PSYC1003 Study Guide - Final Guide: Cognitive Development, Childhood Amnesia, Explicit Memory
Cognitive Development
• Cognitive development - understanding the divisions that a particular community or group
makes in order to represent them mentally.
Conceptual development
• Category - a class of things or events in the world.
• Concept - a mental representation of a class of things or events.
• Early in life children divide the world into 3 categories - people, animals (excl. plants) and
inanimate objects.
• Forming these broad categories allows them to draw accurate inferences about unfamiliar
entities, eg: knowing an animal can move, grow, eat, etc.
• Quinn & Eimas (1996): 3-4 months old - habituation-dishabituation paradigm.
• Dishabituation - shown pictures of different animals and the baby looks longer/shows greater
surprise. This means that they can identify differences in types.
• Young infants appear to categorise on the basis of perceptual similarity, eg: colour and size.
• As children grow older, categories become hierarchical - superordinate level = animal, basic
level = domestic pets, subordinate level = pug, Labrador.
• Causal Understanding - understanding causal relations is crucial to forming many categories.
Knowledge of Self and Other People
• We all have a naïve psychology of self and others.
• We use our understanding of 3 concepts to understand human behaviour - desires, beliefs and
action.
• Noteworthy properties of psychological concepts:
o Many refer to invisible mental states - you can't see desires or beliefs.
o They are linked to each other in cause-effect relationships.
o Naïve psychological concepts develop very early in life.
Infants' Naïve Psychology
• Infants have enormous interest in other humans - they prefer to look at human faces rather
than at objects, and imitate people's facial expressions.
• Meltzoff and Moore (1977) - imitation suggests children represent actions of self and other
using common representations.
• Around 12 months of age, children begin engaging in joint attention - someone looking an at
object, and the other person then looking at that object = being able to represent someone
else's mind state.
• Joint attention is the precursor to the theory of mind.
Intermodal understanding
• Infants are more capable of intermodal processing - the ability to associate sensations of an
object from different senses or to match their own actions to behaviours they have observed
visually.
• By 3 months, infants pay more attention to a person if speech sounds are synchronised with
lip movements.
• By 4-5 months, they follow a conversation by shifting visual attention between 2 speakers.
• Thus, they recognise not only features of objects from different senses but also the temporal
order of those features, eg: lips moving.
Perceiving meaning
• According to ecological theorists, who understand perception in its environmental adaptive
context, infants can attribute meaning to the objects they perceive.
• They argue that the nervous system is wired to recognise certain dangers and to recognise the
potential 'value' of some stimuli without prior learning.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
What can Infants Remember?
• Infantile amnesia - most people completely lack explicit memory for events before age 3 or 4.
• This does not imply, however, that experience is lost on infants and young children.
• Infant retention improves dramatically over the first 2 years of life.
• Representational flexibility - the ability to retrieve memories despite changes in the cues that
were present at encoding.
• While young infants appear to be capable of remembering their experiences, their ability to
retrieve these memories depends on whether the cues present when the memories were
encoded are again presented in a given situation (Richmond and Nelson, 2009).
• Various forms of implicit memory are present from birth. In a study, six month olds exposed
once to a stimulus responded faster to it two years later than peers not previously exposed to
it (Perris, et al. 1990).
• The rudiments of explicit memory are also present from birth, but more complete
development of explicit memory depends on maturation of the hippocampi and the temporal
lobes sometime between 8 and 18 months (Nelson, 1995).
• Working memory appears to be the slowest developing memory system, relying on the
maturation of the prefrontal cortex.
Theory of Mind
• An organised understanding of how mental processes (intentions, emotions, beliefs, desires,
perceptions) influence behaviour.
• Phillips et al. (2000) - 12 month olds (but not 8 month olds) understand that actions are linked
to desires.
• Eg: Kitty experiment - child looked longer when experimenter was holding kitty that they
hadn't gushed over, suggesting they understand that people's desires guide their actions.
• Gopnik and Slaughter (1991) - 2yo understand that desires are subjective, even when another
person's desire conflicts with their own, eg: character choose dolls over trucks experiment.
• But 2yo and 3yo children don't understand that beliefs determine action.
• False-belief problems - tasks that test a child's understanding that other people will act in
accord with their own beliefs even when the child knows that those beliefs are incorrect.
• False belief task - failure indicates children have difficulty understanding that people act
according to beliefs (their representation of reality).
• 3yo: <25% pass, 5yo: >70% pass.
• Many children may succeed in false belief problems if the task is presented in a manner that
facilitates understanding.
• Callaghan et al. (2005) - development replicates across cultures, eg: Canada, India, Peru.
• Children's understanding others' minds continue to develop into adulthood - predicts develop
of empathy and is related to children's and adults communicative development.
• Theory of mind module (TOMM) - a hypothesised brain mechanism devoted to understanding
other human beings.
• There is also the empiricist stance that the development of TOM - psychological understanding
arises from interactions with other people.
• Those who have siblings outperform peers who do not in false belief tasks, with those who
have older siblings or of opposite sex doing best and they are exposed to different desires,
perspectives, etc.
• Children's understanding of false-belief problems is substantially correlated with their ability
to reason about complex counterfactual statements.
• This is important because false belief problems require children to predict what a person
would do on the basis of a counterfactual belief.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Cognitive development: cognitive development - understanding the divisions that a particular community or group makes in order to represent them mentally. Joint attention is the precursor to the theory of mind. In a study, six month olds exposed once to a stimulus responded faster to it two years later than peers not previously exposed to it (perris, et al. False-belief problems - tasks that test a child"s understanding that other people will act in accord with their own beliefs even when the child knows that those beliefs are incorrect. Disorder: almost all children achieve a basic, but useful, theory of mind by age 5, perspective-taking - the ability to understand other people"s viewpoints or perspectives. Imaginary companions (ic) (cid:862)a (cid:448)er(cid:455) (cid:448)i(cid:448)id i(cid:373)agi(cid:374)ar(cid:455) (cid:272)hara(cid:272)ter (cid:894)perso(cid:374), a(cid:374)i(cid:373)al or o(cid:271)je(cid:272)t(cid:895) (cid:449)ith (cid:449)hi(cid:272)h the (cid:272)hild i(cid:374)tera(cid:272)ts duri(cid:374)g his/her pla(cid:455) a(cid:374)d dail(cid:455) a(cid:272)ti(cid:448)ities. (cid:863) it has a perso(cid:374)alit(cid:455) a(cid:374)d (cid:272)o(cid:374)s(cid:272)ious. (cid:894)bouldi(cid:374) & pratt, Ic children are more likely to: be reported as highly imaginative.
