Chapter 9 Cognitive Growth

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Chapter 9 Cognitive Growth

• By Bruce Landon

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Agenda

• 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

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ACT-R related term project

• http//act-r.psy.cmu.edu
• http//act-r.psy.cmu.edu/about/

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What 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)

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Criticism 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

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Criticism 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.

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Increased 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

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Metacognitive 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

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Theory 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?)

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Knowledge 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)

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Types 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

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Vygotskys 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).

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Sociocultural 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.   

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Vygotsky

• 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

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Influence 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/

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Culture 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

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Patterns 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

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Adulthood- 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
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Cognition 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

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Wisdom 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)

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The 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)

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Cognitive 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

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Alzheimer'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.

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Importance 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

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Group 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

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Reflective 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

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On 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)

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Thank 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)

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Childrens thinking about another persons
thinking predicting action
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A 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

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The 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.

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Inhibition of Inhibition model
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Inhibition 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.

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Model 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.

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The End of the Show