PSY 1200 Lecture : Chapter 7
28 May 2023
School
Department
Course
Professor
1 The
Information-
Processing
Approach
developmental connection
Cognitive Theory
Piaget theorized that cognitive development occurs in four
stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and
formal operational. Connect to “Cognitive Developmental
Approaches.”
developmental connection
Theories
In Skinner’s behavioral view, it is external rewards and
punishment that determine behavior, not thoughts. Connect to
“Introduction.”
THE INFORMATION-
PROCESSING
APPROACH AND ITS
APPLICATION TO
DEVELOPMENT
The information-processing approach analyzes how individuals encode
information, manipulate it, monitor it, and create strategies for handling
it (Siegler, 2006, 2016a, b, 2017; Siegler & Braithwaite, 2017). This
approach shares some characteristics with the theories of cognitive
development discussed in the chapter on “Cognitive Developmental
Approaches.” Both those theories and the information-processing
approach rejected Skinner’s behavioral approach, which dominated
psychology during the first half of the twentieth century. The
behaviorists argued that to explain behavior it is important to examine
associations between stimuli and behavior. In contrast, the information-
processing approach—like the theories of Piaget and Vygotsky—focuses
on how people think.
Cognitive psychologists often use the computer as an analogy to help
explain the connection between cognition and the brain (Radvansky &
Ashcraft, 2018). They describe the physical brain as the computer’s
hardware and cognition as its software. In this analogy, the sensory and
perceptual systems provide an “input channel” similar to the way data
are entered into the computer (see Figure 1). As input (information)
comes into the mind, mental processes, or operations, act on it, just as
the computer’s software acts on the data. The transformed input
generates information that remains in memory much in the way a
computer stores what it has worked on. Finally, the information is
retrieved from memory and “printed out” or “displayed” (so to speak) as
an observable response.
FIGURE 1COMPARING INFORMATION PROCESSING IN HUMANS AND
COMPUTERS. Psychologists who study cognition often use a computer analogy
to explain how humans process information. The brain is analogous to the
computer’s hardware, and cognition is analogous to the computer’s software.
Creatas/PictureQuest
I think, therefore I am.
—Rene Descartes
Philosopher, 17th Century
Page 215Computers provide a logical and concrete, but oversimplified,
model of the mind’s processing of information. Inanimate computers
and human brains function quite differently in some respects. For
example, most computers receive information from a human who has
already coded the information and removed much of its ambiguity. In
contrast, each brain cell, or neuron, can respond to ambiguous
information transmitted through sensory receptors such as the eyes and
ears.
Computers can do some things better than humans. For instance,
computers can perform complex numerical calculations with far greater
speed and accuracy than humans could ever hope to achieve. Computers
can also apply and follow rules more consistently and with fewer errors
than humans and can process complex mathematical patterns better
than humans.
Still, the brain’s extraordinary capabilities will probably not be mimicked
completely by computers at any time in the near future (Sternberg,
