Developmental Psychology I: infancy and childhood part 6 Flashcards
(56 cards)
Cognitive and Physical Development in Middle Childhood (7–11 years)
Introduction to Growth
Key Point:
Children between 7 to 11 years continue to grow at a steady (and relatively slow) rate until the growth spurt in puberty.
📏 Physical Growth:
Children at this age are still growing ~5–8 cm in height and ~2.5–3 kg in weight each year.
During puberty, the growth rate increases to 5–10 cm and 4.5–7 kg per year.
Independence:
At this age, children are more self-sufficient than younger children and not yet troubled by adolescent body changes.
This is a “calm before the storm” stage—mentally and emotionally more stable, physically less volatile than during adolescence.
Attention & Memory Development
7 to 11 years of age also sees changes in cognitive abilities.
⚠️ Younger children (2–3 years old):
Have little control over attention.
Example: A toddler watching TV can suddenly get distracted by a cat walking by. Their “attention spotlight” moves on its own, like a motion-detecting security light—easily hijacked.
They are unable to inhibit intrusion of task-irrelevant thoughts.
Imagine trying to focus on a puzzle while someone whispers a joke in your ear. Toddlers can’t “tune it out.”
Role of the Brain – Reticular Formation?
The ability to sustain attention gradually improves throughout childhood and early adolescence…
This ties into CNS (Central Nervous System) development.
🧬 The Reticular Formation:
Located in the hindbrain, responsible for sustaining attention, and not fully myelinated until puberty.
Analogy: The reticular formation is like a Wi-Fi router for attention—it helps signal strength and maintain a good connection (attention focus). But before puberty, the “wiring” (myelin) isn’t fully installed yet, so signal drops (distractions) are more frequent.
🔬 What are LC, LDT, and PPT?
These are nuclei—specialized clusters of neurons—that are part of the reticular formation or closely connected to it. Each plays a role in regulating attention, arousal, and cognitive function.
🧠 LC – Locus Coeruleus
Location: Pons (upper brainstem).
Neurotransmitter: Primarily norepinephrine (noradrenaline).
Function: Key role in arousal, attention, and stress responses.
🛎 Analogy:
Think of the locus coeruleus like the alarm bell system of the brain. When something important or surprising happens (like a loud sound), the LC activates quickly and wakes up the brain to pay attention.
🧠 LDT – Laterodorsal Tegmental Nucleus
Location: Midbrain/upper pons.
Neurotransmitter: Acetylcholine.
Function: Involved in alertness, REM sleep, and attention.
💡 Analogy:
The LDT is like a spotlight operator in a theater—it helps control where the brain’s attention beam is pointing, especially when switching focus from one thing to another.
🧠 PPT – Pedunculopontine Tegmental Nucleus
Location: Border of midbrain and pons.
Neurotransmitter: Also acetylcholine, sometimes glutamate.
Function: Helps regulate wakefulness, attention, and motor control.
🎛 Analogy:
Think of the PPT as part of the brain’s control panel for staying awake and alert, especially during tasks that involve movement and attention together (like riding a bike or playing a game).
Memory Task: Miller & Weiss (1981)
Ability to resist distraction from task-irrelevant information improves from 7 to 13 years.
Experiment:
Children aged 7, 10, and 13 had to:
Remember locations of toy animals behind screens.
Household items were placed near the screen.
Result:
13-year-olds were most accurate in remembering locations, followed by 10-year-olds, then 7-year-olds.
📌 Why? Older children are better at selective attention—focusing on what’s important and ignoring the irrelevant.
Irrelevant Information Recall
13-year-olds were less able to remember the household item compared to 7- and 10-year-olds.
✅ This is a good thing!
13-year-olds were better at ignoring task-irrelevant information.
Analogy: Think of a bouncer at a party—13-year-olds have a better bouncer (brain filter) who only lets in guests (information) that matter.
Meta-Cognition ?
They said they should pay attention to the animal and ignore the household item because it was irrelevant.
This demonstrates meta-cognition: the knowledge that someone has regarding their own cognitive processes.
It’s like knowing how you learn best—realizing “I need quiet to study” is meta-cognition.
Even though 7- and 10-year-olds know what to do, they still performed worse than 13-year-olds—knowledge isn’t the same as implementation.
Meta-Awareness in Younger Children
They are aware of the limits of their mental abilities.
Even preschoolers show meta-cognition!
Meta-Attention:
4-year-olds understand that it is harder to pay attention to two people telling different stories at the same time.
Analogy: Imagine trying to watch two YouTube videos playing simultaneously. A 4-year-old knows one will get missed.
Meta-Memory:
4-year-olds understand that some things are easier to remember than others, and even 3–5-year-olds know remembering many items is more difficult than remembering a few.
Analogy: A child knows it’s easier to remember 3 toys than 30.
Development of Memory Strategies
Children of 3–5 years believe that remembering something over a short period is just as easy as over a long period.
🧠 They treat memory like a temporary photo that fades, rather than a long-lasting database.
Around 11 years, children understand the mind holds interpretations (not copies) of reality.
This is key: memory is not a camera—it’s a painter interpreting a scene.
With this increase in understanding comes strategies that promote memory storage and retrieval: mnemonics.
Mnemonic Example:
My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets
(to remember Mercury → Neptune).
Mnemonic Strategies – Rehearsal
Adults regularly use mnemonics. Children develop them slowly.
Two Types:
Rehearsal – Repeating to remember.
Organisation – Grouping similar items.
When 3- and 4-year-olds try to remember objects, they look carefully at them and label them, but do not rehearse.
By 7 to 10 years, children can rehearse, and the more they do so, the more they remember.
__________________________
Rehearsal Style Differences:
5- to 8-year-olds rehearse one word at a time:
e.g., “Lion, lion, lion…”
12-year-olds use active, cumulative rehearsal:
e.g., “Lion, tiger, leopard…” “Lion, tiger, leopard…”
This is like building a LEGO tower. Younger kids add one block repeatedly; older kids build a structured tower by combining blocks.
Younger children may be unable to carry out such sophisticated rehearsal because their limited working memory capacity doesn’t allow clustering.
Organisational Mnemonics
Organisation: grouping or classifying stimuli into meaningful clusters that are easier to retain.
🔹 Intuitive Analogy:
Imagine your messy closet. If all clothes, books, and shoes are thrown together, it’s hard to find things (like List 1). But if you group by type—shirts, pants, shoes—it’s easier to remember where things are (like List 2).
This is exactly what the mind does using organisational mnemonics.
Remembering lists 1 and 2 should be equally difficult if you simply use rehearsal.
This means if you just repeat words in your head (rehearsal), both lists are equally hard. But…
By grouping items together into meaningful clusters, list 2 should be easier to remember.
Because:
List 1: Random unrelated items (e.g., Boat, Grass, Pencil).
List 2: Semantically clustered into 3 categories:
Cutlery: Knife, Fork, Spoon, Plate
Clothes: Shirt, Pants, Sock
Vehicles: Car, Boat, Truck
Children appear to use organisation mnemonic techniques from around 9–10 years.
This ability requires abstract categorisation—a skill linked to the Concrete Operational Stage (next part).
🧱 Concrete Operational Stage (7–11 years)
Develop cognitive operations that involve using logic to solve concrete, current problems.
Children at this stage:
Stop thinking purely intuitively (i.e., no longer “just guessing”).
Can mentally manipulate information, but only when it’s about real, concrete things (not abstract ideas yet).
🔹 Mental Seriation
Ability to order things based on quantity, e.g., shortest to tallest.
Preoperational children make:
Incomplete ordering: they skip a few.
Extension errors: they focus on local comparisons (e.g., “this one is taller than the previous”) but miss global order.
Concrete-operational children can make greater-than and less-than comparisons easily.
🔹 Analogy:
Think of ordering books from shortest to tallest.
A preoperational child might say: “this is taller than that” but mess up the full line.
A concrete-operational child can mentally line them all up, like sorting by height in their head.
🔹 Transitivity
Understanding the logical relations between a series of objects.
If A > B and B > C, then A > C.
Preoperational children need to see all objects physically.
Concrete-operational children can rely on logic alone.
Example:
If John > Peter > Sam (in height), a 7-year-old can say John is taller than Sam, even without seeing them side by side.
🔹 Classification
Learn to name and sort objects into categories based on similar characteristics.
Classification is the ability to:
Use logic to make assumptions about objects based on their membership to a category.
Example:
“All mammals are warm-blooded. A horse is a mammal. Therefore, it must be warm-blooded.”
This is deductive reasoning, and children begin to handle it around this stage.
🔹 Class-Inclusion Task
Piaget et al. (2001): 7 daisies, 2 roses → total = 9 flowers
6-year-olds said: “More daisies”, because:
“Daisies are daisies, not flowers.”
They don’t yet understand that categories can be nested (subcategory inside category).
7-year-olds correctly said: more flowers than daisies, showing an understanding of class-inclusion.
🔹 Conservation & Reversibility
Reversibility = ability to mentally reverse an action.
Concrete-operational kids realize that things stay the same even if their form changes (e.g., liquid poured into a different shaped glass).
Also applies to math:
5 + 5 = 10
10 – 5 = 5
Preoperational children can use symbols (e.g., numbers), but concrete-operational children can use logic to operate on them.
“Numbers can be changed and returned to their original state” is an example of reversibility.
🔤 LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT (Vocabulary and Grammar by Age 6)
“By 6 years children have an immense vocabulary (up to 30,000 words) and can form infinitely long sentences and use complex grammar such as the passive voice and subjunctive.”
🔍 What’s Going On?
By age 6, a child can already speak a massive number of words—around 30,000! That’s like knowing almost every word in a small dictionary.
✅ Key Grammar Terms:
Passive voice: “The ball was thrown by John” (the object comes first).
Subjunctive mood: “If I were a bird…” (used for hypotheticals).
________________________________
The Pragmatic System: Age 6–11:
“Between 6 and 11 years there are great improvements in the pragmatic system.”
🧠 Pragmatic system = how language is used appropriately in social situations (not just knowing grammar or vocabulary, but using language well with others).
“Children become more sensitive to the needs of other people in conversations and show greater awareness of what other people know and do not know.”
💬 Analogy:
Before this age, kids are like radio hosts talking into a microphone—they assume everyone hears what they say. Between 6–11, they start becoming like walkie-talkie users—aware that communication only works when both sides are tuned in and understand each other.
Egocentrism & Theory of Mind (Piaget)
“A child < 6… may describe the man as ‘the man’, assuming the other person knows what they know.”
“This kind of mistake is an example of egocentrism.”
📘 Egocentrism (from Piaget): Child assumes everyone sees the world from their perspective.
🧠 Theory of mind: The ability to understand that other people have different knowledge, thoughts, or perspectives.
“They need to introduce ‘a man’… before referring to him as ‘the man’.”
Resolving Misunderstandings
“The ability to resolve misunderstandings is also part of the pragmatic system.”
If someone replies with just “What?”, you might repeat your entire sentence.
If they reply “Where’s the nearest what?”, you know to just repeat “metro station”.
🧠 Analogy:
It’s like being in a noisy restaurant. If someone only hears the middle of your sentence, you only repeat the missing part. This takes mental flexibility and is part of social pragmatic competence.
“This ability begins to develop before 3 years of age.”
Emotional Content in Vocalisations
“The pragmatic system is not well-developed until school age, and even then, it continues to develop.”
Sauter et al. (2013)… children had to match each vocalisation with a corresponding picture of a facial expression.
5-year-olds were 78% accurate for non-verbal vocalisations and 53% for verbal vocalisations.
10-year-olds were 84% accurate and 72% respectively.
🎭 Emotional understanding: Knowing what emotion is behind a tone of voice—even when the words themselves don’t say it directly.
Humour, Irony, Sarcasm, and Conversation Rules
“The pragmatic system… also our ability to understand the relation between language and humour, irony, sarcasm.”
Humour is a social tool. You can’t just know words—you need to “get” what’s funny to someone else.
“Using humour… requires understanding other people’s sense of humour and how words can have double meanings.”
“Certain patterns of speech must be respected.”
🔄 Knock-knock jokes: Highly structured! You break the pattern, you break the joke.
Humour & Hearing Loss
“Learning to detect humorous content has been proposed to have roots in infant-directed speech.”
👶 Infant-directed speech = exaggerated, musical baby talk (slow, high-pitched, emotional).
“Children with hearing loss, been found to be less sensitive at detecting humour than children with normal hearing suggesting they have had fewer opportunities to detect the subtleties of pragmatics in language.”
👂 If you don’t hear language’s tone shifts, you miss the music of meaning—like watching a movie with no soundtrack.
