Child Psychology 560 Cognitive Development 1 02 27 2014 Roadmap Cognitive Development Today Overview of key components of cognitive development Tuesday Guest lecturer Melanie Jones on Piaget Thursday Beyond Piaget Infancy Tuesday Beyond Piaget kids other perspectives Key components of cognition that change over development Working Memory Attention Learning Categorization Executive function Theory of mind o All are kind of interconnected hard to isolate them and tease them apart in studying Working Memory Holding information in mind active processing the immediate stuf o Classic tasks to measure working memory capacity o Distinguished between long term memories long delays recall memory studies List many numbers see how many kids adults remember it Memory Span o o o o Adults the famous 7 2 4 5 year olds 4 9 10 year olds 6 What might be changing Increase in white matter myelination helps them process faster Elementary school experience dependent Regroup numbers use mnemonic devices Brain maturation Our ability to do use strategies Cross cultural studies o Chinese kids recall more digits than US kids Digit names shorter in Chinese not necessary the number of numbers you can remember its about the amount of stuf you can remember words shorter remember more o Bilingual digit span Welsh English Larger in language with faster speech rate Digit span is longer in English if you test the same person in Welsh and English Expertise Efects o o o Adults vs 10 year old chess experts Digit span adults did better Chess positions kids do better Diferent memory abilities in diferent domains Other possible comparisons Pok mon characters Musical patterns Cultural Efects o Mayan kids rural Guatemala Free recall task remember seen picture Mayan kids did worse than U S kids but don t have same learning experience as us o Make task more relevant Recall task with diorama of village 3 D Reconstruct scene o Mayan kids did better than U S kids If you change around task one group may do better than the other Executive Function prefrontal cortex The Brain o o o Cognitive Control control over cognition executive part o o o Whole brain doesn t myelinate at the same rate 5 year old visual cortex does great prefrontal cortex not mature Even 20 year old may not have a fully formed prefrontal cortex Working memory strategies Cognitive flexibility Inhibition of responses Cognitive Flexibility card sort task o Being able to shift from focusing on one type of information or type of state to another when you are directed to o Children have difficulties shifting from one task to another Rabbit and Boat task First Separate cards by boat and rabbit Second Separate cards by color blue goes with blue boat red goes with red rabbit o o Still put the red boat in the blue boat basket 3 year olds have difficulty shifting rules By 5 children are more flexible The bilingual advantage in cognitive flexibility o Bilingual that was bilingual from early on do better with switching tasks Why Bilingual children have to constantly switch set from one language to another Inhibition of Responses o Marshmallow Test http www youtube com watch v QX oy9614HQ Self control as a predictor Follow ups among many others SAT scores 18 years old o o fMRI 40 sometings o o More impulsive 4 year old scored 524 528 Q Less impulsive 4 year old scored 610 652 Q more impulsive showed less responding in prefrontal cortex Can t consider casual its correlational Learning when self control is worthwhile http sanfrancisco cbslocal com video 7836145 healthwatch study findskids can learn impulsive behavior Children in the Reliable condition waited far longer than children in the Unreliable condition o Unreliable waited less than 5 minutes to eat marshmallow Reliable waited 12 minutes to eat marshmallow Learned that waiting pays of Training in self control Positive efects of experience Those with lowest EF gain the most Promote school readiness Freeze Dance http www youtube com watch v o23pQ9yQeYg Teacher was holding up index cards with poses they were supposed to freeze with o Controls inhibitions and switching sets cognitively flexible Theory of Mind Quick o o Understanding of how the minds works Recognizing that others can hold views that difer from their own o Kids have a difficult time understanding this Assessed via false belief tasks Thinking About Others Minds o Sally Anne Test 4 year olds Sally will look in the basket where she thinks it is 3 year olds Sally will look in the box where it actually is o Older kid understands that Sally might have a diferent idea Don t understand that other people don t have context to their mind thinks Sally knows where the ball was moved when she was away ToM False Belief Task Another Example The False Belief Test http www youtube com watch v 8hLubgpY2 w What is changing 1 The ability to represent the contents of others mind 2 Other cognitive abilities required by false belief tasks And the underlying brain structures 02 27 2014 02 27 2014