Chapter 7 (only 7.1 and 7.2) Flashcards
(15 cards)
Origins of Memory
Roots of memory are laid down in the first few months after birth. Young babies remember events for days or even weeks at a time.
Carolyn Rovee-Collier studies:
- A ribbon from a mobile is attached to a 2- or 3-month- old’s leg; in each case, within a few minutes, the babies learn to kick to make the mobile move.
- When Rovee-Collier brought the mobile to the infants’ homes several days or a few weeks later, babies would still kick to make the mobile move.
- If Rovee-Collier waited several weeks to return, most babies forgot that kicking moved the mobile. When that happened, she gave them a reminder. She moved the mobile herself without attaching the ribbon to their foot. Then she would return the next day, hook up the apparatus, and the babies would kick to move the mobile.
- Shows that three important features of memory exist as early as 2 and 3 months of age: (1) an event from the past is remembered, (2) over time, the event can no longer be recalled, and (3) a cue can serve to dredge up a forgotten memory.
From these origins, memory improves rapidly in older infants and toddlers. Youngsters can recall more of what they experience and remember it longer
- Infants reveal steady growth in memory over the first 18 months.
Children can remember the connection between actions (kicking, pushing) and consequences (movements of mobile or train): from a week or less in young babies to more than 3 months for l.5-year-olds.
BRAIN DEVELOPMENT AND MEMORY
These improvements in memory can be traced to growth in the brain regions that support memory
The brain structures primarily responsible for the initial storage of information, including the hippocampus and amygdala, develop very early - by age 6 months.
- On the other hand, the structure responsible for retrieving these stored memories, the frontal cortex, develops much later - into the 2nd year.
In addition, part of the hippocampus is not mature until about 20 to 24 months.
- Thus, development of memory during the first 2 years reflects growth in these two different brain regions.
As the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex mature over the first 24 months, children’s memory skills gradually improve.
Once youngsters begin to talk, we can study their memory skills using most of the same methods we use with older children and adults.
- Research using these methods has linked age-related improvement in memory to two factors
- First, as children grow, they use more effective strategies for remembering.
- Second, children’s growing factual knowledge of the world allows them to organize information more completely and to remember better.
Strategies for Remembering
Memory strategies are techniques or activities that improve remembering.
- Some strategies help maintain information in working memory, whereas others help transfer information to long-term memory.
- Others help retrieve information from long-term memory
Children begin to use memory strategies early.
- Preschool children look at or touch objects that they’ve been told to remember
- Looking and touching aren’t very effective, but they tell us that preschoolers understand that they should be doing something to try to remember
During the elementary-school years, children begin to use more powerful strategies.
- For example, 7- and 8-year-olds use rehearsal, a strategy of repetitively naming information that is to be remembered.
As children get older, they learn other memory strategies.
- Organization: structuring material to be remembered so that related
information is placed together.
- Elaboration: embellishing information to be remembered to make it more memorable.
- External aids: make notes and to write down information on calendars
METACOGNITION is important
OVERALL: Strategies, metamemory, and metacognition are essential for effective learning and remembering
METACOGNITION
During the elementary-school years and adolescence, children gradually learn to identify different kinds of memory problems and the memory strategies most appropriate to each.
Children gradually become more skilled at selecting appropriate strategies, but even high-school students do not always use effective learning strategies when they should
After children choose a memory strategy, they need to monitor its effectiveness. That is, they need to decide if the strategy is working.
- If it’s not working, they need to begin anew, reanalyzing the memory task to select a better approach.
- If the strategy is working, they should determine the portion of the material they have not yet mastered and concentrate their efforts there.
- Monitoring improves gradually with age.
Diagnosing memory problems accurately and monitoring the effectiveness of memory strategies are two important elements of METAMEMORY, which refers to a child’s informal understanding of memory.
Children’s growing understanding of memory is paralleled by growing understanding of all cognitive processes. Such knowledge and awareness of cognitive processes is called METACOGNITIVE KNOWLEDGE
- Metacognitive knowledge grows rapidly during the elementary-school years: Children come to know much about perception, attention, intentions, knowledge, and thinking
- school-age children know that sometimes they deliberately direct their attention - as in searching for a parent’s face in a crowd.
- But they also know that sometimes events capture attention - as with an unexpected clap of thunder
- One of the most important features of children’s metacognitive knowledge is their understanding of the connections among goals, strategies, monitoring, and outcomes. Children come to realize that on a broad spectrum of tasks - ranging from learning words in a spelling list to learning to spike a volleyball to learning to get along with an overly talkative classmate seated nearby - they need to regulate their learning by understanding the goal and selecting a means to achieve that goal. Then they determine whether the chosen method is working.
Effective cognitive self-regulation - that is, skill at identifying goals, selecting effective strategies, and monitoring accurately - is a characteristic of successful students
Some students do not master these learning strategies spontaneously, but they can be taught to use them.
- several programs have been created to teach students strategies for reading more effectively
- Teachers explain and demonstrate several basic strategies that promote greater reading comprehension, including: first selecting a goal for reading, making a mental picture of what’s going on in the text, periodically predicting what will happen next, and summarizing aloud what’s happened so far.
- Children practice these strategies separately
Knowledge and Memory
A study in which 10-year-olds and adults tried to remember sequences of numbers:
- Adults remembered more numbers than children
- But, children remember more positions of objects than adults
- Why? the objects were chess pieces on a chessboard; and the children were skilled chess players but the adults were novices
The knowledge that allows a child to organize information and give it meaning increases gradually with age
- Researchers depict knowledge as a network. The entries in the network are linked by different types of associations.
- others denote a SCRIPT, a memory structure used to describe the sequence in which events occur. The list of events in walking the dog is a script.
- A network diagram for younger child would have fewer entries and fewer and weaker connecting links. Consequently, the youngster cannot organize information as extensively, which makes remembering more difficult than for an older child. Nevertheless, the knowledge that young children have is organized; and this turns out to be a powerful asset.
Knowledge can also distort memory. If a specific experience does not match a child’s knowledge (e.g., it differs from a script), the experience is sometimes forgotten or distorted so that it conforms to the existing knowledge
- For example, told a story about a female helicopter pilot, many youngsters will remember the pilot as a man because their knowledge network specifies that pilots are men.
- Because older children often have more knowledge than younger children, they are sometimes more prone to memory distortions than younger children.
Reasoning for above ^^^, According to fuzzy trace theory, developed by Charles J. Brainerd and Valerie Reyna, most experiences can be stored in memory exactly (verbatim) or in terms of their basic meaning (gist).
- A 10-year-old who reads an invitation to a birthday party may store the information in memory as “the party starts at 7:30 P.M.” (verbatim) or as “the party is after dinner” (gist).
- A 14-year-old who gets a grade on a science test may store it as “I got 75% correct” (verbatim) or “I got an average grade” (gist).
- Throughout development, children store information in memory in both verbatim and gist formats, but young children are biased toward verbatim memory traces; during childhood and adolescence, a bias toward gist traces emerges.
- That is, older children and adolescents typically represent experiences and information in terms of gist, instead of verbatim.
- False memories - in this case “recognizing” a word that was never presented-were less common in young children than in older children and adolescents. This result is consistent with fuzzy trace theory, in which these memory errors are a consequence of the greater tendency for older children and adults to remember the gist of what they’ve experienced.
Thus, although children’s growing knowledge usually helps them to remember, sometimes it can interfere with accurate memory.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY
Autobiographical memory refers to people’s memory of the significant events and experiences of their own lives.
- Autobiographical memory is important because it helps people construct a personal life history.
- In addition, autobiographical memory allows people to relate their experiences to others, creating socially shared memories
Autobiographical memory originates in the preschool years
- According to one influential theory, autobiographic memory emerges gradually, as children acquire the component skills.
- Infants and toddlers have the basic memory skills that allow them to remember past events. Layered on top of these memory skills during the preschool years are language skills and a child’s sense of self. Language allows children to become conversational partners.
- After infants begin to talk, parents often converse with them about past and future events - particularly about personal experiences in the child’s past and future.
- Parents may talk about what the child did today at day care or remind the child about what she will be doing this weekend. In conversations like these, parents teach their children the important features of events and how events are organized
- Children’s autobiographical memories are richer when parents talk about past events in detail and encourage their children to participate in these conversations.
- In contrast, when parents’ talk is limited to direct questions that can be answered “yes” or “no”, children’s autobiographical memories are less extensive
The richness of parent-child conversations also helps to explain a cultural difference in autobiographical memory.
- Compared to adults living in China, Japan, and Korea, Europeans and North Americans typically remember more events from their early years and remember those events in more detail
- This difference in early memories can be traced to cultural differences in parent-child conversational styles: the elaborative style is less common among Asian parents, which means that Asian youngsters have fewer opportunities for the conversations about past events that foster autobiographical memory
An emergent sense of self also contributes to autobiographical memory.
- 1- and 2-year-olds rapidly acquire a sense that they exist independently, in space and time.
- Children realize that the self who went to the park a few days ago is the same self who is now at a birthday party
- The self provides a personal timeline that anchors a child’s recall of the past (and anticipation of the future).
Thus, a sense of self, language skills that allow children to converse with parents about past and future, and basic memory skills all contribute to the emergence of autobiographical memory in preschool children.
Infantile amnesia refers to the inability to remember events from one’s early life.
- Adults and school-age children recall nothing from infancy, but they remember an ever-increasing number of events from about age 3 or 4 years
Many of the same factors that forge an autobiographical memory contribute to infantile amnesia.
- For example, once children learn to talk (at 2 years old), they tend to rely on language to represent their past
- Consequently, their earlier, prelingual experiences may be difficult to retrieve from memory
- And some theorists would argue that because infants and toddlers have no sense of self, they lack the autobiographical timeline that’s used to organize experiences later in life
Thus, personal experiences from our earliest years usually can’t be recalled because of inadequate language or inadequate sense of self
Beginning in the preschool years, however, autobiographical memory provides a cohesive framework for remembering life’s significant events.
EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY
Can memories be trusted?
In legal proceedings, children are often interviewed repeatedly, sometimes as many as 10 to 15 times. Over the course of repeated questioning, they may confuse what actually happened with what others suggest may have happened.
- When the questioner is an adult in a position of authority, children often believe that what is suggested by the adult actually happened
- Preschoolers are particularly prone to confusion of this sort
Leichtman and Ceci believe that whether preschoolers are suggestible depends entirely on how their memory for events is probed.
- The results from their control condition suggest that without stereotypes and suggestions, preschoolers are unlikely to report events that never happened
- However, when adults suggest that a person is likely to behave in a particular way and later imply that some events actually did happen, many preschoolers will go along.
Although law enforcement officials and child protection workers believe they can usually tell whether children are telling the truth, professionals often cannot distinguish true and false reports
- analyses of videotapes of actual interviews reveal that trained investigators often ask children leading questions and make suggestive comments
Children’s memories can be tainted simply by overhearing others - adults or peers - describe events.
Preschool children are particularly suggestible. Why?
- One idea is that they are more suggestible due to limited source-monitoring skills. Older children, adolescents, and adults often know the source of information that they remember.
- When recalling past events, preschoolers are often confused about who did or said what and, when confused in this manner, they frequently assume that they must have experienced something personally.
- Consequently, when preschool children are asked leading questions, this information is also stored in memory, but without the source.
- Because preschool children are not skilled at monitoring sources, they have trouble distinguishing what they actually experienced from what interviewers imply that they experienced
Although preschoolers are easily misled, they can provide reliable testimony. Here are guidelines derived from research for improving the reliability of child witnesses:
- Warn children that interviewers may sometimes try to trick them or suggest things that didn’t happen.
- Ensure that interviewers’ questions evaluate alternative explanations of what happened and who was involved.
- Do not question children repeatedly on a single issue.
- Following these guidelines will foster the conditions under which preschoolers (and older children, too) are likely to recall the past more accurately and thereby be better witnesses.
Developmental Trends in Solving Problems
As children get older, they solve problems more often and solve them more effectively
In case study: The 5- and 6-year-olds solved slightly fewer than half of the problems correctly, but 16- and 17-year-olds solved two thirds of them correctly
- The younger children in Siegler’s study failed more often than they succeeded, but this doesn’t mean that younger children are always inept at solving problems. In fact, research has produced many instances in which young children solve problems successfully.
- Even infants can solve simple problems
- And adolescents don’t always solve problems as readily as they solved the balance-scale problems in Siegler’s study. Math problems can be difficult
Although children tend to become more effective problem solvers as they get older, even young children sometimes show remarkable problem-solving skill and adolescents often are error prone.
Features of Children’s and Adolescents’ Problem Solving
Child-development scientists have been eager to reveal the circumstances that promote children’s problem solving.
Topics to cover:
- YOUNG CHILDREN SOMETIMES FAIL TO SOLVE PROBLEMS BECAUSE THEY DON’T ENCODE ALL THE IMPORTANT INFORMATION IN A PROBLEM
- YOUNG CHILDREN SOMETIMES FAIL TO SOLVE PROBLEMS BECAUSE THEY DON’T PLAN AHEAD
- SUCCESSFUL PROBLEM SOLVING TYPICALLY DEPENDS UPON KNOWLEDGE SPECIFIC TO THE PROBLEM AS WELL AS GENERAL PROCESSES.
- CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS USE A VARIETY OF STRATEGIES TO SOLVE PROBLEMS.
- COLLABORATION OFTEN ENHANCES CHILDREN’S PROBLEM SOLVING.
YOUNG CHILDREN SOMETIMES FAIL TO SOLVE PROBLEMS BECAUSE THEY DON’T ENCODE ALL THE IMPORTANT INFORMATION IN A PROBLEM
Encoding processes transform the information in a problem into a mental representation.
- When solving a problem, people construct a mental representation that includes the important features of a problem
- Quite often, children’s representations of problems are incorrect or incomplete. They fail to encode problem features (or encode them incorrectly), making it unlikely that they will solve problems.
A more subtle form of flawed encoding emerges in transitive inference problems, in which children might be told, “Jon is older than Dave. Dave is older than Rob. Who’s older, Jon or Rob?”
- Young children often encode these statements in absolute terms, not relative ones
As children grow, their encodings are more likely to be complete, perhaps due to increases in the capacity of working memory and because of greater knowledge of the world
But even adults’ representations are often incomplete.
YOUNG CHILDREN SOMETIMES FAIL TO SOLVE PROBLEMS BECAUSE THEY DON’T PLAN AHEAD.
Solving problems, particularly complex ones, often requires planning ahead.
Faced with problems, young children rarely come up with effective plans. Why? Several factors contribute:
- Young children often believe - unrealistically - that they can solve a problem by boldly forging ahead, without an explicit plan
- Planning is hard work, and if young children find that their plans often fail, they may see little point in investing the effort
- Young children may expect parents and other adults to solve complex problems for them.
These factors don’t mean that young children never plan or can’t plan.
Thus, young children can plan, if they’re asked to and the problem is not too complex.
- But many problems make it difficult or pointless for young children to plan.
SUCCESSFUL PROBLEM SOLVING TYPICALLY DEPENDS UPON KNOWLEDGE SPECIFIC TO THE PROBLEM AS WELL AS GENERAL PROCESSES.
Solving a problem often requires that children know some critical facts.
- For example, as children master their basic arithmetic facts, they learn how to map different types of word problems onto arithmetic problems
Usually, older children have more of the knowledge relevant to solving a problem and so they will be more successful.
- But effective problem solving depends on more than problem-specific knowledge.
- Children often use generic strategies - ones not specific to particular tasks or problems - to find a solution.
An example of a generic strategy is means-ends analysis, in which a person determines the difference between the current and desired situations, then does something to reduce the difference.
- If no single action leads directly to the goal, then a person establishes a subgoal, one that moves them closer to the goal.
Even preschool children use means-ends analyses to solve problems. This is evident in their efforts to solve the dog-cat-mouse problem
- Three animals and their favorite foods are placed on corners and the child is asked to move the animals along the paths, one at a time, until each animal is paired with its favorite food.
- In the problem, moving the cat to the opposite corner would achieve part of that goal, and that’s what most children do.
- In contrast, they rarely move an animal away from its favorite food (even though that’s often required temporarily) because that is a “bad move” according to means-end analyses.
- Even though young children often use means-end analyses, they’re usually successful only on relatively simple problems in which the difference between the current and desired situations can be achieved in a few moves.
CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS USE A VARIETY OF STRATEGIES TO SOLVE PROBLEMS.
General approach is captured in Siegler’s overlapping waves model.
- According to Siegler, children use multiple strategies to solve problems and, over time, they use strategies that are faster, more accurate, and take less effort.
Children and adolescents are alike in drawing upon a well-stocked kit of tools from which to choose to solve problems
- they differ in that adolescents typically have a more sophisticated set of tools.
Some theorists go further and imagine that the problem-solving toolbox includes two general kinds of tools: heuristics and analytics
- heuristic: ruIes of thumb that do not guarantee a solution but are useful in solving a range of problems. Heuristics tend to be fast and require little effort.
- But sometimes children solve problems analytically - depending on the nature of the problem, they may compute an answer mathematically or use logical rules.
- The heuristic solution relies on personal experience: When in doubt, imitate other people who have been successful.
- The analytic solution involves relying upon the statistical information
- Adolescents are more likely than children to solve problems analytically; but some children solve them analytically and some adolescents rely on the heuristic
Flipped a coin and got 5 tails and only 1 head. On the next coin flip, is it more likely to get heads, more likely to get tails, or equally like to get heads or tails?
- The analytic solution relies on the fact that the penny has no memory of what’s happened on previous trials and so the odds of getting heads or tails are 50-50
- However, many children and some adolescents believe that tails are more likely; they rely on an averaging heuristic - when outcomes occur more often than expected, this is followed by a period when events occur less frequently than expected
There is a gradual trend for more frequent use of analytic solutions as children develop.
COLLABORATION OFTEN ENHANCES CHILDREN’S PROBLEM SOLVING.
In research, children typically solve problems by themselves but in everyday life they often collaborate with parents, siblings, and peers. This collaboration is usually beneficial when the partner is a parent, older child, or more knowledgeable peer.
- Parents and older children often scaffold children’s efforts to solve problems, providing structure and direction that allow younger children to accomplish more than they could alone.
- In laboratory studies, for example, parents often tailor help to the child’s needs, watching quietly when children are making headway but giving words of encouragement and hints when their children are stumped
Collaboration with peers is sometimes but not always productive, and the set- tings that are conducive to effective peer collaboration remain something of a mystery
- collaboration involving young
children often fails simply because preschool children lack many of the social and linguistic skills needed to work as part of a team.
- And peer collaboration is often unproductive when problems are so difficult that neither child has a clue about how to proceed.
- On the other hand, peer collaboration works when both children are invested in solving the problem and when they share responsibility for doing so.
Collaboration doesn’t come easily to children attending traditional Western schools, where the common teacher- student “dialog” consists of a teacher
asking a question with a well-defined answer, a student responding, and the teacher evaluating that response.
- Children attending traditional Western schools are exposed to instruction that emphasizes an individual student’s participation and achievement.
- In contrast, in some schools in the rest of the world - for example, in Mexico and Japan - students are taught to support their classmates, to build on their ideas and suggestions, and to view classmates as resources. In this setting, collaboration comes naturally to children
Scientific Problem Solving
Many child-development researchers rely on the child-as-scientist metaphor
- But, when it comes to the skills associated with real scientific reasoning, children and even adolescents typically have some conspicuous faults:
- Children and adolescents often devise experiments in which variables are confounded - they are combined instead of evaluated independently - so that the results are ambiguous
- if asked to determine how the size of a car’s engine, wheels, and tail fins affect its speed, children often manipulate more than one variable at a time
- Not until adulthood do individuals commonly devise experiments in which one variable is manipulated (e.g., size of the wheels) and the rest are held constant, which allows clear conclusions regarding cause and effect - Children and adolescents often reach conclusions prematurely, basing them on too little evidence.
- instead of conducting all of the experiments necessary to isolate the impact of variables, children and adolescents typically conduct a subset of the experiments, and then reach conclusions prematurely - Children and adolescents often have difficulty integrating theory and data.
- if the results of an experiment don’t support adolescents’ own beliefs, they tend to discount the value of the study
- adolescents use less rigorous standards to evaluate experiments when the evidence supports what they believe
These findings suggest that children and adolescents have limited scientific skills.
- Other findings, however, indicate that young children have some rudimentary scientific skill. For example, children can sometimes tell the kind of evidence that would support a hypothesis.
It’s also clear that even young children can be trained to think more scientifically.
- For example, 9- and 10-year-olds can be trained in the need to avoid confounded experiments by manipulating one variable at a time.
- Such training is straightforward - by showing both confounded and unconfounded experiments, then illustrating the difficulty in drawing clear conclusions from confounded experiments - and results in long-lasting improvements in children’s understanding of well-designed experiments
Overall, children’s skill improves steadily as they grow but young children are sometimes amazingly skilled while older children and adolescents are sometimes surprisingly inept.
