Which of the following individuals is known for cognitive development of children?

After reading Chapter 7, you should be better equipped to:

• List and describe Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.
• Explain the main ideas of Vygotsky’s Sociocultural theory.
• Compare and contrast the theories of Piaget and Vygotsky.
• Explain the concepts of Information Processing theory.
• Differentiate between the three main theories of cognitive development.

refers to thinking and memory processes, and cognitive development refers to long-term changes in these processes. One of the most widely known perspectives about cognitive development is the cognitive stage theory of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget created and studied an account of how infants and children gradually become able to think logically and scientifically.

Piaget was a psychological : in his view, learning proceeded by the interplay of (adjusting new experiences to fit prior concepts) and (adjusting concepts to fit new experiences). The to-and-fro of these two processes leads not only to short-term learning, but also to long-term developmental change. The long-term developments are really the focus of Piaget’s cognitive theory.

After observing children closely, Piaget proposed that cognition developed through four distinct stages from birth through the end of adolescence.

1. (Birth through 2 years old)
2. (2-7 years old)
3. (7-11 years old)
4. (12 years old- adulthood)

By stages Piaget meant a sequence of thinking patterns with the following four key features:

1. They always happen in the same order.
2. No stage is ever skipped.
3. Each stage is a significant transformation of the stage before it.
4. Each later stage incorporated the earlier stages into itself.[1]

, and : Piaget believed that we are continuously trying to maintain cognitive equilibrium, or a balance, in what we see and what we know (Piaget, 1954). Children have much more of a challenge in maintaining this balance because they are constantly being confronted with new situations, new words, new objects, etc. All this new information needs to be organized, and a framework for organizing information is referred to as a schema. Children develop schemata through the processes of assimilation and accommodation. [2]

When faced with something new, a child may demonstrate assimilation, which is fitting the new information into an existing schema, such as calling all animals with four legs “doggies” because he or she knows the word doggie. Instead of assimilating the information, the child may demonstrate accommodation, which is expanding the framework of knowledge to accommodate the new situation and thus learning a new word to more accurately name the animal. For example, recognizing that a horse is different than a zebra means the child has accommodated, and now the child has both a zebra schema and a horse schema. Even as adults we continue to try and “make sense” of new situations by determining whether they fit into our old way of thinking (assimilation) or whether we need to modify our thoughts (accommodation).

Sensorimotor Stage

According to the Piagetian perspective, infants learn about the world during the primarily through their senses and motor abilities (Harris, 2005). These basic motor and sensory abilities provide the foundation for the cognitive skills that will emerge during the subsequent stages of cognitive development. Piaget called this first stage of cognitive development the and it occurs through the following six substages. [3]

Piaget’s Six Substages of Sensorimotor Development[4]

 (Birth through 1st month)

This active learning begins with automatic movements or reflexes. For example, the nipple of a bottle comes into contact with an infant’s cheek and the infant will orient toward the object and automatically begin to suck on and lick the object.  However, this is also what happens with a sour lemon, much to the infant’s surprise!

(1st through 4th month)

Fortunately, within a couple of weeks, the infant begins to discriminate between objects and adjust responses accordingly as reflexes are replaced with voluntary movements. An infant may accidentally engage in a behavior and find it interesting such as making a vocalization. This interest motivates trying to do it again and helps the infant learn a new behavior that originally occurred by chance. At first, most actions have to do with the body, but in months to come, will be directed more toward objects.

(4th through 8th months)

During the next few months, the infant becomes more and more actively engaged in the outside world and takes delight in being able to make things happen. Repeated motion brings particular interest as the infant is able to bang two lids together from the cupboard when seated on the kitchen floor.

(8th through 12th months)

Now the infant can engage in behaviors that others perform and anticipate upcoming events. Perhaps because of continued maturation of the prefrontal cortex, the infant become capable of having a thought and carrying out a planned, goal-directed activity such as seeking a toy that has rolled under the couch. The object continues to exist in the infant’s mind even when out of sight and the infant now can make attempts to retrieve it. This ability is called

(12th through 18th months)

Infants from one year to 18 months of age more actively engage in experimentation to learn about the physical world. Gravity is learned by pouring water from a cup or pushing bowls from highchairs. The caregiver tries to help the child by picking it up again and placing it on the tray. And what happens?  Another experiment! The child pushes it off the tray again causing it to fall and the caregiver to pick it up again! A closer examination of this stage causes us to really appreciate how much learning is going on at this time and how many things we come to take for granted must actually be learned. I remember handing my daughters (who are close in age) when they were both seated in the back   seat of the car a small container of candy. They struggled to move the pieces up and out of the small box and became frustrated when their fingers would lose their grip on the treats before they made it up and out of top of the boxes. They had not yet learned to simply use gravity and turn the box over in their hands! This is a wonderful and messy time of experimentation, and most learning occurs by trial and error.

(18th month to 2 years of age)

The child is now able to solve problems using mental strategies, to remember something heard days before and repeat it, to engage in pretend play, and to find objects that have been moved even when out of sight. Take for instance, the child      who is upstairs in a room with the door closed, supposedly taking a nap. The doorknob has a safety device on it that makes it impossible for the child to turn the knob. After trying several times in vain to push the door or turn the doorknob, the child carries out a mental strategy to get the door opened-he knocks on the door! Obviously, this is a technique learned from the past experience of hearing a knock on the door and observing someone opening the door. The child is now better equipped with mental strategies for problem-solving. This initial movement from the “hands-on” approach to knowing about the world to the more mental world of stage six marked the transition to preoperational intelligence that we will discuss in the next lesson. Part of this stage involves learning to use language.[5]

Critical Evaluation Object Permanence

The main development during the sensorimotor stage is the understanding that objects exist and events occur in the world independently of one’s own actions (‘the object or ‘object permanence’).

means knowing that an object still exists, even if it is   hidden. It requires the ability to form a mental representation (i.e. a schema) of the object. For example, if you place a toy under a blanket, the child who has achieved object permanence knows it is there and can actively seek it. At the beginning of this stage the child behaves as if the toy had simply disappeared.

The attainment of object permanence generally signals the transition from the sensorimotor stage to the preoperational stage of development.

Blanket and Ball Study

Aim: Piaget (1963) wanted to investigate at what age children acquire object permanence.

Method: Piaget hid a toy under a blanket, while the child was watching, and observed whether or not the child searched for the hidden toy.

Searching for the hidden toy was evidence of object permanence. Piaget   assumed that the child could only search for a hidden toy if s/he had a mental representation of it.

Results: Piaget found that infants searched for the hidden toy when they   were around 8-months-old.

Conclusion: Children around 8 months have object permanence because they are able to form a mental representation of the object in their minds.

Evaluation: Piaget assumed the results of his study occur because the children under 8 months did not understand that the object still existed underneath the blanket (and therefore did not reach for it). However, there are alternative reasons why a child may not search for an object:

The child could become distracted or lose interest in the object and therefore lack the motivation to search for it, or simply may not have the physical coordination to carry out the motor movements necessary for the retrieval of the object (Mehler & Dupoux, 1994).

There is evidence that object permanence occurs earlier than Piaget claimed. Bower and Wishart (1972) used a lab experiment to study infants aged between 1 – 4 months old.

Instead of using a Piaget’s blanket technique they waited for the infant to reach for an object, and then turned out the lights so that the object was no longer visible. They then filmed the infant using an infrared camera. They found that the infant continued to reach for the object for up to 90 seconds after it became invisible.

Again, just like Piaget’s study there are also criticisms of Bower’s “reaching in the dark” findings. Each child had up to 3 minutes to complete the task and reach for the object. Within this time period, it is plausible they may have successfully completed the task by accident.  For example, randomly reaching out and finding the object or even reaching out due to the distress of the lights going out (rather than reaching out with the intention of searching for an object).

Violation of Expectation Research

A further challenge to Piaget’s claims comes from a series of studies designed by Renee Baillargeon. She used a technique that has come to be known as the (VOE) paradigm. It exploits the fact that infants tend to look for longer at things they have not encountered before.

In a VOE experiment, an infant is first introduced to a novel situation. They are repeatedly shown this stimulus until they indicate, by looking away, that it is no longer new to them. In Baillargeon’s  (1985, 1987) study, the habituation stimulus was a ‘drawbridge’ that moved through 180 degrees.

The infants are then shown two new stimuli, each of which is a variation on the habituation stimulus. In Baillargeon’s experiments, one of these test stimuli is a possible event (i.e. one which could physically happen) and the other is an impossible event (i.e. one that could not physically happen in the way it appears).

In the ‘drawbridge’ study, a colored box was placed in the path of the drawbridge. In the possible event, the drawbridge stopped at the point where its path would be blocked by the box. In the impossible event, the drawbridge appeared to pass through the box and ended up lying flat, the box apparently having disappeared.

Baillargeon found that infants spent much longer looking at the impossible event. She concluded that this indicated surprise on the infants’ part and that the infants were surprised because they had expectations about the behavior of physical objects that the impossible event had violated.

In other words, the infants knew that the box still existed behind the drawbridge    and, furthermore, that they knew that one solid object cannot just pass through another. The infants in this study were five months old, an age at which Piaget would say that such knowledge is quite beyond them.[6]

Renee Baillargeon Violation of Expectation Experiment: Possible versus Impossible Event

The A-not-B Error

The data does not always support Piaget’s claim that certain processes are crucial in transitions from one stage to the next. For example, in Piaget’s theory, an important feature in the progression into substage 4, coordination of   secondary circular reactions, is an infant’s inclination to search for a hidden object in a familiar location rather than to look for the object I in a new location. Thus, if a toy is hidden twice, initially at location A and subsequently at location B, 8- to 12-month-old infants search correctly at location A initially. But when the toy is subsequently hidden at location B, they make the mistake of continuing to search for it at location A. The is the term used to describe this common mistake. Older infants are less likely to make the A-not-B error because their concept of object permanence is more complete.[7]

Preoperational Stage

 Remember that Piaget believed that we are continuously trying to maintain balance in how we understand the world. With rapid increases in motor skill and language development, young children are constantly encountering new experiences, objects, and words. In the module covering main developmental theories, you learned that when faced with something new, a child may either assimilate it into an existing schema by matching it with something they already know or expand their knowledge structure to accommodate the new situation. During the , many of the child’s existing schemas will be challenged, expanded, and rearranged. Their whole view of the world may shift.

Piaget’s second stage of cognitive development is called the preoperational stage and coincides with ages 2-7 (following the sensorimotor stage). The word  refers to the use of logical rules, so sometimes this stage is misinterpreted as implying that children are illogical. While it is true that children at the beginning of the preoperational stage tend to answer questions intuitively as opposed to logically, children in this stage are learning to use language and how to think about the world symbolically. These skills help children develop the foundations they will need to consistently use operations in the next stage. Let’s examine some of Piaget’s assertions about children’s cognitive abilities at this age.

Pretend Play

Pretending is a favorite activity at this time. For a child in the preoperational stage, a toy has qualities beyond the way it was designed to function and can now be used to stand for a character or object unlike anything originally intended. A teddy bear, for example, can be a baby or the queen of a faraway land!

Piaget believed that children’s and experimentation helped them solidify the new schemas they were developing cognitively. This involves both assimilation and accommodation, which results in changes in their conceptions or thoughts. As children progress through the preoperational stage, they are developing the knowledge they will need to begin to use logical operations in the next stage.

Egocentrism

in early childhood refers to the tendency of young children to think that everyone sees things in the same way as the child. Piaget’s classic experiment on egocentrism involved showing children a three-dimensional model of a mountain and asking them to describe what a doll that is looking at the mountain from a different angle might see. Children tend to choose a picture that represents their own, rather than the doll’s view. However, when children are speaking to others, they tend to use different sentence structures and vocabulary when addressing a younger child or an older adult. Consider why this difference might be observed. Do you think this indicates some awareness of the views of others? Or do you think they are simply modeling adult speech patterns?[8]

Testing for Egocentrism: Piaget’s Three Mountain Task[9]

Martin Hughes (1975) argued that the three mountains task did not make sense to children and was made more difficult because the children had to match   the doll’s view with a photograph.

Hughes devised a task which made sense to the child. He showed children a model comprising two intersecting walls, a ‘boy’ doll and a ‘policeman’ doll. He then placed the policeman doll in various positions and asked the child to hide the boy doll from the policeman.

Hughes did this to make sure that the child understood what was being asked of him, so if s/he made mistakes they were explained and the child tried again.   Interestingly, very few mistakes were made.

Hughes (1975) Police Doll Experiment[10]

The experiment then began. Hughes brought in a second policeman doll, and placed both dolls at the end of two walls, as shown in the illustration  above. The child was asked to hide the boy from both policemen, in other words he had to take account of two different points of view.

Hughes’ sample comprised children between three and a half and five years of age, of whom 90 percent gave correct answers. Even when he devised a more complex situation, with more walls and a third policeman, 90 percent of four-year-olds were successful.

This experiment showed that children have largely lost their egocentric thinking by four years  of age, because they are able to take the view of another. Hughes’ experiment allowed them to demonstrate this because the task made sense to the child, whereas Piaget’s did not.

In Borke’s (1975) test of egocentrism the child is given two identical models of a three-dimensional scene (several different scenes were used including different arrangements of toy people and animals and a mountain model similar to Piaget and Inhelder’s). One of the models is mounted on a turntable so it can easily be turned by the child.

After a practice session where the child is familiarized with the materials and the idea of looking at things from another person’s point of view, a doll is introduced (in Borke’s study it was the character Grover from ‘Sesame Street’, a program the children were familiar with).

The Grover doll was placed so it was ‘looking’ at the model from a particular vantage point and the child was invited to turn the other model around until its view of the model matched what Grover would be able to see.

Borke (1975) found, using the ‘mountains’ model three-year-olds selected a correct view 42% of the time and four-year-olds selected the right view 67% of the time. With other displays, the three-years-olds’ accuracy increased to 80% and the four-year olds’ to 93%.[11]

Precausal Thinking

Similar to preoperational children’s egocentric thinking is their structuring of cause-and-effect relationships based on their limited view of the world. Piaget coined the term “precausal thinking” to describe the way in which preoperational children use their own existing ideas or views, like in egocentrism, to explain cause-and-effect relationships. Three main concepts of causality, as displayed by children in the preoperational stage, include , , and .

 is the belief that inanimate objects are capable of actions and have lifelike qualities. An example could be a child believing that the sidewalk was mad and made them fall down, or that the stars twinkle in the sky because they are happy. To an imaginative child, the cup may be alive, the chair that falls down and hits the child’s ankle is mean, and the toys need to stay home because they are tired. Young children do seem to think that objects that move may be alive, but after age three, they seldom refer to objects as being alive (Berk, 2007). Many children’s stories and movies capitalize on animistic thinking. Do you remember some of the classic stories that make use of the idea of objects being alive and engaging in lifelike actions?

 refers to the belief that environmental characteristics can be attributed to human actions or interventions. For example, a child might say that it is windy outside because someone is blowing very hard, or the clouds are white because someone painted them that color.

Finally, precausal thinking is categorized by transductive reasoning.  is when a child fails to understand the true relationships between cause and effect. Unlike deductive or inductive reasoning (general to specific, or specific to general), transductive reasoning refers to when a child reasons from specific to specific, drawing a relationship between two separate events that are otherwise unrelated. For example, if a child hears a dog bark and then a balloon pop, the child would conclude that because the dog barked, the balloon popped. Related to this is , which refers to a tendency to think that if two events occur simultaneously, one caused the other. An example of this might be a child asking the question, “if I put on my bathing suit will it turn to summer?”

Cognition Errors

Between about the ages of four and seven, children tend to become very curious and ask many questions, beginning the use of primitive reasoning. There is an increase in curiosity in the interest of reasoning and wanting to know why things are the way they are. Piaget called it the intuitive substage because children realize they have a vast amount of knowledge, but they are unaware of how they acquired it.

 and are characteristic of preoperative thought.  is the act of focusing all attention on one characteristic or dimension of a situation while disregarding all others. An example of centration is a child focusing on the number of pieces of cake that each person has, regardless of the size of the pieces. Centration is one of the reasons that young children have difficulty understanding the concept of conservation.  is the awareness that altering a substance’s appearance does not change its basic properties. Children at this stage are unaware of conservation and exhibit centration. Imagine a 2-year-old and 4-year-old eating lunch. The 4-year-old has a whole peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He notices, however, that his younger sister’s sandwich is cut in half and protests, “She has more!” He is exhibiting centration by focusing on the number of pieces, which results in a conservation error.

Conservation of Liquid

Demonstration of the conservation of liquid.  Does pouring liquid in a tall, narrow container make it have more?

In Piaget’s famous conservation task, a child is presented with two identical beakers containing the same amount of liquid. The child usually notes that the beakers do contain the same amount of liquid. When one of the beakers is poured into a taller and thinner container, children who are younger than seven or eight years old typically say that the two beakers no longer contain the same amount of liquid, and that the taller container holds the larger quantity (centration), without taking into consideration the fact that both beakers were previously noted to contain the same amount of liquid.

is also demonstrated during this stage and is closely related to the ideas of centration and conservation.  refers to the young child’s difficulty mentally reversing a sequence of events. In the same beaker situation, the child does not realize that, if the sequence of events was reversed and the water from the tall beaker was poured back into its original beaker, then the same amount of water would exist.

Centration, conservation errors, and irreversibility are indications that young children are reliant on visual representations. Another example of children’s reliance on visual representations is their misunderstanding of “less than” or “more than”. When two rows containing equal amounts of blocks are placed in front of a child with one row spread farther apart than the other, the child will think that the row spread farther contains more blocks.

refers to a kind of conceptual thinking that children in the preoperational stage cannot yet grasp. Children’s inability to focus on two aspects of a situation at once (centration) inhibits them from understanding the principle that one category or class can contain several different subcategories or classes. Preoperational children also have difficulty understanding that an object can be classified in more than one way. For example, a four-year-old girl may be shown a picture of eight dogs and three cats. The girl knows what cats and dogs are, and she is aware that they are both animals. However, when asked, “Are there more dogs or more animals?” she is likely to answer “more dogs.” This is due to her difficulty focusing on the two subclasses and the larger class all at the same time. She may have been able to view the dogs as dogs or animals, but struggled when trying to classify them as both, simultaneously. Similar to this is a concept relating to intuitive thought, known as .

is using previous knowledge to determine the missing piece, using basic logic. Children in the preoperational stage lack this logic. An example of transitive inference would be when a child is presented with the information “A” is greater than “B” and “B” is greater than “C.” The young child may have difficulty understanding that “A” is also greater than “C.”

As the child’s vocabulary improves and more schemes are developed, they are more able to think logically, demonstrate an understanding of conservation, and classify objects.[12]

Limitations in the Child’s Thinking

Piaget focused most of the description of this stage on limitations in the child’s thinking, identifying a number of mental tasks which children seem unable to do.

These include the inability to decenter, conserve, understand seriation (the inability to understand that objects can be organized into a logical series or order) and to carry out inclusion tasks.

Children in the preoperational stage are able to focus on only one aspect or dimension of problems (i.e. centration). For example, suppose you arrange two rows of blocks in such a way that a row of 5 blocks is longer than a row of 7 blocks.

Preoperational children can generally count the blocks in each row and tell you The number contained in each. However, if you ask which row has more, they will likely say that it is the one that makes the longer line, because they cannot simultaneously focus on both the length and the number. This inability to decenter contributes to the preoperational child’s egocentrism.

Conservation is the understanding that something stays the same in quantity even though its appearance changes. To be more technical, conservation is the ability to understand that redistributing material does not affect its mass, number or volume. The ability to solve this and other “conservation” problems signals the transition to the next stage. So, what do these tasks tell us about the limitations of preoperational thought in general?  Piaget drew a number of related conclusions:

1) Understanding of these situations is ‘perception bound’. The child is drawn by changes in the appearance of the materials to conclude that a change has occurred.

2) Thinking is ‘centered’ on one aspect of the situation. Children notice changes in the level of water or in the length of clay without noticing that other aspects of the situation have changed simultaneously.

3) Thinking is focused on states rather than on transformations. Children fail to track what has happened to materials and simply make an intuitive judgment based on how they appear ‘now’.

4) Thinking is ‘irreversible’ in that the child cannot appreciate that a reverse transformation would return the material to its original state. Reversibility is a crucial aspect of the logical (operational) thought of later stages.[13]

Concrete Operational Stage

From ages 7 to 11, children are in what Piaget referred to as the of cognitive development (Crain, 2005). This involves mastering the use of logic in concrete ways. The word concrete refers to that which is tangible; that which can be seen, touched, or experienced directly.  The concrete operational child is able to make use of logical principles in solving problems involving the physical world. For example, the child can understand principles of cause and effect, size, and distance. The child can use logic to solve problems tied to their own direct experience, but has trouble solving hypothetical problems or considering more abstract problems. The child uses , which is a logical process in which multiple premises believed to be true are combined to obtain a specific conclusion. For example, a child has one friend who is rude, another friend who is also rude, and the same is true for a third friend. The child may conclude that friends are rude. We will see that this way of thinking tends to change during adolescence being replaced with .

Children Studying[14]

We will now explore some of the major abilities that the concrete child exhibits.

: As children’s experiences and vocabularies grow, they build schemata and are able to organize objects in many different ways. They also classification hierarchies and can arrange objects into a variety of classes and subclasses. Identity: One feature of concrete operational thought is the understanding that objects have qualities that do not change even if the object is altered in some way. For instance, mass of an object does not change by rearranging it. A piece of chalk is still chalk even when the piece is broken in two.

: The child learns that some things that have been changed can be returned to their original state. Water can be frozen and then thawed to become liquid again, but eggs cannot be unscrambled. Arithmetic operations are reversible as well: 2 3 = 5 and 5 – 3 = 2. Many of these cognitive skills are incorporated into the school’s curriculum through mathematical problems and in worksheets about which situations are reversible or irreversible.

: Remember the example in our last chapter of preoperational children thinking that a tall beaker filled with 8 ounces of water was “more” than a      short, wide bowl filled with 8 ounces of water? Concrete operational children can understand the concept of conservation which means that changing one quality (in this example, height or water level) can be compensated for by changes in another quality (width). Consequently, there is the same amount of water in each container, although one is taller and narrower and the other is shorter and wider.

: Concrete operational children no longer focus on only one dimension of any object (such as the height of the glass) and instead consider the changes in other dimensions too (such as the width of the glass). This allows           for conservation to occur.

: Arranging items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight, in a methodical way is now demonstrated by the concrete operational child. For example, they can methodically arrange a series of different-sized sticks in order by length, while younger children approach a similar task in a haphazard way. [15]

Example of a Seriation Task that Involves Sorting by Shape and Size[15]

These new cognitive skills increase the child’s understanding of the physical world, however according to Piaget, they still cannot think in abstract ways. Additionally, they do not think in systematic scientific ways. For example, when asked which variables influence the period that a pendulum takes to complete its arc and given weights they can attach to strings in order to do experiments, most children younger than 12 perform biased experiments from which no conclusions can be drawn (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958).)[16]

Horizontal Decalage

Piaget used the term refers to fact that once a child learns a certain function, he or she does not have the capability to immediately apply the learned function to all problems. In other words, “a horizontal décalage arises when a cognitive structure that can be successfully applied to task X cannot, though it is composed of the same organization of logical operations, be extended to task Y.” Horizontal décalage is frequently used in reference to a child’s ability to solve different conservation tasks. This concept recognizes that an individual child will not necessarily be on the same level of functioning in all possible areas of performance. Rather, “concepts and schemas develop through operation on and manipulation of objects in a specific manner.”

An example of horizontal décalage is the invariance of quantity, which is typically mastered around the age of 6 or 7 when matter is concerned, at the age of 9 or 10 when weight is concerned, and around 11 or 12 years old when the invariant is volume. A 7-year-old child understands that when one of two equivalent balls of clay is transformed into a sausage-shape, the two lumps still consist of equal amounts of clay. The child, however, fails to correctly comprehend that the differently shaped clumps of clay weigh the same. Both tasks are similar, but the child is clearly unable to apply his understanding about the first situation to the second situation. A comparable phenomenon can be seen in a child’s increasing ability to perform seriation tasks, which consists of ordering objects according to increasing or decreasing size. The ability to arrange rods in order of decreasing/increasing size is always acquired prior to the capacity to seriate according to weight.[17]

 Formal Operational Stage

The begins at approximately age twelve and lasts into adulthood. As adolescents enter this stage, they gain the ability to think in an abstract manner by manipulating ideas in their head, without any dependence on concrete manipulation (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). He/she can do mathematical calculations, think creatively, use abstract reasoning, and imagine the outcome of particular actions. An example of the distinction between concrete and formal operational stages is the answer to the question “If Kelly is taller than Ali and Ali is taller than Jo, who is tallest?” This is an example of , which is the ability to think about things which the child has not actually experienced and to draw conclusions from its thinking. The child who needs to draw a picture or use objects is still in the concrete operational stage, whereas children who can reason the answer in their heads are using formal operational thinking.

:  The ability to think scientifically through generating predictions, or hypotheses, about the world to answer questions is hypothetico-deductive reasoning. The individual will approach problems in a systematic and organized manner, rather than through trial-and-error.

: Concrete operations are carried out on things whereas formal operations are carried out on ideas. The individual can think about hypothetical and abstract concepts they have yet to experience. Abstract thought is important for planning regarding the future.

How Did Piaget Test Formal Operations?

Piaget (1970) devised several tests of formal operational thought. One of the simplest was the ‘third eye problem’. Children were asked where they would put an extra eye, if they were able to have a third one, and why. Schaffer (1988) reported that when asked this question, 9-year-olds all suggested that the third eye should be on the forehead. However, 11-year-olds were more inventive, for example suggesting that a third eye placed on the hand would be useful for seeing round corners.

Formal operational thinking has also been tested experimentally using the pendulum task (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). The method involved a length of string and a set of weights. Participants had to consider three factors (variables) the length of the string, the heaviness of the weight and the strength of push. The task was to work out which factor was most important in determining the speed of swing of the pendulum. Participants can vary the length of the pendulum string, and vary the weight. They can measure the pendulum speed by counting the number of swings per minute. To find the correct answer the participant has to grasp the idea of the experimental method -that is to vary one variable at a time e.g. trying different lengths with the same weight). A participant who tries different lengths with different weights is likely to end up with the wrong answer. Children in the formal operational stage approached the task systematically, testing one variable (such as varying the length of the string) at a time to see its effect. However, younger children typically tried out these variations randomly or changed two things at the same time. Piaget concluded that the systematic approach indicated the children were thinking logically, in the abstract, and could see the relationships between things. These are the characteristics of the formal operational stage.

Using Hypothetical Deductive Reasoning to Solve a Problem

Teenage thinking is characterized by the ability to reason logically and solve hypothetical problems such as how to design, plan, and build a structure.[17]

Test Yourself: Fill in the blank

Critical Evaluation

Psychologists who have replicated this research, or used a similar problem, have generally found that children cannot complete the task successfully until they are older. Robert Siegler (1979) gave children a balance beam task in which some discs were placed either side of the center of balance[19].

In the balance-scale task, children have to predict the movement of a balance-scale (see figure below), on which the number of blocks on each peg, and the distance between the blocks and the fulcrum are varied. Depending on the number of blocks and the distance between the blocks and the fulcrum on each arm, the beam tilts to one side or remains in balance. Thus, to succeed on the balance-scale task, a child has to identify the relevant task dimensions (number-of-blocks and distance) and understand their multiplicative relation.

Three balance-scale tasks.  The upper left-hand shows an example of conflict of weight, (notice that the distance from the fulcrum is the same, but the weights differ).   If calculated properly, the child should say that the left side of the balance scale will go down.  The example shown in the upper right-hand corner shows a conflict between both weight and distance, (notice that both the weight and distance from the fulcrum differ on both ends). If calculated properly, the child should say the scale will balance.  The lower example shows an example where the weights are the same, but the distance from the fulcrum is different.  If calculated properly, the child should answer that the right side of the scale will go down.  To easily determine whether the scale will balance or go down on the right or left side you will need to multiply the weight by the distance of the fulcrum (WxD) for each side and then compare the product of each.  If the product on the left side of the balance scale is greater than the product of the right side of the balance scale, then the left side of the scale will go down.  If the product on the right side of the balance scale is greater than the product on the left side of the balance scale, then the right side of the scale will go down, and if the products on both the left and right side of the balance scale are equal, then the scale will balance.  

Using these item types Siegler differentiated between a series of rules that children might use to solve balance-scale items. A child using Rule I will only consider the number of blocks in the prediction of the movement and disregards the distances—the number of blocks is more dominant than the distance. A child using Rule II does include the distance dimension in the prediction, but only when the number of blocks on each side of the fulcrum is equal. A child using Rule III does know that both the number-of-blocks and the distance dimension are relevant but does not know how to integrate both dimensions. A child using this rule will guess or ‘muddle through’ when both dimensions are in conflict. A child using Rule IV compares the torques on each side resulting in correct responses on all problems.[18]

Like Piaget, Siegler found that eventually the children were able to take into account the interaction between the weight of the discs and the distance from the center, and so successfully predict balance. However, this did not happen until participants were between 13 and 17 years of age. Consequently, Siegler concluded that children’s cognitive development is based on acquiring and using rules in increasingly more complex situations, rather than in stages.[19]

Does everyone reach formal operations?

According to Piaget, most people attain some degree of formal operational thinking, but use formal operations primarily in the areas of their strongest interest (Crain, 2005). In fact, most adults do not regularly demonstrate formal operational thought. A possible explanation is that an individual’s thinking has not been sufficiently challenged to demonstrate formal operational thought in all areas.

Adolescent Egocentrism

Once adolescents can understand abstract thoughts, they enter a world of hypothetical possibilities and demonstrate egocentrism, a heightened self-focus. The egocentricity comes from attributing unlimited power to their own thoughts (Crain, 2005). Piaget believed it was not until adolescents took on adult roles that they would be able to learn the limits to their own thoughts.

David Elkind (1967) expanded on the concept of Piaget’s adolescent egocentricity. Elkind theorized that the physiological changes that occur during adolescence result in adolescents being primarily concerned with themselves. Additionally, since adolescents fail to differentiate between what  others are thinking and their own thoughts, they believe that others are just as fascinated with their behavior and appearance. This belief results in the adolescent anticipating the reactions of others, and consequently constructing an .  Elkind thought that the imaginary audience contributed to the self-consciousness that occurs during early adolescence. The desire for privacy and reluctance to share personal information may be a further reaction to feeling under constant observation by others. Alternatively, recent research has indicated that the imaginary audience is not Imaginary. Specifically, adolescents and adults feel that they are often under scrutiny by others, especially if they are active on social media (Yau & Reich, 2018).

Another important consequence of adolescent egocentrism is the or belief that one is unique, special, and invulnerable to harm. Elkind (1967)     explains that because adolescents feel so important to others (imaginary audience) they regard themselves and their feelings as being special and unique. Adolescents believe that only they have experienced strong and diverse emotions, and therefore others could never understand how they feel. This uniqueness in one’s emotional experiences reinforces the adolescent’s belief of invulnerability, especially to death. Adolescents will engage in risky behaviors, such as drinking and driving or unprotected sex, and feel they will not suffer any negative consequences. Elkind believed that adolescent egocentricity emerged in early adolescence and declined in middle adolescence, however, recent research has also identified egocentricity in late adolescence (Schwartz, et al., 2008).

Consequences of Formal Operational Thought

As adolescents are now able to think abstractly and hypothetically, they exhibit many new ways of reflecting on information (Dolgin, 2011). For example, they demonstrate greater introspection or thinking about one’s thoughts and feelings.  They begin to imagine how the world could be which leads them to become idealistic or insisting upon high standards of behavior. Because of their idealism, they may become critical of others, especially adults in their life. Additionally, adolescents can demonstrate hypocrisy, or pretend to be what they are not. Since they are able to recognize what others expect of them, they will conform to those expectations for their emotions and behavior seemingly hypocritical to themselves. Lastly, adolescents can exhibit . This is when they approach problems at a level that is too complex, and they fail because the tasks are too simple. Their new ability to consider alternatives is not completely under control and they appear “stupid” when they are in fact bright, just not experienced.[20]

Beyond Formal Operational Thought

As with other major contributors of theories of development, several of Piaget’s ideas have come under criticism based on the results of further research. For example, several contemporary studies support a model of development that is more continuous than Piaget’s discrete stages (Courage & Howe, 2002; Siegler, 2005, 2006). Many others suggest that children reach cognitive milestones earlier than Piaget describes (Baillargeon, 2004; de Hevia & Spelke, 2010).

According to Piaget, the highest level of cognitive development is formal operational thought, which develops between 11 and 20 years old. However, many developmental psychologists disagree with Piaget, suggesting a fifth stage of cognitive development, known as the (Basseches, 1984; Commons & Bresette, 2006; Sinnott, 1998). In postformal thinking, decisions are made based on situations and circumstances, and logic is integrated with emotion as adults develop principles that depend on contexts. One way that we can see the difference between an adult in postformal thought and an adolescent in formal operations is in terms of how they handle emotionally charged issues.

It seems that once we reach adulthood our problem-solving abilities change: As we attempt to solve problems, we tend to think more deeply about many areas of our lives, such as relationships, work, and politics (Labouvie-Vief & Diehl, 1999). Because of this, postformal thinkers can draw on past experiences to help them solve new problems. Problem-solving strategies using postformal thought vary, depending on the situation. What does this mean? Adults can recognize, for example, that what seems to be an ideal solution to a problem at work involving a disagreement with a colleague may not be the best solution to a disagreement with a significant other.[21]

Test Yourself: True or False?

As introduced in Chapter 1, Lev Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist who argued that culture has a major impact on a child’s cognitive development. He believed that the social interactions with adults and more interpersonal instruction, he believed children’s minds would not advance very far as their knowledge would be based only on their own discoveries. Let’s review some of Vygotsky’s key concepts. Some of Vygotsky’s key concepts are described below. [22]

: Vygotsky believed that learning takes place within the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). In this, students can, with help from adults or children who are more advanced, master concepts and ideas that they cannot understand on their own. This model has two developmental   levels:

1. The – point the learner has already reached & can problem-solve independently.
2. The  – point the learner is capable of reaching under the guidance of teachers or in collaboration with peers.

The (ZPD) is the level at which learning takes place. It comprises cognitive structures that are still in the process of maturing, but which can only mature under the guidance of or in collaboration with others.

Explaining the Zone of Proximal Development

To ensure development in the ZPD, the assistance/guidance received must have certain features:

– the process whereby two participants who begin a task with different understandings arrive at a shared understanding (Newson & Newson, 1975). This creates a common ground for communication as each partner adjusts to the perspective of the other.

– adjusting the support offered during a teaching session to fit the child’s current level of performance. This captures the form of teaching interaction that occurs as individuals work on tasks such as puzzles and academic assignments.[23]

– a broader concept than scaffolding that refers to shared endeavors between expert and less expert participants

: Do you ever talk to yourself? Why? Chances are, this occurs when you are struggling with a problem, trying to remember something, or feel very emotional about a situation. Children talk to themselves too. Piaget interpreted this as egocentric speech or speech that is focused on the child and does not include another’s point of view.  Vygotsky, however, believed that children talk to themselves in order to solve problems or clarify thoughts. As children learn to think in words, they do so aloud before eventually closing their lips and engaging in private speech or . Thinking out loud eventually becomes thought accompanied by internal speech and talking to oneself becomes a practice only engaged in when we are trying to learn something or remember something. This inner speech is not as elaborate as the speech we use when communicating with others (Vygotsky, 1962).[24]

Contrast with Piaget: Piaget was highly critical of teacher-directed instruction believing that teachers who take control of the child’s learning place the child into a passive role (Crain, 2005). Further, teachers may present abstract ideas without the child’s true understanding, and instead they just repeat back what they heard. Piaget believed children must be given opportunities to discover concepts on their own. As previously stated, Vygotsky did not believe children could reach a higher cognitive level without instruction from more learned individuals. Who is correct? Both theories certainly contribute to our understanding of how children learn.[28]

Test Yourself

Information Processing is not the work of a single theorist but based on the ideas and research of several cognitive scientists studying how individuals perceive, analyze, manipulate, use, and remember information. This approach assumes that humans gradually improve in their processing skills; that is, cognitive development is continuous rather than stage-like. The more complex mental skills of adults are built from the primitive abilities of children. We are born with the ability to notice stimuli, store, and retrieve information, and brain maturation enables advancements in our information processing system. At the same time, interactions with the environment also aid in our development of more effective strategies for processing information.[25]

Attention

Changes in attention have been described by many as the key to changes in human memory (Nelson & Fivush, 2004; Posner & Rothbart, 2007). However, attention is not a unified function; it is comprised of sub-processes. The ability to switch our focus between tasks or external stimuli is called or . This is separate from our ability to focus on a single task or stimulus, while ignoring distracting information, called . Different from these is , or the ability to stay on task for long periods of time. Moreover, we also have attention processes that influence our behavior and enable us to inhibit a habitual or dominant response, and others that enable us to distract ourselves when upset or frustrated.[26]

Attention in Infancy

An approach to understanding cognitive development by observing the behavior of infants is through the use of the , which was discussed in detail in Chapter 2, Research methods.  You should recall that habituation refers to the decreased responsiveness toward a stimulus after it has been presented numerous times in succession. Organisms including infants, tend to be more interested in things the first few times they experience them and become less interested in them with more frequent exposure. Developmental psychologists have used this general principle to help them understand what babies remember and understand. Although this procedure is very simple, it allows researchers to create variations that reveal a great deal about a newborn’s cognitive ability.[27]

The results of visual habituation research and the findings from other studies that measured attention utilizing other measures (e.g., looking measures such as the visual paired comparison task, heart rate, and event-related potentials ) indicate significant developmental change in and across the infancy period. For example, infants show gains in the magnitude of the attention related response and spend a greater proportion of time engaged in attention with increasing age (Richards and Turner, 2001).  Throughout infancy, attention has a significant impact on infant performance on a variety of tasks tapping into recognition memory.[28]

Attention in Childhood

: Young children (age 3-4) have considerable difficulties in dividing their attention between two tasks, and often perform at levels equivalent to our closest relative, the chimpanzee, but by age five they have surpassed the chimp (Hermann, Misch, Hernandez-Lloreda & Tomasello, 2015; Hermann & Tomasello, 2015). Despite these improvements, 5-year-olds continue to perform below the level of school-age children, adolescents, and adults. Older children also improve in their ability to shift their attention between tasks or different features of a task (Carlson, Zelazo, & Faja, 2013). A younger child who asked to sort objects into piles based on type of object, car versus animal, or color of object, red versus blue, may have difficulty if you switch from asking them to sort based on type to now having them sort based on color. This requires them to suppress the prior sorting rule. An older child has less difficulty making the switch, meaning there is greater flexibility in their attentional skills. These changes in attention and working memory contribute to children having more strategic approaches to tasks.

: Children’s ability with selective attention tasks improve as they age. However, this ability is also greatly influenced by the child’s temperament (Rothbart & Rueda, 2005), the complexity of the stimulus or task (Porporino, Shore, Iarocci & Burack, 2004), and along with whether the stimuli are visual or auditory (Guy, Rogers & Cornish,  2013). Guy et al. found that children’s ability to selectively attend to visual information outpaced that of auditory stimuli. This may explain why young children are not able to hear the voice of the teacher over the cacophony of sounds in the typical preschool classroom (Jones, Moore & Amitay, 2015). Jones and his colleagues found that 4 to 7-year-olds could not filter out background noise, especially when its frequencies were close in sound to the target sound. In comparison, 8 to 11-year-old older children often performed similar to adults. Overall, the ability inhibit irrelevant information improves during this age group, with there being a sharp improvement in selective attention from age six into adolescence (Vakil, Blachstein, Sheinman, & Greenstein, 2009).[33]

: Most measures of sustained attention typically ask children to spend several minutes focusing on one task, while waiting for an infrequent event, while there are multiple distractors for several minutes. Berwid, Curko-Kera, Marks and Halperin (2005) asked children between the ages of 3 and 7 to push a button whenever a “target” image was displayed, but they had to refrain from pushing the button when a non-target image was shown. The younger the child, the more difficulty he or she had maintaining their attention. [29]

Disorders Involving Attention

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD)

The exact causes of (AD/HD) are unknown; however, research has demonstrated that factors that many people associate with the development of AD/HD do not cause the disorder including, minor head injuries, damage to the brain from complications during birth, food allergies, excess sugar intake, too much television, poor schools, or poor parenting. Research has found a number of significant risk factors affecting neurodevelopment and behavior expression. Events such as maternal alcohol and tobacco use that affect the development of the fetal brain can increase the risk for AD/HD. Injuries to the brain from environmental toxins such as lack of iron have also been implicated.

Symptoms: People with AD/HD show a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity–impulsivity that interferes with functioning or development:

Inattention: Six or more symptoms of inattention for children up to age 16, or five or more for adolescents 17 and older and adults; symptoms of inattention have been present for at least 6 months, and they are inappropriate for developmental level:

1. .Often fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes in schoolwork, at work, or with other activities.
2. Often has trouble holding attention on tasks or play activities.
3. Often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly.
4. Often does not follow through on instructions and fails to finish schoolwork, chores, or duties in the workplace (e.g., loses focus, side-tracked).
5. Often has trouble organizing tasks and activities.
6. Often avoids, dislikes, or is reluctant to do tasks that require mental effort over a long period of time (such as schoolwork or homework).
7. Often loses things necessary for tasks and activities (e.g. school materials, pencils, books, tools, wallets, keys, paperwork, eyeglasses, mobile telephones).
8. Is often easily distracted
9. Is often forgetful in daily activities.

1. Hyperactivity and Impulsivity: Six or more symptoms of hyperactivity-impulsivity for children up to age 16, or five or more for adolescents 17 and older and adults; symptoms of hyperactivity-impulsivity have been present for at least 6 months to an extent that is disruptive and inappropriate for the person’s developmental level:

1. Often fidgets with or taps hands or feet, or squirms in seat.
2. Often leaves seat in situations when remaining seated is expected.
3. Often runs about or climbs in situations where it is not appropriate (adolescents or adults may be limited to feeling restless).
4.  Often unable to play or take part in leisure activities quietly.
5. Is often “on the go” acting as if “driven by a motor”.
6. Often talks excessively.
7. Often blurts out an answer before a question has been completed.
8. Often has trouble waiting his/her turn.
9.  Often interrupts or intrudes on others (e.g., butts into conversations or games

In addition, the following conditions must be met:

1. Several inattentive or hyperactive-impulsive symptoms were present before age 12 years.
2. Several symptoms are present in two or more settings, (such as at home, school or work; with friends or relatives; in other activities).
3. There is clear evidence that the symptoms interfere with, or reduce the quality of, social, school, or work functioning.
4. The symptoms are not better explained by another mental disorder (such as a mood disorder, anxiety disorder, dissociative disorder, or a personality disorder). The symptoms do not happen only during the course of schizophrenia or another psychotic disorder.

Based on the types of symptoms, three kinds (presentations) of AD/HD can occur:

if enough symptoms of both criteria inattention and hyperactivity-impulsivity were present for the past six months.

: if enough symptoms of inattention, but not hyperactivity-impulsivity, were present for the past six months: if enough symptoms of hyperactivity-impulsivity, but not inattention, were present for the past six months.

: if enough symptoms of hyperactivity-impulsivity, but not inattention, were present for the past six months.

Because symptoms can change over time, the presentation may change over time as well.[30]

The diagnosis of AD/HD can be made reliably using well-tested diagnostic interview methods. However, as of yet, there is no independent valid test for ADHD. Among children, AD/HD frequently occurs along with other learning, behavior, or mood problems such as learning disabilities, oppositional defiant disorder, anxiety disorders, and depression.         

Treatment

A variety of medications and behavioral interventions are used to treat AD/HD. The most widely used medications are methylphenidate (Ritalin), D-amphetamine, and other amphetamines. These drugs are stimulants that affect the level of the neurotransmitter dopamine at the synapse. Nine out of 10 children improve while taking one of these drugs. In addition to the well-established treatments described above, some parents and therapists have tried a variety of nutritional interventions to treat AD/HD. A few studies have found that some children benefit from such treatments. Nevertheless, no well-established nutritional interventions have consistently been shown to be effective for treating AD/HD.[31]

Test Yourself

Memory

One way of understanding memory is to think about it in terms of stages that describe the length of time that information remains available to us. According to this approach information begins in , moves to, and eventually moves to . But not all information makes it through all three stages; most of it is forgotten. Whether the information moves from shorter-duration memory into longer-duration memory or whether it is lost from memory entirely depends on how the information is attended to and processed.[32]

Milti-Store Model of Memory[38]

Sensory memory: refers to the brief storage of sensory information. Sensory memory is a memory buffer that lasts only very briefly and then, unless it is attended to and passed on for more processing, is forgotten. The purpose of sensory memory is to give the brain some time to process the incoming sensations, and to allow us to see the world as an unbroken stream of events rather than as individual pieces.

Visual sensory memory is known as. Iconic memory was first studied by the psychologist George Sperling (1960).Sperling, G. (1960). The information is available in a brief visual presentation.  In his research, Sperling showed participants a display of letters in rows (see image below). However, the display lasted only about 50 milliseconds (1/20 of a second). Then, Sperling gave his participants a recall test in which they were asked to name all the letters that they could remember. On average, the participants could remember only about one-quarter of the letters that they had seen.

An example of the displays used by Sperling to test the capacity and duration of sensory memory. [33]

Sperling (1960) showed his participants displays such as this one for only 1/20th of a second. He found that when he cued the participants to report one of the three rows of letters, they could do it, even if the cue was given shortly after the display had been removed. The research demonstrated the existence of iconic memory.

Sperling reasoned that the participants had seen all the letters but could remember them only very briefly, making it impossible for them to report them all. To test this idea, in his next experiment he first showed the same letters, but then after the display had been removed, he signaled to the participants to report the letters from either the first, second, or third row. In this condition, the participants now reported almost all the letters in that row. This finding confirmed Sperling’s hunch: Participants had access to all of the letters in their iconic memories, and if the task was short enough, they were able to report on the part of the display he asked them to. The “short enough” is the length of iconic memory, which turns out to be about 250 milliseconds (¼ of a second).

Auditory sensory memory is known as. In contrast to iconic memories, which decay very rapidly, echoic memories can last as long as 4 seconds (Cowan, Lichty, & Grove, 1990).Cowan, N., Lichty, W., & Grove, T. R. 1990).

In some people iconic memory seems to last longer, a phenomenon known as (or “photographic memory”) in which people can report details of an image over long periods of time. These people, who often suffer from psychological disorders such as autism, claim that they can “see” an image long after it has been presented, and can often report accurately on that image.  There is also some evidence for eidetic memories in hearing; some people report that their echoic memories persist for unusually long periods of time. The composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart may have possessed eidetic memory for music, because even when he was very young and had not yet had a great deal of musical training, he could listen to long compositions and then play them back almost perfectly (Solomon, 1995).

Most of the information that gets into sensory memory is forgotten, but information that we turn our attention to, with the goal of remembering it, may pass into short-term memory. is the place where small amounts of information can be temporarily kept for more than a few seconds but usually for less than one minute (Baddeley, Vallar, & Shallice, 1990). Information in short-term memory is not stored permanently but rather becomes available for us to process, and the processes that we use to make sense of, modify, interpret, and store information in STM are known as. Short-term memory is limited in its capacity. The digit span of most adults is between five and nine digits, with an average of about seven. (George Miller, 1956).

If information makes it past short term-memory it may enter, memory storage that can hold information for days, months, and years. The capacity of long-term memory is large, and there is no known limit to what we can remember (Wang, Liu, & Wang, 2003).  refers to knowledge or experiences that can be consciously remembered. There are two types of explicit memory:  and . Episodic memory refers to the firsthand experiences that we have had (e.g., recollections of our high school graduation day or of the fantastic dinner we had in New York last year). Semantic memory refers to our knowledge of facts and concepts about the world (e.g., that the absolute value of −90 is greater than the absolute value of 9 and that one definition of the word “affect” is “the experience of feeling or emotion”).In contrast, knowing how to walk so you can get to the classroom or how to hold a pencil to write would be examples of non-declarative memories. [34]

Types of Long Term Memory [35]

While explicit memory consists of the things that we can consciously report that we know, refers to knowledge that we cannot consciously access. However, implicit memory is nevertheless exceedingly important to us because it has a direct effect on our behavior. Implicit memory refers to the influence of experience on behavior, even if the individual is not aware of those influences. As you can see in the figure “Types of Memory”, there are three general types of implicit memory: ,, and .

refers to our often-unexplainable knowledge of how to do things. When we walk from one place to another, speak to another person in English, dial a cell phone, or play a video game, we are using procedural memory. Procedural memory allows us to perform complex tasks, even though we may not be able to explain to others how we do them. There is no way to tell someone how to ride a bicycle; a person has to learn by doing it. The idea of implicit memory helps explain how infants are able to learn. The ability to crawl, walk, and talk are procedures, and these skills are easily and efficiently developed while we are children despite the fact that as adults we have no conscious memory of having learned them.

A second type of implicit memory is , in which we learn, often without effort or awareness, to associate neutral stimuli (such as a sound or a light) with another stimulus (such as food), which creates a naturally occurring response, such as enjoyment or salivation. The memory for the association is demonstrated when the conditioned stimulus (the sound) begins to create the same response as the unconditioned stimulus (the food) did before the learning.

The final type of implicit memory is known as , or changes in behavior as a result of experiences that have happened frequently or recently. Priming refers both to the activation of knowledge (e.g., we can prime the concept of “kindness” by presenting people with words related to kindness) and to the influence of that activation on behavior (people who are primed with the concept of kindness may act more kindly).[36]

Network Models and Connectionism

storage emphasize the role of connections between stored memories in the brain. The basis of these theories is that neural networks connect and interact to store memories by modifying the strength of the connections between neural units. In network theory, each connection is characterized by a weight value that indicates the strength of that particular connection. The stronger the connection, the easier a memory is to retrieve.

are based on the concept of . Connectionism is an approach in cognitive science that models mental or behavioral phenomena as the emergent processes of interconnected networks that consist of simple units. Connectionism was introduced in the 1940s by Donald Hebb, who said the famous phrase, “Cells that fire together wire together.” This is the key to understanding network models: neural units that are activated together strengthen the connections between themselves.

There are several types of network models in memory research. Some define the fundamental network unit as a piece of information. Others define the unit as a neuron. However, network models generally agree that memory is stored in neural networks and is strengthened or weakened based on the connections between neurons. Network models are not the only models of memory storage, but they do have a great deal of power when it comes to explaining how learning memory work in the brain, so they are extremely important to understand.[37]

An example of a neural network.  The darker lines demonstrate a stronger connection between concepts whereas the lighter lines represent a weaker connection between concepts. [44]

Test Yourself

Infant Memory

Infant Memory requires a certain degree of brain maturation, so it should not be surprising that infant memory is rather fleeting and fragile. As a result, older children and adults experience , the inability to recall memories from the first few years of life. Several hypotheses have been proposed for this amnesia. From the biological perspective, it has been suggested that infantile amnesia is due to the immaturity of the infant brain, especially those areas that are crucial to the formation of autobiographical memory, such as the hippocampus. From the cognitive perspective, it has been suggested that the lack of linguistic skills of babies and toddlers limit their ability to mentally represent events; thereby, reducing their ability to encode memory. Moreover, even if infants do form such early memories, older children and adults may not be able to access them because they may be employing very different, more linguistically based, retrieval cues than infants used when forming the memory. Finally, social theorists argue that episodic memories of personal experiences may hinge on an understanding of “self”, something that is clearly lacking in infants and young toddlers.

However, in a series of clever studies Carolyn Rovee-Collier and her colleagues have demonstrated that infants can remember events from their life, even if these memories are short-lived. Three-month-old infants were taught that they could make a mobile hung over their crib shake by kicking their legs. The infants were in their crib, on their backs. A ribbon was tied to one foot and the other end to a mobile. At first infants made random movements, but then came to realize that by kicking they could make the mobile shake. After two 9 minute sessions with the mobile, the mobile was removed. One week later the mobile was reintroduced to one group of infants and most of the babies immediately started kicking their legs, indicating that they remembered their prior experience with the mobile. A second group of infants was shown the mobile two weeks later and the babies only random movements. The memory had faded (Rovee-Collier, 1987; Giles & Rovee-Collier, 2011). However, when Rovee-Collier and Hayne (1987) found that 3-month-olds could remember the mobile after two weeks if they were shown the mobile and watched it move, even though they were not tied to it. This reminder helped most infants to remember the connection between their kicking and the movement of the mobile. Like many researchers of infant memory, Rovee-Collier (1990) found infant memory to be very context dependent. In other words, the sessions with the mobile and the later retrieval sessions had to be conducted under very similar circumstances or else the babies would not remember their prior experiences with the mobile. For instance, if the first mobile had had yellow blocks with blue letters, but at the later retrieval session the blocks were blue with yellow letters, the babies would not kick.

Infants older than 6 months of age can retain information for longer periods of time; they also need less reminding to retrieve information in memory. Studies of , that is, the imitation of actions after a time delay, can occur as early as six-months of age (Campanella & Rovee-Collier, 2005), but only if infants are allowed to practice the behavior they were shown. By 12 months of age, infants no longer need to practice the behavior in order to retain the memory for four weeks (Klein & Meltzoff, 1999).[38]

Test Yourself

Memory in Early Childhood

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, three types of memory have been identified:  sensory memory, short term memory (working memory) and long-term memory.

Sensory Memory: Studies of auditory sensory memory have found that the sensory memory trace for the characteristics of a tone last about one second in 2-year-olds, two seconds in 3-year-olds, more than two seconds in 4-year-olds and three to five seconds in 6-year-olds (Glass, Sachse, & vob Suchodoletz, 2008). Other researchers have found that young children hold sounds for a shorter duration than do older children and adults and that this deficit is not due attentional differences between these age groups but reflect differences in the performance of the sensory memory system (Gomes et al., 1999).

Short-term Memory: Children in this age group struggle with many aspects of attention, and this greatly diminishes their ability to consciously juggle several pieces of information in memory. The capacity of working memory, that is the amount of information someone can hold in consciousness, is smaller in young children than in older children and adults (Galotti, 2018). The typical adult and teenager can hold a 7-digit number active in their short-term memory. The typical 5-year-old can hold only a 4-digit number active. This means that the more   complex a mental task is, the less efficient a younger child will be in paying attention to, and actively processing, information in order to complete the task.

Older children and adults use mental strategies to aid their memory performance. For instance, simple rote rehearsal may be used to commit information to memory. Young children often do not rehearse unless reminded to do so, and when they do rehearse, they often fail to use . In clustering rehearsal, the person rehearses previous material while adding in additional information. If a list of words is read out loud to you, you are likely to rehearse each word as you hear it along with any previous words you were given. Young children will repeat each word they hear, but often fail to repeat the prior words in the list. In Schneider, Kron-Sperl and Hunnerkopf’s (2009) longitudinal study of kindergarten children, the majority of children used no strategy to remember information, a finding that was consistent with previous research. As a result, their memory performance was poor when compared to their abilities as they aged and started to use more effective memory strategies.

Long-term Memory: A component of episodic memory is or our personal narrative. Adults rarely remember events from the first few years of life. In other words, we lack autobiographical memories from our experiences as an infant, toddler and very young preschooler. Several factors contribute to the emergence of autobiographical memory, including brain maturation, improvements in language, opportunities to talk about experiences with parents and others, the development of theory of mind, and a representation of “self” (Nelson & Fivush, 2004). Two-year-olds do remember fragments of personal experiences, but these are rarely coherent accounts of past events (Nelson & Ross, 1980). Between 2 and 2 ½ years of age children can provide more information about past experiences. However, these recollections require considerable prodding by adults (Nelson & Fivush, 2004). Over the next few years, children will form more detailed autobiographical memories and engage in more reflection of the past.

Neo-Piagetians

As previously discussed, Piaget’s theory has been criticized on many fronts, and updates to reflect more current research have been provided by the , or those theorists who provide “new” interpretations of Piaget’s theory. Morra, Gobbo, Marini and Sheese (2008) reviewed Neo-Piagetian theories, which were first presented in the 1970s, and identified how these “new” theories combined Piagetian concepts with those found in Information Processing. Similar to Piaget’s theory, Neo-Piagetian theories believe in , assume cognitive development can be separated into different stages with qualitatively different characteristics, and advocate that children’s thinking becomes more complex in advanced stages. Unlike Piaget, Neo-Piagetians believe that aspects of information processing change the complexity of each stage, not logic as determined by Piaget.

Neo-Piagetians propose that working memory capacity is affected by biological maturation, and therefore restricts young children’s ability to acquire complex thinking and reasoning skills. Increases in working memory performance and cognitive skills development coincide with the timing of several neurodevelopmental processes. These include , , , changes in cerebral metabolism, and changes in brain activity (Morra et al., 2008). Myelination especially occurs in waves between birth and adolescence, and the degree of myelination in particular areas explains the increasing efficiency of certain skills. Therefore, brain maturation, which occurs in spurts, affects how and when cognitive skills develop. Additionally, all Neo-Piagetian theories support that experience and learning interact with biological maturation in shaping cognitive development.[39]

Memory in Middle-to-Late Childhood

Children differ in their memory abilities, and these differences predict both their readiness for school and academic performance in school (PreBler, Krajewski, & Hasselhorn, 2013). During middle and late childhood children make strides in several areas of cognitive function including the capacity of working memory, ability to pay attention, and their use of memory strategies. Both changes in the brain and experience foster these abilities.        

Working Memory: The capacity of working memory expands during middle and late childhood, and research has suggested that both an increase in processing speed and the ability to inhibit irrelevant information from entering memory are contributing to the greater efficiency of working memory during this age (de Ribaupierre, 2002). Changes in myelination and synaptic pruning in the cortex are likely behind the increase in processing speed and ability to filter out irrelevant stimuli (Kail, McBride-Chang, Ferrer, Cho, & Shu, 2013).

Children with learning disabilities in math and reading often have difficulties with working memory (Alloway, 2009). They may struggle with following the directions of an assignment. When a task calls for multiple steps, children with poor working memory may miss steps because they may lose track of where they are in the task. Adults working with such children may need to communicate: Using more familiar vocabulary, using shorter sentences, repeating task instructions more frequently, and breaking more complex tasks into smaller more manageable steps. Some studies have also shown that more intensive training of working memory strategies, such as chunking, aid in improving the capacity of working memory in children with poor working memory (Alloway, Bibile, & Lau, 2013).

Memory Strategies

Bjorklund (2005) describes a developmental progression in the acquisition and use of memory strategies. Such strategies are often lacking in younger children but increase in frequency as children progress through elementary school. Examples of memory strategies or , include rehearsing information you wish to recall, visualizing and organizing information, creating rhymes, such “i” before “e” except after “c”, or inventing acronyms, such as “roygbiv” to remember the colors of the rainbow. Schneider, Kron-Sperl, and Hünnerkopf (2009) reported a steady increase in the use of memory strategies from ages six to ten in their longitudinal study. Moreover, by age ten many children were using two or more memory strategies to help them recall information. Schneider and colleagues found that there were considerable individual differences at each age in the use of strategies, and that children who utilized more strategies had better memory performance than their same aged peers. Children may experience deficiencies in their use of memory strategies. A occurs when a child does not grasp the strategy being taught, and thus, does not benefit from its use. If you do not understand why using an acronym might be helpful, or how to create an acronym, the strategy is not likely to help you. In a the child does not spontaneously use a memory strategy and must be prompted to do so. In this case, children know the strategy and are more than capable of using it, but they fail to “produce” the strategy on their own. For example, children might know how to make a list, but may fail to do this to help them remember what to bring on a family vacation. A refers to children using an appropriate strategy, but it fails to aid their performance. Utilization deficiency is common in the early stages of learning a new memory strategy (Schneider & Pressley, 1997; Miller, 2000). Until the use of the strategy becomes automatic it may slow down the learning process, as space is taken up in memory by the strategy itself. Initially, children may get frustrated because their memory performance may seem worse when they try to use the new strategy. Once children become more adept at using the strategy, their memory performance will improve. Sodian and Schneider (1999) found that new memory strategies acquired prior to age eight often show utilization deficiencies with there being a gradual improvement in the child’s use of the strategy. In contrast, strategies acquired after this age often followed an “all-or-nothing” principle in which improvement was not gradual, but abrupt. [47]

Knowledge Base (Long-term memory)

One’s has an unlimited capacity and stores information for days, months or years. It consists of things that we know of or can remember if asked. This is where you want information to ultimately be stored. The important thing to remember about storage is that it must be done in a meaningful or effective way. In other words, if you simply try to repeat something several times in order to remember it, you may only be able to remember the sound of the word rather than the meaning of the concept. So if you are asked to explain the meaning of the word or to apply a concept in some way, you will be lost. Studying involves organizing information in a meaningful way for later retrieval. Passively reading a text is usually inadequate and should be thought of as the first step in learning material. Writing key words, thinking of examples to illustrate their meaning, and considering ways that concepts are related are all techniques helpful for organizing information for effective storage and later retrieval.

During middle childhood, children are able to learn and remember due to an improvement in the ways they attend to and store information. As children enter school and learn more about the world, they develop more categories for concepts and learn more efficient strategies for storing and retrieving information. One significant reason is that they continue to have more experiences on which to tie new information. New experiences are similar to old ones or remind the child of something else about which they know. This helps them file away new experiences more easily.

They also have a better understanding of how well they are performing on a task and the level of difficulty of a task. As they become more realistic about their abilities, they can adapt studying strategies to meet those needs. While preschoolers may spend as much time on an unimportant aspect of a problem as       they do on the main point, school aged children start to learn to prioritize and gage what is significant and what is not. They develop metacognition or the ability to understand the best way to figure out a problem. They gain more tools and strategies (such as “i before e except after c” so they know that “receive” is correct but “recieve” is not.)[40]

Test Yourself

Executive Function

is an umbrella term for the management, regulation, and control of cognitive processes, including working memory, reasoning, problem solving, social inhibition, planning, and execution. The is a theoretical cognitive system that manages the processes of executive function. This system is thought to rely on the prefrontal areas of the frontal lobe, but while these areas are necessary for executive function, they are not solely sufficient.

Role of the Executive System

The executive system is thought to be heavily involved in handling novel situations outside the domain of the routine, automatic psychological processes (i.e., ones that are handled by learned schemas or set behaviors). There are five types of situation where routine behavior is insufficient for optimal performance, in which the executive system comes into play:

• • • • planning or decision making;
      • error correction or troubleshooting;
      • novel situations with unrehearsed reactions;
      • dangerous or technically difficult situations;
      • overcoming of a strong habitual response; resisting temptation.

A is a response for which immediate reinforcement (positive or negative) is available or is associated with that response. Executive functions tend to be invoked when it is necessary to inhibit or override prepotent responses () that would otherwise occur automatically. For example, on being presented with a potentially rewarding stimulus like a piece of chocolate cake, a person might have the prepotent “automatic” response to take a bite. But if this behavior conflicts with internal plans (such as a diet), the executive system might be engaged to inhibit that response.

Anatomy of the Executive System

Historically, the executive functions have been thought to be regulated by the prefrontal regions of the frontal lobes, but this is a matter of ongoing debate. Though prefrontal regions of the brain are necessary for executive function, it seems that non-frontal regions come into play as well. The most likely explanation is that while the frontal lobes participate in all executive functions, other brain regions are necessary. The major frontal structures involved in executive function are:

• Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex: associated with verbal and design fluency, set shifts, planning, response inhibition, working memory, organizational skills, reasoning, problem solving, and abstract thinking.
• Anterior cingulate cortex: inhibition of inappropriate responses, decision making, and motivated behaviors.
• Orbitofrontal cortex: impulse control, maintenance of set, monitoring ongoing behavior, socially appropriate behavior, representing the value of rewards of sensory stimuli.[41]

The prefrontal cortex:  The different parts of the prefrontal cortex are vital to executive function.[50]

Development of the Executive System

The abilities of the executive system mature at different rates over time because the brain continues to mature and develop connections well into adulthood. Therefore, a developmental framework is helpful. Executive-function corresponds to the development of the growing brain; as the processing capacity of the frontal lobes (and other interconnected regions) increases, the core executive functions emerge. Growth spurts also occur in the development of the executive functions; their maturation is not a linear process.

In early childhood, the primary executive functions to emerge are working memory and inhibitory control. Cognitive flexibility, goal-directed behavior, and planning also begin to develop, but are not fully functional. [42]

A child shows higher executive functioning skills when the parents are more warm and responsive, use scaffolding when the child is trying to solve a problem, and provide cognitively stimulating environments for the child (Fay-Stammbach, Hawes & Meredith, 2014). For instance, scaffolding was positively correlated with greater cognitive flexibility at age two and inhibitory control at age four (Bibok, Carpendale & Müller, 2009). In Schneider, Kron-Sperl and Hunnerkopf’s (2009) longitudinal study of 102 kindergarten children, the majority of children used no strategy to remember information, a finding that was consistent with previous research. As a result, their memory performance was poor when compared to their abilities as they aged and started to use more effective memory strategies.[43]

During , there are major increases in verbal working memory, goal-directed behavior, selective attention, cognitive flexibility, and strategic planning.  In adolescence, these functions all become better integrated as they continue developing. [44]

However, , or the ability to control impulses, may still fail. A failure in self-regulation is especially true when there is high stress or high demand on mental functions (Luciano & Collins, 2012). While high stress or demand may tax even an adult’s self-regulatory abilities, neurological changes in the adolescent brain may make teens particularly prone to more risky decision making under these conditions.[45]

Metacognition

refers to the knowledge we have about our own thinking and our  ability to use this awareness to regulate our own cognitive processes (Bruning, Schraw, Norby, & Ronning, 2004). Children in this developmental stage also have a better understanding of how well they are performing a task, and the level of difficulty of a task. As they become more realistic about their abilities, they can adapt studying strategies to meet those needs. Young children spend as much time on an unimportant aspect of a problem as they do on the main point, while older children start to learn to prioritize and gauge what is significant and what is not. As a result, they develop metacognition.

, or a detailed examination of beliefs, courses of action, and evidence, involves teaching children how to think. The purpose of critical thinking is to evaluate information in ways that help us make informed decisions. Critical thinking involves better understanding a problem through gathering, evaluating, and selecting information, and also by considering many possible solutions.  Ennis (1987) identified several skills useful in critical thinking. These include: Analyzing arguments, clarifying information, judging the credibility of a source, making value judgments, and deciding on an action. Metacognition is essential to critical thinking because it allows us to reflect on the information as we make decisions.

Children differ in their cognitive process and these differences predict both their readiness for school, academic performance, and testing in school. (Prebler, Krajewski, & Hasselhorn, 2013).[46]  Much of the current study regarding metacognition within the field of cognitive psychology deals with its application within the area of education. Educators strive to increase students’ metacognitive abilities in order to enhance their learning, study habits, goal setting, and self-regulation.[56]

Test Yourself

Theory of Mind

refers to the ability to think about other people’s thoughts. This mental mind reading helps humans to understand and predict the reactions of others, thus playing a crucial role in social development. One   common method for determining if a child has reached this mental milestone is the false belief task, described below.

The research began with a clever experiment by Wimmer and Perner (1983), who tested whether children can pass a false-belief test.  The child is shown a picture story of Sally, who puts her ball in a basket and leaves the room. While Sally is out of the room, Anne comes along and takes the ball from the basket and puts it inside a box. The child is then asked where Sally thinks the ball is located when she comes back to the room. Is she going to look first in the box or in the basket? The right answer is that she will look in the basket, because that’s where she put it and thinks it is; but we have to infer this false belief against our own better knowledge that the ball is in the box.

This is very difficult for children before the age of four because of the cognitive effort it takes. Three-year-olds have difficulty distinguishing between what they once thought was true and what they now know to be true. They feel confidentthat what they know now is what they have always known (Birch & Bloom, 2003).  Even adults need to think through this task (Epley, Morewedge, & Keysar, 2004).

To be successful at solving this type of task the child must separate what he or    she “knows” to be true from what someone else might “think” is true. In Piagetian terms, they must give up a tendency toward egocentrism. The child must also understand that what guides people’s actions and responses are what they “believe” rather than what is reality. In other words, people can mistakenly believe things that are false and will act based on this false knowledge. Consequently, prior to age four children are rarely successful at solving such a task (Wellman, Cross & Watson, 2001).

Researchers examining the development of theory of mind have been concerned by the overemphasis on the mastery of false belief as the primary measure of whether a child has attained theory of mind. Wellman and his colleagues (Wellman, Fang, Liu, Zhu & Liu, 2006) suggest that theory of mind is comprised of a number of components, each with its own developmental timeline.

Two-year-olds understand the diversity of desires, yet as noted earlier it is not until age four or five that children grasp false belief, and often not until middle childhood do they understand that people may hide how they really feel. In part, because children in early childhood have difficulty hiding how they really feel.

This awareness of the existence of theory of mind is part of social intelligence, such as recognizing that others can think differently about situations. It helps us to be self-conscious or aware that others can think of us in different ways and it helps us to be able to be understanding or be empathetic toward others. Moreover, this mind reading ability helps us to anticipate and predict people’s actions. The awareness of the mental states of others is important for communication and social skills.[47]

Theory of Mind begins to increase in adolescence and is an important component of social problem solving and conflict avoidance.     According to one longitudinal study, levels of cognitive empathy begin rising in girls around 13 years old, and around 15 years old in boys (Van der Graaff et al., 2013).[48]