COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

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COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Does the brain shrink with age?
• Does memory deteriorate with age?
• Can you teach an old dog new tricks?
• Does intelligence decline with age?
• Implications for
• jobs
• educational opportunities
• social status

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• Chapter 6 Attention and Perceptual Processing
• Chapter 7 Memory
• Chapter 8 Intelligence
• Chapter 9 Social Cognition (pp. 317-334)

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• Attention and Perceptual Processing
• The Information Processing Model
• Basic tenets
• We are active processors.
• We process quantitative and qualitative
  information.
• Information is processed through a series of
  stores or systems.

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• 1st system sensory memory
• Brains door to outside world
• New, incoming information first picked up
• sounds, sights, smells, etc.
• Very fast but fleeting
• if not attended to, it vanishes from
  consciousness
• What determines what is attended to?
• Attentional processes
• selective attention what we attend to gets
  passed to the next store or system, what we dont
  attend to disappears
• important feature, as there is too much sensory
  input around us

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• Attentional processes (Contd)
• selectivity determined by motivation, interest,
  previous cues, state of mind, expectations,
  previous experience, etc.
• divided attention ability to pay attention to
  more than one thing at the same time, e.g. study
  and listen to music. More common than we realize
  in daily life.
• sustained attention focus on task or object for
  a long time, e.g., waiting for appropriate
  highway sign to appear.
• switching attention back and forth between two
  or more items, e.g., looking out the windshield,
  then the side mirrors, then the rearview mirror,
  back to the windshield.
• Some age differences found in complex tasks.
  Practice helps, as well as cues.

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• Caveat
• most recent tests of attentional factors, and
  many other cognitive features, are done using
  stimuli on computer screens. Younger people much
  more used to computers.
• The fitness factor
• older adults perform better if they exercise
  regularly.

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• Age differences in processing
• Young adults more likely to exhibit the automatic
  attention response in laboratory tasks.
• This is when a previously learned stimulus
  automatically gets your attention, it jumps out
  at you from a jumble of other stimuli.
• Possible explanation
• general slowing of neural transmissions in older
  adults. This is known as

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• Age differences in processing (Contd)
• Speed of processing
• in order to react to a stimulus, we must process
  it first what does it mean? Do we need to
  respond? And if yes, how? And then produce the
  response. Attention and memory involved.
• Speed of processing tested with reaction time
  tasks. Three types
• simple RT tasks one stimulus
• choice RT tasks more than one stimulus
• complex RT tasks many decisions for many complex
  tasks

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• Age differences in processing (Contd)
• Simple
• older adults take longer on the cognitive step,
  not on the motor step (response).
• Choice
• different Rs needed for each S. Older adults
  slower.
• Complex
• e.g. driving. Older adults progressively worse as
  complexity increases.
• Possible causes of slower processing
• changes in the neurons and synapses (neural
  circuits)
• In everyday life, older adults have
  compensations experience at a specific task (see
  text typists, race car drivers)

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• Language Processing
• Important for understanding information
  processing.
• Language comprehension related to sensory
  capabilities (hearing, vision)
• Older adults have more difficulty when
• speed increases
• there is background noise or interfering sounds
• Importance of encoding for language processing
  rich encoding connecting a word to other known
  words or facts.

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• Language Processing (Contd)
• Because ones language is so well encoded, no
  significant age differences have been found.
  Research results sometimes conflicting.
• Read studies as examples for
• comprehension, but no need to learn
• thoroughly.