CHAPTER 6: COGNITIVE PROCESSES AND …



Test Three Study Guide

Chapter 7

A. The Information-Processing Approach and Its Application to Development

1. Effective information processing involves attention, memory, and thinking.

2. Mechanisms of change are especially important in the advances children make in cognitive development.

3. Three mechanisms work together to create changes in children’s cognitive skills:

4. Encoding is the process by which information gets into memory.

5. Automaticity refers to the ability to process information with little or no effort.

6. Strategy construction is the creation of new procedures for processing information.

B. Speed of Processing Information

• Speed of processing can be a limitation since it influences what we can do with information.

C. Changes in Speed of Processing

• Increases from childhood to young adulthood, and gradually declines thereafter.

• Health and exercise may influence how much decline in processing speed occurs.

II. ATTENTION

A. What Is Attention?

• Attention is the focusing of mental resources.

• Attention improves cognitive processing for many tasks.

• At any one time, people can pay attention to only a limited amount of information.

• Individuals can allocate their attention in the following ways:

o Selective attention is focusing on a specific aspect of experience that is relevant while ignoring others that are irrelevant.

o Divided attention involves concentrating on more than one activity at the same time.

o Sustained attention (vigilance) is the ability to maintain attention to a selected stimulus for a prolonged period of time.

o Executive attention involves action planning, allocating attention to goals, error detection and compensation, monitoring progress on tasks, and dealing with novel or difficult circumstances.

III. MEMORY

A. Memory processing

1. Processes of Memory

• Encoding, storage, and retrieval are the basic processes required for memory.

• Failures can occur in any of these processes.

2. Constructing Memory

• Memories may be inaccurate for a number of reasons.

• According to schema theory, people mold memories to fit information that already exists in their minds.

o This process is guided by schemas.

• Schemas influence the way people encode, make inferences about, and retrieve information.

• We reconstruct the past rather than take an exact photograph of it, and the mind can distort an event as it encodes and stores impressions of it.

B. Infancy

1. First Memories

• Implicit memory refers to memory without conscious recollection.

• Explicit memory refers to the conscious memory of facts and experiences.

• Maturation of the hippocampus and the surrounding cerebral cortex, especially the frontal lobes, makes the improvement of explicit memory possible.

2. Infantile Amnesia

• The inability to remember little if anything from the first three years of your life is called infantile amnesia.

• The immaturity of the prefrontal lobes of the brain is believed to play a role in infantile amnesia.

C. Childhood

1. Short-Term and Working Memory

• Long-term memory is relatively permanent and unlimited.

• Short-term memory involves the retention of information for up to 15 to 30 seconds, without rehearsal of the information.

2. Working memory

• Working memory is defined as a kind of mental “workbench” where individuals manipulate and assemble information when they make decisions, solve problems, and comprehend written and spoken language.

3. Children’s Long-Term Memory

• Several factors influence the accuracy of a young child’s memory:

• There are age differences in children’s susceptibility to suggestion.

• There are individual differences in susceptibility

• Interviewing techniques can produce substantial distortions in children’s reports about highly salient events.

• Whether a young child’s eyewitness testimony is accurate or not may depend on a number of factors mentioned above.

3. Strategies involve the use of mental activities to improve the processing of information

• For memory, rehearsing information and organizing are two typical strategies that older children (and adults) use to remember information more effectively.

• Creating mental images (imagery) in another strategy for improving memory.

• One important strategy is elaboration, which involves engaging in more extensive processing of information.

o The use of elaboration changes developmentally.

• Fuzzy trace theory states that memory is best understood by considering two types of memory representations: verbatim memory trace and gist.

Chapter 8

I. THE CONCEPT OF INTELLIGENCE

A. What Is Intelligence?

1. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems and to adapt to and learn from experiences.

B. Intelligence tests

1. Binet and Weschler (no test items on Weschler tests)

The Binet Tests

7. Mental age (MA) is an individual’s level of mental development relative to others.

8. Intelligence quotient (IQ) is a person’s mental age divided by chronological age (CA), multiplied by 100. If mental age is the same as chronological age, then the person’s IQ is 100.

9.

2. The use and Misuse of Intelligence Tests

• Psychological tests are tools and their effectiveness depends on the knowledge, skill, and integrity of the user.

• Intelligence tests have real-world applications as predictors of school and job success.

• The single number provided by many IQ tests can easily lead to false expectations about an individual.

3. Theories of Multiple Intelligenc

a. Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of intelligence proposes three main types of intelligence (do not need to memorize the definition for each type):

• Analytical intelligence involves the ability to analyze, evaluate, compare, and contrast.

• Creative intelligence consists of the ability to create, design, invent, originate, and imagine.

• Practical intelligence focuses on the ability to use, apply, implement, and put into practice.

b. Triarchic Theory in the Classroom

• Students with high analytic ability tend to do well in conventional schools.

c. Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences

• Gardner thinks there are eight types of intelligence (do not need to memorize the definition for each type):

1. Verbal skills: the ability to think in words and to use language to express meaning.

2. Mathematical skills: the ability to carry out mathematical operations.

3. Spatial skills: the ability to think in three-dimensional ways.

4. Bodily-kinesthetic skills: the ability to manipulate objects and be physically skilled.

5. Musical skills: possessing sensitivity to pitch, melody, rhythm, and tone.

6. Interpersonal skills: the ability to understand and effectively interact with others.

7. Intrapersonal skills: the ability to understand one’s self and effectively direct one’s life.

8. Naturalist skills: the ability to observe patterns in nature and understand natural and human-made systems (farmers, botanists, ecologists, landscapers).

9. Gardner notes that each of the eight intelligences can be destroyed by brain damage, that each involves unique cognitive skills, and that each shows up in exaggerated fashion in the gifted and in individuals with mental retardation or autism.

10. Gardner believes that everyone has all of these intelligences to varying degrees.

5. Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive and express emotion accurately and adaptively. This concept was initially developed by Salovey and Mayer.

II. CONTROVERSIES AND GROUP COMPARISONS

A. The Influence of Heredity and Environment

1. Genetic Influences

• The heritability index has several flaws:

• The data are virtually all from traditional IQ tests, which some experts believe are not always the best indicator of intelligence.

• The heritability index assumes that we can treat genetic and environmental influences as factors that can be separated, with each part contributing a distinct amount of influence.

2. Environmental Influences

• Most researchers agree that there are both genetic and environmental influences on intelligence.

• Variables that have been found to correlate with intelligence include how much parents communicate with their children in the first three years of life, schooling (or lack thereof), and parent training.

• Intelligence test scores have increased worldwide in a relatively short amount of time. This phenomenon has been termed the Flynn effect and may be due to increasing levels of education that have been attained worldwide.

B. Group Comparisons and Issues

1. Cultural Bias in Testing

• Many of the early intelligence tests were biased against rural children, children from low-income families, minority children, and children who do not speak English proficiently.

• Culture-fair tests are tests of intelligence that attempt to be free of cultural bias.

3. Ethnic Comparisons

• In the United States, children from African American and Latino families score below children from White families on standardized tests.

• The gap between the scores has narrowed as African Americans have experienced improved social, economic, and educational opportunities, which highlights that these differences are environmentally influenced.

III. THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENCE

A. Stability and Change in Intelligence Through Adolescence

• Strong correlations are found between IQ scores at age 6 and age 10, and between the ages of 10 and 18.

• IQ scores can fluctuate a lot during childhood and intelligence does not appear to be as stable as it was originally envisioned.

C. Intelligence in Adulthood

1. Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence

• Crystallized intelligence is an individual’s accumulated information and verbal skills, which continue to increase throughout the life span.

• Fluid intelligence is the ability to reason abstractly and begins to decline from middle adulthood on through later adulthood.

• John Horn argues that crystallized intelligence increases through the life span, whereas fluid intelligence declines in middle adulthood.

2. The Seattle Longitudinal Study

• When assessed longitudinally, intellectual abilities are less likely to decline and may even improve in middle adulthood than when assessed cross-sectionally.

3. Wisdom

• Research by Baltes and his colleagues have found the following:

• The time frame of late adolescence and early adulthood is the main age window for wisdom to emerge.

• Certain life experiences, such as having wisdom-enhancing mentors, contribute the most to higher levels of wisdom.

• People higher in wisdom have values that are more likely to consider the welfare of others rather than their own happiness.

• Personality-related factors, such as openness to experience, generativity, and creativity, are better predictors of wisdom than cognitive factors such as intelligence.

Chapter 9

I. WHAT IS LANGUAGE?

A. Defining Language

1. Language is a form of communication, whether spoken, written, or signed, that is based on a system of symbols.

2. Infinite generativity is the ability to produce an endless number of meaningful sentences using a finite set of words and rules and is a basic characteristic of human language.

B. Language’s Rule Systems

1. Phonology: The sound system of language. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language.

2. Morphology: Word formation based on meaning. A morpheme is the smallest unit of sound which carries meaning in a language.

3. Syntax: The way words are combined for acceptable phrases and sentences.

4. Semantics: The meaning of words and sentences.

5. Pragmatics: The use of appropriate conversation and knowledge underlying the use of language in context.

II. HOW LANGUAGE DEVELOPS

A. Infancy

1. Babbling and Other Vocalizations

• Early vocalizations are to practice making sounds, to communicate, and to attract attention.

• A universal pattern is observed: newborn cries, cooing at 2 months, babbling by 6 months, and gestures by 8–12 months.

2. Gestures

3. The absence of pointing is a significant indicator of problems in the infant’s communication system.

3. First Words

4. The infant’s first spoken word usually occurs between 10 to 15 months of age.

5. Receptive vocabulary refers to the words an individual understands. Receptive vocabulary precedes and exceeds spoken vocabulary (words that the child uses).

6. The rapid increase in vocabulary that begins at approximately 18 months is called the vocabulary spurt.

7. Cross-linguistic differences in word learning are apparent, with infants learning an Asian language acquiring more verbs earlier in their development than do children learning English.

4. Two-Word Utterances

8. By 18 to 24 months of age, two-word utterances begin to occur, which rely heavily on gesture, tone, and context in order to provide meaning:

9. Telegraphic speech is the use of short and precise words to communicate and is characteristic of young children’s two- or three-word utterances.

B. Early Childhood

1. Understanding Phonology and Morphology

• During early childhood, most children gradually become more sensitive to the sounds of spoken words and become increasingly capable of producing all the sounds of their language.

• By the time children move beyond two-word utterances, they demonstrate a knowledge of morphology rules.

10. Use of plural and possessive demonstrates knowledge of morphological rules.

2. Changes in Syntax and Semantics

11. Preschool children learn and apply rules of syntax.

12. Gains in semantics also characterize early childhood.

13. Vocabulary development is dramatic.

14. Some experts have estimated that between 18 months and 6 years of age, young children learn about one new word every waking hour.

15. The speaking vocabulary of a child entering first grade is approximately 14,000 words.

16. One way children may increase their vocabulary so quickly is through fast mapping.

3. Advances in Pragmatics

• Pragmatics or rules of conversation also show great improvement. Indeed, by 4 or 5 years of age, children can suit their speech style to specific situations (e.g., they speak differently to younger and older children).

C. Middle and Late Childhood—

• Children gain new skills as they enter school that include increasingly using language to talk about things that are not physically present, learning what a word is, and learning how to recognize and talk about sounds.

• It is important for children to learn the alphabetic principle (that the letters of the alphabet represents sounds of the language) is important for learning to read and right.

1. Vocabulary, Grammar, and Metalinguistic Awareness

• Vocabulary increases to about 40,000 words by 11 years of age.

• Children make similar advances in grammar.

• The ability to understand complex grammar increases across the elementary school years.

• Children must be able to do these things orally before they can deal with written language.

• Metalinguistic awareness is a term that refers to knowledge of language, cognition about language.

• Metalinguistic awareness improves over the elementary-school years; children define words and learn how to use language appropriately.

• Children also make progress in understanding how to use language in culturally appropriate ways – pragmatics.

2. Reading

17. Before learning to read, children learn to use language to talk about things that are not present; they learn what a word is; and they learn how to recognize sounds and talk about them.

18. The larger a child’s vocabulary, the easier it is for him/her to learn to read.

19. Vocabulary development plays an important role in reading comprehension.

20. The whole language approach stresses that reading instruction should parallel children’s natural language learning. Reading materials should be whole and meaningful.

21. The phonics approach emphasizes that reading instruction should focus on phonetics, and its basic rules for translating written symbols into sounds. Early reading instructions should involve simplified materials.

22. Researchers have found strong evidence that direct instruction in phonics is a key aspect of learning to read, but children can benefit from both approaches.

3. Writing

23. Most 4-year-olds can print their first name, and most 5-year-olds can copy several short words, although some letter reversal may still be evident.

24. Interventions that are the most effective in improving students’’ writing include:

25. Strategy instruction, summarization, peer assistance, and setting goals

4. Bilingualism and Second Language Learning

• Children’s ability to pronounce words with a native-like accent in a second language typically decreases with age, with an especially sharp drop occurring after the age of about 10 to 12.

• Children who are fluent in two languages perform better than their single-language counterparts on tests of control of attention, concept formation, analytical reasoning, cognitive flexibility, and cognitive complexity.

26. Recent research shows that it takes immigrant children approximately three to five years to develop speaking proficiency and seven years to develop reading proficiency in English.

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