Stability and Plasticity over Time PDF

Preview

Summary

Lecture Notes Week 2...

Description

Cognitive Development Involves Both Stability and Plasticity over Time ■ Stability and plasticity of cognition are related ● Stability - refers to the degree to which children maintain their same relative rank order over time in comparison with their peers in some aspect of cognition ● Plasticity - the extent to which children can be shaped by experience ■ Jerome Kagan - Tape Recorder Model of Development ● Every experience was seen as being recorded for posterity, without the opportunity to rewrite or erase something ove it has been recorded ○ Children with litle social or physical stimulation showed signs of intellectual impairment as early as 3-4 months of age ○ Harry Harlow - isolation from mothers led to adverse afects on their social and sexual behaviors -- maladaptive behavior remained stable over the life of the animal ● Children moved from overcrowded understafed orphanage → institution for intellectually imapired saw an increase in IQ (while the other children declined) ○ Monkeys can be rehabilitated over a period of 6 months -- demonstrates plasticity and resilience concerning the negative efects of early environments ● Kagan proposed that one reason to expect resilience is that development doesn’t

proceed as a tape recorder ○ Development is transformational, with relatively drastic changes occurring between adjacent stages or phases ■ Stimulation and experience are important in the early years of life, but so is later experience to maintain positive beginnings ■ Cognitive Development Involves Changes in the Way Information Is Represented ● Representation - mental encoding of information ● Karen Wynn - sat 5 month old infants in front of display ○ Shown sequence of events ■ Possible outcome (1+1=2) ■ Impossible outcome (1+1=1) ○ When number of objects in impossible outcome was shown, child spent more time looking at the “impossible” outcome ○ ■ Children Develop Increasing Intentional Control Over Their Behavior and Cognition ● Strategies - deliberate, goal-directed mental operations that are aimed at solving a problem ● Executive Function - processes involved in regulating atention and in determining

what to do with information just gathered or retrieved from long-term memory ○ Central role in planning and behaving fexibly ■ Cognitive Development Involves Changing Both Domain-General and Domain Specific Abilities ● Domain-General Abilities - assume that at any point in time, a child’s thinking is infuenced by a single set of factors with the factors afecting diferent aspects of cognition equally ● Domain-Specific Abilities - knowing a child’s ability for one aspect of cognition tells us nothing about his or her level of cognitive ability for other aspects of thinking because diferent cognitive domains are controlled by diferent mind/brain functions ● Jerry Fodor - Modularity ○ Certain areas of the brain are dedicated to performing specific cognitive tasks ■ Modules represent special-purpose systems that are “informationally encapsulated” meaning other parts of the brain can neither infuence nor access the working of the module ○ Outputs of these models become available to central information processors (a domain-general mechanism) but that the activity of this central processor does not afect the domain-specific modules ● Children think diferently as a function of how much background knowledge they have in a particular domain

○ Wolfgang Schneider - evaluated German children in grades 3,5, and 7 for their knowledge of soccer and classified children as either soccer experts or soccer novices ■ Children were administered a series of intelligence tests and results, along with their math and German grades, were used to classify them as successful learners or unsuccessful learners ● Memory performance was beter for children who were soccer experts than for soccer novices ● No diference in performance between academically successful learners and unsuccessful ones ○ Function of background knowledge (domain-specificity) can be explained by domain-general mechanisms ● Modularity implies infexibility in that the individual is constrained by biology to process certain information in certain ways ○ Increases likelihood that complex information will be properly processed and understood ○ Hallmark of human cognition is fexibility -- both domain-general and domainspecific abilities exists, and we must be cautious of claims that postulate otherwise

○ Even if told lines were the same length, modular process makes it hard to see them that way ■ Perception can happen on its own, independently, and not take information from cognitive processes ● Visual perception can be modular...