PSYC 2450 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Childhood Amnesia, Long-Term Memory, Cognitive Inhibition
23 Jan 2017
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Document Summary
Children"s awareness of the distinction between conscious and unconscious thought develops gradually: most infant thoughts are implicit. Fuzzy-trace theory offers an alternative: people encode information on a continuum from verbatim (specific) to gist (general) Gist: preserves essential content without precise details. A summary, and approximation of what is encoded. Gists: easily accessed, require relatively little effort. Verbatim traces: more susceptible to interference, more easily forgotten. Children"s reliance on verbatim or gist traces changes: age 7 - puberty: rely on the fuzzy trace. Must pay attention in order to encode information. Development of attention: planning attentional strategies, selective attention. Focusing on the task relevant features and ignoring what is irrelevant. Pay attention selectively because we are goal-driven: cognitive inhibition. Ability to prevent ourselves from doing something. Meta-attention: children (6,7,8, age) start to develop the ability to pay attention and know if other are paying attention or not (ex. eye direction etc) but they don"t really know what attention is.
