Chapter 8 The Child o Autobiographical Memories Episodic memories of personal events Childhood amnesia lack of autobiographical memory during the first few years of life Before age 2 3 Hypothesized to be due to the lack of language sense of self Fuzzy trace theory store verbatim specific and general accounts separately With age focus more on general and less on specific o Changes in Problem Solving Improves with age in childhood Siegler rule assessment o Natural selection Most adaptive strategy survives The Adolescent Use of multiple strategies produces best strategy o New strategies emerge elaboration o Better use of strategies Adolescents focus on task relevant material o Basic capacities increase e g speed Perform cognitive operations faster than children do Knowledge base increases o o Metamemory improves The Adult o Developing Expertise Experience is related to more effective memory and problem solving Benefits of experience seem context specific o Autobiographical Memory Not much influence of perceived personal significance Distinctiveness associated with better recall isolation effect Affective emotional intensity leads to better recall Recall more information from teens and 20s o On average older adults are Slower on timed tasks More trouble when material is unfamiliar artificial More trouble with explicit compared to implicit Disadvantaged in learning and memory that is rarely used in daily life Do worse on recall compared to recognition o Memory and aging Research is based on cross sectional studies in which age differences could be due to other factors Declines typically not noticeable till 70s on and decline with age Not all older adults experience these difficulties Don t do poorly on all memory tasks Knowledge base typically improves Knowledge about memory is similar to younger adults But can misjudge e g sources Negative beliefs can hurt performance Don t spontaneously use strategies they are capable of Basic processing capacities likely cause loss Working memory Chapter 9 The Psychometric approach o o Intelligence is a trait or set of traits that characterizes people 2 Factor Theories Spearman G factor general intelligence S factor special abilities Catell Horn Fluid intelligence ability to solve novel problems Ex Solving verbal analogies remember unrelated pairs of words or recognize relationships among geometric figures Skills involved reasoning seeing relationships among stimuli and drawing inferences Using your mind in new and flexible ways Crystallized intelligence knowledge acquired through schooling life experience Ex Tests of general info word comprehension and numerical abilities Using what you have already learned through experience o Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale 1904 tried to identify children who had trouble in school Test norms standards of normal performance expressed as average scores and the range of scores around the average from large representative samples IQ score of 100 is average Age graded items used IQ MA CA x 100 IQ intelligence quotient MA mental age CA chronological age Modern scales o The Wechsler Scales Widely used today Three IQ scores derived Verbal IQ Performance IQ Full scale IQ Average is 100 Gardner s Theory of Multiple Intelligences o Many forms of intelligence o o Traditional IQ tests emphasize linguistic and logical Can explain savant syndrome the phenomenon in which extraordinary talent in a particular area is displayed by a person otherwise intellectually disabled Sternberg s Triarchic Theory o 3 different areas Analytic mental steps or components used to solve problem Practical ability to read and adapt to the contexts of everyday life Creative use of experience in ways that foster insight o Successful Intelligence establishing and achieving reasonable goals consistent with skills and circumstances optimizing strengths and minimizing weaknesses adapting to environment through a combo of selecting a good environment and making modifications to self or the environment to increase fit using all 3 components analytical creative practical o Ability to produce novel responses appropriate in context and valued by others o IQ and creativity don t correlate well May reflect different types of thinking IQ convergent thinking converging on the best answer to a problem Creativity divergent thinking coming up with a variety of ideas or solutions to a problem when there is no single correct answer Creativity o The Child But likely still related E g minimum IQ for creativity o The Infant Developmental Quotients Developmental quotient DQ how well or how poorly the infant performs in comparison with a large norm group of infants and toddlers of the same age Bayley scales test designed for infants and toddlers ages 1 42 months Motor scale Mental scale Behavior rating scale Correlations with IQ are low to zero Infant intelligence and later intelligence Best predictors of IQ Attention speed of habituation preference for novelty Fast information processing higher IQ How stable are IQ scores during childhood Stability IQ at age 4 predicts later IQ BUT individual trajectories patterns of change differ considerably from child to child Motivation testing conditions Changes of Gains and Loss IQ gains due to parents who foster achievement IQ drops due to Poverty Cumulative deficit hypothesis impoverished environments inhibit intellectual growth and negative effects accumulate over time Interventions Head Start program Immediate gains in IQ IQ advantages don t last more than 3 4 years Different attitudes about achievement Kids in headstart are prouder of their scholastic achievements than kids not in headstart Successful interventions start early last long and involve several components It is better to intervene in preschool rather than later The emergence of creativity Preschool display high levels of divergent thought generating original ideas Creative output declines in school age Creativity scores increase until 3rd grade levels off 4th and 5th grade and declines significantly Declines reflect pressures in middle school to conform to the group rather than be a Free spirit Rise again after age 12 May reflect demands of school Personality Convergent thinking Traditional classrooms tend to emphasize and reinforce convergent thinking with tests constructed to assess whether students know the answer to a problem Creative children showed more freedom originality humor aggression and playfulness than the high IQ children High IQ children were