ears, then asked if did—most kids correctly denied it, especially for the atypical events (Did the doctor listen to your bellybutton?). But.... · They also had false alarms; this happened when children incorrectly stated that an event happened, when in fact it didn't. In this, both 4 & 6 yr olds were more likely to incorrectly say that these events did happen when they were typical rather than atypical. · Again, knowing what usually happens contributed to children to falsely remembering what did happen.
What would happen without scripts
o Without generalized scripts it would be hard to function in new contexts o Children's ability to develop scripts is important in structuring their experience in such a way that they can use and adapt their knowledge of previous events to make sense of similar, but novel events.
Awareness of Learning Context
o Young children may know that learning and remembering can be affected by various factors o Wellman (1977) showed 3-5-year-olds pairs of pictures of variables that might influence learning and recall. By 5 years of age children understood most of these factors- they were able to choose the pictures that indicated when recall was likely to be better
How to appropriately interview children?
o children have to be instructed and given practice in answering questions, must be encouraged to tell the truth, must understand that it's okay to say "I don't know" when unsure, and instructed in how to correct the interviewer when they are uncertain. o Sounds overwhelming, right? Well, it kind of is which is why the NICHD developed an interview protocol for child forensic interviews. It is based on the best evidence available to date in eliciting accurate and complete information from children.
Reasons for Infantile Amnesia- information processing and language based interpretations
§ It's possible that infantile amnesia is simply a natural consequence of developing cognitive and language abilities. The structures or schemas which enable autobiographical memory are in the process of being formed so they are not yet available for encoding events. What we know is that verbatim memory is much more susceptible to forgetting and far less accurate than gist memory. Heavy reliance on these highly forgettable verbatim memory traces makes these early memories unavailable (or at least fragmented and rudimentary) for later recall. Alternatively, gist traces become increasingly available by the early school years, about the time more memories can be retrieved Memory improves and children become verbal
What does it mean when newborns have less effective scanning abilities
§ Salapatek found at 1 month, infants tend to focus on a single or limited number of features in the shape § By 2 months, infants have adopted more comprehensive scanning strategies and prefer to scan internal features more than boundaries of a shape
Reasons for Infantile Amnesia- sense of self hypothesis
§ Those in this camp say that for autobiographical memories to be laid down and later retrieved, there needs to exist a sense of self. (Think the self as the "auto" in autobiography). § It is well-established that a sense of self develops gradually over the preschool years. Although young children have some "memories" of experiences of early childhood, these events occurred when the sense of self was poorly developed, or there was no self-schema to which these memories could be hooked or anchored. The idea is that unless events can be related to the "self" in a meaningful way, they cannot be later retrieved. There is some evidence to support this.
Neo Piagetians- Case (efficiency model)
· Case says that these age differences in WM are not so much related to capacity, but have more to do with the efficiency with which children use the mental capacity they have available to them. Case proposed age-related decreases in the amount of mental effort (mostly due to biological maturation, read: myelination) required to do specific cognitive tasks · Simply put, as each new developmental skill is mastered and becomes practiced, the increase in processing efficiency frees attention (or processing space) for doing other mental work.
Awareness of the meaning of perceptual info
· If you see a ball that reflects back the light, you would guess that the ball would feel smooth. You would also recognize that round things of a certain size can be easily held in the hand and thrown. · Gibson call these qualities of objects affordances: an object affords the opportunity for certain actions. With development, the infant and child gradually learn the links between how objects appear and what those objects can be used for.
What is important about children in motion
· Motion is essential to perceptual development, even in infancy à "the perceives as performer" · Perception is an event. Children and adults discover explore, attend, extract info and differentiate objects, events, and array · Children act to discover the info, and discovering the info they can act
In what way do children and adults differ in their abilities of attention
· One difference between young children and older children is the ability to identify the most crucial aspects of a task and pay attention to those aspects · Children may also have difficulty in tasks that require attention to just a selection of, rather than all, the material they are shown. (The older the children the better concentration they have on the specific tasks at hand without getting distracted)
Why are children misled
· They encode less info about events than adults · Children may attend to info but because of working memory constraints, encode that info less completely than adults · Children have more 'gaps' in memory that can be filled with info implied by suggestive questioning · Their encoding abilities are weaker due to fewer schemas and less existing knowledge
What do we understand about children's free recall when it comes to eyewitness memory
·It's generally agreed that young children's free recall is typically low, accurate, and central to the event, if asked without being lead. · When they are given some cues ("What did the girl look like?") they recall more, as we would expect; however, they not only recall more correct information but also more incorrect information.
