Title: Chapter 9 Cognitive Growth
1Chapter 9 Cognitive Growth
2Agenda
- Weekly quiz
- Online course supports? Can we moodle?
- Term Project
- QA for next week on ch67
- Cognitive Growth beginnings
- Knowledge Construction
- Social Cognition
- Construction of Social Reality
- Cognition and Aging
3ACT-R related term project
- http//act-r.psy.cmu.edu
- http//act-r.psy.cmu.edu/about/
4What biologically Develops?
- at birth there are more neurons and some
reflexes (video clip) - neurons decrease but 10x increase in connections
in 2 years - gradual myelination makes adult hemispheric
transmission 4 to 5 times faster (224 miles per
hour)
5Criticism of Piaget's Theory 1 of 2
- Weak clinical methodology and belief in
maturation process is contradicted by evidence
that particular experiences, training, and other
factors can alter performance on Piagetian tasks.
(video clip) - Stage progression is much more "messy" than
proposed by Piaget and more continuous - Piaget's focus on reasoning ability is
contradicted by evidence for limitations based on
motor coordination, working memory, memory
strategies, and verbal understanding of questions
6Criticism of Piaget's Theory 2 of 2
- Piaget's ages for stages is contradicted by
earlier ability than predicted and inconsistent
abilities - Difference between can do (competence theory)
and usually do (performance theory) - (aka
normative vs. descriptive) - Adolescents and adults do not show formal
operational thinking in many if not most
circumstances.
7Increased Mental Capacity
- Case (1985) working memory-space theory
- increased speed of neural function drives
- working memory size increases up to about age 20
- looks like a power function of practice
- Draw a power function
8Metacognitive Skills and Memory Development
- observation that older children have better
memories - understanding and control of cognitive processes
- example rehearsal of a phone number, monitoring
progress - Self-monitoring is bottom-up process
- Self-regulation is a top-down process
9Theory of mind - about how the mind operates
- This issue is quite developed in philosophy
- We encountered this before in context of Autism
- This involves the nature of what constitutes an
adequate explanation of the "how - What do you do when you understand how someone
else thinks? - Draw a map on paper from this room to the
library. - Exchange it with the person sitting next to you
and then check there map do they know where the
library is ? - (can you follow what they were thinking when they
drew it?) - (is it the same route as your map?)
10Knowledge Construction
- Individual Knowledge Construction
- Constructivism
- Learners are active builders
- Teaching facilitates and encourages
- Selection of materials
- Choice of activities
- Using cooperative learning and guided discussion
- Integration into thematic projects
- Social interaction is important
- Learning about mathematics (video clip)
11Types of Constructivism
- Exogenous reconstructions of structures like
cause and effect, presentations, and behavior
patterns - Knowledge is true copy of world
- Behavior contingencies, modeling
- Simulating irrational beliefs to experience
emotional disturbance symptoms (RET) - Endogenous cognitive structures are created
based on earlier structures like Piagetian
stages - Dialectical source of knowledge is in the
interactions between learners and their
environment context effects, contextualism
12Vygotskys Dialectical Constructivism
- Cognitive change occurs as children use these
mental tools (like schemata, language, cultural
patterns, and scripts) in social interactions and
internalize and transform these interactions (p
197).
13Sociocultural Influences on Thought Processes
- Vygotsky Theory of internalization of
interactions within the environment - Zone of Proximal Development - ZPD
- Scaffolding to the next step in learning
- Bridging from known to new learning
- Common in tutoring situations
- Vygotsky video BF 721 V94 1994 (28m)
- Reviews the life and career of Lev Vygotsky.
Outlines Vygotsky's theories on child psychology,
learning and child development. Using classroom
footage, shows early childhood education
applications. Topics include knowledge
construction by children role of learning,
social context and language in development.
14Vygotsky
- BF 713 L43 1997
- Presents recent work by developmental
psychologists that emphasizes the influence of
contextual factors in learning and performance.
Examines 3 sets of experiments involving
children tasks in which deliberately
gender-biased instructions are provided tasks
requiring cooperation between asymmetrical pairs
of peers tasks involving training of students by
adults and by peers. The results shed light on
the impact of stereotyping on performance the
effects of self-perception on competence and the
influence of different teaching approaches on
learning. - Gender roles and demonstration of abilities
15Influence of Culture on Cognitive Development
- The western assumptions about the "rational man"
as the core of humanness - Aristotle thought that we humans were different
because we could do sums - There seems to be some progression to
mathematical skills from infancy - In the extreme example the youngest ever chess
master played with chess pieces from infancy (and
achieved eminence at age tender age of 14) and
now publishes a chess game to capitalize on her
success (available at the mall calendar store) - http//www.kosteniuk.com/
16Culture and Causal Cognition
- By Norenzayan and Nisbett
- Fundamental Attribution Error inferring an
attitude (like or dislike) that corresponds to
the apparent behavior, without taking into
account the situational constraints operating - Western Cultural Mentality analytic
- East Asian Cultural Mentality holistic
- Relation to field dependence context
- (Relation to self-monitoring social context)
- A personality dimension low monitoring -
indivualism
17Patterns of Growth and Decline in Cognitive
Development
- Neural Network Development in infants
- Crystallized abilities (verbal memory) increase
throughout lifespan ("sometimes children use
words whose meanings they do not understand and
only gradually acquire the correct meaning after
they have started to use the words" Sternberg p
471) - Fluid abilities peak and then decline
- decline in working memory capacity
- decline in attention resources
- slowing of higher order processes
- offset somewhat by increasing expertise
18Adulthood- Cognitive Changes
Intelligence (IQ) score
- Verbal intelligence scores hold steady with age,
while nonverbal intelligence scores decline
(adapted from Kaufman others, 1989).
105
100
95
90
85
80
75
20
35
55
70
25
45
65
Age group
19Cognition and Aging
- Hippocampus loss (0.5 per year)
- Verbal peak (30s) and slow decline
- Performance declines from 20s
- Different skills have different peaks
- Lose the ability to hold information in working
memory (slower with age over 20) - The Flynn Effect - average IQ is rising so the
younger generation is getting brighter in a
normative sense - perhaps due to living in a more
complex world than their parents
20Wisdom and Aging
- Controversy over the definition
- Sternberg's six factors of wisdom
- Reasoning ability
- Sagacity - shrewdness
- Learning from ideas and from the environment
- Judgment
- Expeditious use of information
- Perspicacity - keen awareness - insight
- (mostly after the fact finding that one was wise)
21The Projective Way of Knowing
- By Nickerson
- Building a Conceptual Model of what another
person knows - Self as a source of hypotheses
- Are you Normal? (average like most others)
- Are others similar you?
- False consensus effect makes friendly folks
- Curse of expertise
- Illusion of simplicity (easy for me is easy for
you missing familiarity makes it easy) - Anchoring and Adjustment
- Default model plus tweaks (usually not enough)
22Cognitive Perils of later life
- The graying of North America - by 2030 over 20
of the population will be over 65 - Delirium- 10-20 of elderly in hospital
- Dementia - severe memory problem plus at least
one other loss - thinking, judgment, or language - Multi-infarct dementia - caused by stroke
- Alzheimer's Disease - 8 of those over 65
23Alzheimer's Disease Vulnerability
- In a study of autobiographies of nuns written in
their early 20's, low density of ideas in early
life predicted death by Alzheimer's disease
between 79 and 90 years of age. High density and
grammatical complexity in autobiographies were
associated with high cognitive scores late in
life (reference Nancy Maloney 2002) - There is also evidence of some genetic basis in
that the concordance rate is 83 in MZ twins
compared to only 46 in DZ twins.
24Importance of Class Discussion
- Classroom Discourse (old IRE model)
- Teacher Initiates
- Student Responds
- Teacher Evaluates
- Default pattern familiar script works?
- teachers need to ensure that students have
sufficient knowledge to support the discussion
topic p 204 -real reason for weekly quizzes and
schedules
25Group Participation Norms
- What are the classroom limits?
- Who can participate?
- What can be talked about?
- When can you talk?
- How can we regulate turn taking?
- What are the online discussion limits?
- What is public versus private?
- How can we help one another to benefit?
- Cognitive Scaffolding
- Reflecting on the Discussions successes
26Reflective Thinking
- What is it?
- When does it happen?
- Why does it matter?
- Context Effect in Learning
- Transfer of Training Generalization
- How can we get the knowledge of cognitive
psychology out of this classroom? - Reflective thinking frees learning from the
specific training context and makes it more
portable generalizible to new situations
27On becoming self-directed strategic learners of
Cognitive Psychology
- Take a broad perspective on knowledge
- Develop information-seeking skills
- Organized knowledge construction
- Think together when possible
- Promote reflection plus building
- Use coaching and scaffolding
- Use decentralized discussions
- Make tolerance a basic (golden) rule
- (stay flexible and adapt to changing contexts)
28Thank you for your participation
- Discussion Question for this week
- How do you know when you understand what someone
else thinks? (illustrate your answer with a
personal example)
29Childrens thinking about another persons
thinking predicting action
30A developmental shift in processes
underlyingsuccessful belief-desire reasoning
- By Ori Friedmana and Alan M. Lesliea,
- Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University,
Cognitive Science 28 (2004) 963977
31The basic childrens task
- subjects predict the behavior of a character, who
wants to avoid an object but who is mistaken
about which of three locations it is in. - The task has two equally correct answersin
seeking to avoid the location where she
mistakenly believes the object to be, the
character might equally go to the location where
the object actually is, or to the remaining empty
location.
32Inhibition of Inhibition model
33Inhibition of Inhibition model process
- The representations of the TB- and FB-Locations
are shown as boxes. - Selection is illustrated by way the arrow or
index, which points at the currently most salient
candidate. - To predict where a character with a false belief
and an avoidance desire will go (1) The true
belief content is initially most salient. (2)
Inhibitions for false belief and avoidance desire
are applied in parallel, such that they cancel
each other out. (3) The true belief content
remains most salient, and so the TB-Location is
selected as the target of the characters action.
34Model Predictions confirmed
- However, the model predicts that subjects will
prefer one of these answers, - selecting the objects actual location over the
empty location. This bias was confirmed in a
series of five experiments with children aged
between 4 and 8 years of age. - Two further experiments found the opposite bias
in adults. - These findings support one selection model as an
account of belief-desire reasoning in children,
and suggest that a different model is needed for
adults. - The process of selecting contents for mental
state attributions shows a developmental shift
between 8 years of age and adulthood.
35The End of the Show