PSYC1010 Lecture 3:

Cognitive Development
DR EMILY FREEMAN
(SHE/HER)
 Cognitive Development
in Infancy, Childhood,
Overview of
and Adolescence
Today
Cognitive Development
and Change in
Adulthood

2
Learning Outcomes

• After today you should be able to:

1. Describe how perceptual and cognitive development
occurs in infancy, childhood, and adolescence
2. Distinguish between different approaches to cognitive
development
3. Describe the cognitive changes associated with ageing

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Cognitive Ability in Infants

• Infants have limited skills:

• Preverbal (no language)
• Little motor control
• Short Attention Span
• So do they have little cognitive
ability?

4
Innovative Research Methods 1

• Orienting Reflex
• From birth, infants tend to prefer novelty
• Time spent looking at stimuli tells us about an infant’s
discrimination ability

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Innovative Research Methods 2

• Infant sucking
behaviour
• As they habituate to
something (ie get
used to it), suck rate
decreases
• Suck rate increases
when exposed to
something new
(dishabituation)
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Innovative Research Methods 3

• Electroencephalography (EEG)
• Measures electrical activity in
the brain
• Different wave forms to different
types of stimuli
• Old vs New stimuli
• Passive, nonverbal

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Intermodal Perception

• Different brain circuits for

different senses
• Birth: turn eyes towards
source of a sound
• First weeks: infant imitation
• Requires integration of visual
input an d proprioceptive
feedback from own
movements

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 Intermodal Perception contd.
• 1-month: dummy example
• 3-months: prefer synced lip/speech
sounds to unsynced
• 18-months scrambled vs accurate
bodies
• matches learning to walk?

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Types of Memory

• Explicit Memory (eg facts, events)

• Consciously recalled
• Often requires language
• Rudiments in infancy
• Implicit Memory (eg procedural, riding a bike)
• Does not require conscious awareness
• Most of what is measured with infants
• Working Memory (eg solving math problems)
• Information held and manipulated briefly
• Slower to develop, requires maturation of the frontal lobes

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Infantile Amnesia

• Lack of explicit memory for events before age 3-4 years

• Does this mean memory processes aren’t functioning?
• Difficulties reporting without language
• Retention intervals increase with age
• Tendency to forget decreases with age
• Big improvements in first 2 years

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Evidence for Early
Memory Formation
• Newborns prefer their mother’s face to a
stranger’s face
• 9-month-olds look longer at faces
previously seen on one background that
are then presented on a new
background
• 24-month olds respond faster to an object
seen at 6-months compared to those who
hadn’t experienced it previously

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The Origins of Knowledge

Immanuel Kant,
John Locke, British
German Jean Piaget
Philosopher
Philosopher
• All knowledge • Knowledge is • Both right and
comes from innate wrong
experience • Logical rules and • Infants and
• To know what a mathematical children construct
dog is like, you thinking is not just and build on the
must experience a learned through knowledge they
number of dogs experience have through
experience

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Piaget’s Motivation

• How do children arrive at their answers to questions?

• Children at the same ages make the same mistakes
• They also give similar reasons for their incorrect answers
• Concluded that children think in different ways at different
ages
• Lead to his stage theory of cognitive development

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Piaget: Cognition

• Cognition
• Mental activities associated with thinking,
knowing, remembering, and
communicating
• Schemas
• Organised patterns of thought or behaviour
• Repetitions
• Expectations
• Cognitive Development
• Modifications of intellectual schemas as the
child learns about the world

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Assimilation and Accommodation

• Assimilation: Attention to new information

and incorporating it into existing schemas
• 4-legged animals bark
• Accommodation: Adjusting current schemas
in accordance with new information
• Some 4-legged animals meow
• Equilibration: key to cognitive development
• Balancing assimilation and accommodation to
adapt
• Disequilibrium: state of not knowing or
understanding that motivates learning

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 Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive
Development
• The same 4 stages,
occur in the same
sequence for
everyone:
• Sensorimotor
• Preoperational
• Concrete Operational
• Formal Operational

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Sensorimotor Stage: 0-2 years

• Infants rely on senses and motor abilities to gain information

• Senses: hands, mouths, eyes, ears
• Motor actions: grasping, mouthing, watching, manipulating objects
• Basis of future ability to represent information mentally
• Capable of little explicit reasoning beyond what they are
sensing and doing
• Extremely egocentric – embedded in their own point of view
• Key Developmental Achievement: Object Permanence

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Object Permanence
• The knowledge that objects exist even
when they can’t be experienced by the
senses
• Appears around 8-12 months
• Tested using behavioural methods

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7-month-old Failing Object Permanence

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But…
• Some suggest that infants are too easily distracted, lose
interest, and can’t search due to cognitive and motor skills
required…

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Preoperational Stage: 2-7 years

• Emergence of symbolic thought

• Begin to represent abstract concepts
• Symbols and words for concepts
• ‘ball’ = =

• No longer rely solely on senses

• Has mental representations of concepts like hunger and anger

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Preoperational Stage: 2-7 years contd.

• Capable of mental representations

• Can start to play with the world in their minds
• Begin to imagine solutions to problems before acting
• But:
• Limited by centration (focussing on one striking feature)
• Still quite literal in their thinking
• Still limited by egocentrism

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Egocentrism

• Popular Culture: Concerned

only with self/own affairs
• Piaget: difficulties
considering the perspective
of another
• Cover their eyes and
assume everyone else also
can’t see

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Three Mountain Task

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Concrete Operational Stage: 7-12 years

• Can perform mental operations on internal

representations of concrete objects
• Can imagine mentally manipulating a set of objects and then
put them back how they found them
• Can imagine different situations and ways of doing things
• Can mentally represent other people’s perspectives
• Become better liars
• EG “Why were you late getting home?”

• Concept of conservation develops

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Conservation

• Object properties remain the same even when the shape

changes

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Conservation Example

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Transitivity

• Now understand that if a < b and b < c then a < c

• Involves holding multiple mental representations
• Working Memory!
• Harder for children under 8 years
• If Sally is taller than Fred,
• and Fred is taller than Alex,
• who is the shortest?

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Formal Operational Stage: 12+ years

• Appearance of abstract thinking

• Can manipulate both abstract and concrete objects,
events, and ideas mentally
• Can reason about ‘formal’ propositions
• EG Is democracy the best form of government?
• Hypothetical thinking emerges

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Abstract and Hypothetical Thinking

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Piaget Limitations

• Underestimated abilities
• Doesn’t account for continuous, gradual changes
• Ethnocentric – culture not taken into account
• EG Mexican children of potters
• Small sample sizes
• No control groups
• Mostly observational – lacking statistical analyses

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Transactional Model

• Interaction between genes and the environment

• Children born with the potential for a higher IQ, seek out
environments that help to enhance their IQ
• Tucker-Drob et al (2013) Twin Study
• 650 twins
• Cognitive stimulation at age 2 predicted reading ability at age 4
• Cognitive ability at age 2 predicted cognitive stimulation at age
4
• Bidirectional effects
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Vygotsky: Sociocultural Theory

• Emphasises the importance of social

interactions for development
• Social interactions motivate child to learn
• Influence of culture on development
• Children use imitation, play, and social
referencing to learn
• Learn by watching others
• Died young, so theory is undeveloped, but
influential

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Vygotsky: Zone of Proximal
Development

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Information Processing Approach 1

• A much more continuous approach

than Piaget
• Focuses on specific cognitive processes
• Processing Speed
• Can do a range of cognitive tasks faster as
they develop
• Categorisation, decision making etc
• Allows them to hold more information in
mind simultaneously
• Working Memory

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Information Processing Approach 2

• Automatisation
• Complete tasks with less conscious effort
• Driving, Reading etc

• Knowledge Base
• More experience leads to greater
acquisition of knowledge
• Children better than adults on some topics
like dinosaur names

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Information Processing Approach 3

• Cognitive Strategies
• Greater use of sophisticated strategies esp. in memory
• Rote Learning – repetition
• Higher Level – categorising, looking at relationships
• Metacognition
• Thinking about thinking
• Awareness and ability to reflect on one’s own cognitive
processes
• Requires frontal lobe development

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Neo-Piagetian Theorists

• Integrate Piaget’s stage approach with information

processing and social interactions
• Children go through stages
• pre-concrete -> concrete -> abstract
• But occurs alongside continuous development of specific
cognitive processes
• The most important of which is Working Memory
• And is influenced by culture and social environment

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Cognition and Ageing

• Old Age = Wisdom? Cognitive Decline?

• Psychomotor Slowing
• Increased time needed to process and act on information
• Eg pushing a button when a light flashes
• Actually starts in mid-20s
• Eg Athletes often retire quite young
• More noticeable by 50s/60s
• Important when quick reactions and decisions are necessary

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Memory and Ageing

• The stereotype of forgetful older people is too broad

• Everyone forgets things sometimes!
• Short Term Memory
• Older adults perform quite well
• Working Memory
• Older adults show deficits with complex tasks

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Long-term Memory and Ageing

• Greater amount of knowledge with age

• With enough encoding time, older adults perform as well
as younger adults
• Declines seen in:
• Recall Tasks – what were the words on the study list?
• Recognition Tasks – which of these words were on the study list?
• Remember the gist of the story better than the details
• Autobiographical memory best for stories aged 10-30
years
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Crystallised and Fluid Intelligence

• Crystallised Intelligence
• Knowledge store
• Increases up to 40s/50s then levels off
• Fluid Intelligence
• Processing speed, solve analogies
• Begins to decrease in 20s

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Seattle Longitudinal Study

• Previous ageing studies were cross-sectional

• Show group differences
• Don’t show the proportion of people who have a decline in
cognitive ability

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Use it or Lose it?
• Maintaining mental and physical
activity -> less decline
• More years in education -> less
decline
• Learning new skills -> improved
episodic memory and processing
speed
• Maintaining a sense of purpose:
• Better episodic memory and
processing speed
• Less disability
• Better health
• Fewer depressive symptoms
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Last In, First
Out
• Frontal Lobe is last to develop,
first to show decline
• Decision-making, attention,
working memory, processing
speed, task-switching etc
• Decline escalates in the mid 80s

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Ageing and Dementia

• Dementia – progressive, incurable, marked by global

disturbances of higher mental functions
• NOT an inevitable part of ageing
• About 1% of the population
• For people > 80: Approx 12% males / 21% females
• Over half the dementia cases are caused by Alzheimer’s
Disease (AD)
• AD is associated with brain damage and loss of neurons critical
for memory
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