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SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGY
SPECIALISATION SUMMARY
Cognitive Psychology: The Learning Brain
2017/2018
INTERNATIONAL BACHELOR IN PSYCHOLOGY (IBP)
,Week 1 – Chapter 9
Metacognition: knowledge about own cognition. Involves own information-processing skills,
monitoring own cognitive performance, knowing demands of other cognitive demands, regulating
cognitive strategies to enhance performance, developing theory of mind.
Theory of Mind: what the child knows about somebody else’s mind.
Meta-memory is knowledge about memory, the ability to monitor and regulate one’s own memory
behavior. Children should also become more aware of their own strengths and weaknesses in
remembering certain types of information. So, as it develops they should use more mnemonic
strategies to improve their encoding and retrieval of information in memory. Declarative meta-
memory – knowledge of oneself as a memorizer, knowledge of the present contents of one’s memory,
and knowledge of task demands. Procedural meta-memory – knowing how.
5-year olds were as good as 10-year olds in judging the difficulty of memory tasks involving a single
variable (3 vs. 18 items). However, they were significantly worse than 10-year olds when the memory
tasks involved interactions between variables. 5-year olds tended to predict that both boys with 18
items to remember had equally difficult memory tasks, even though one boy had more time. 10-year
olds did not make such errors. 5-year olds could only judge memory performance on the basis of one
relevant variable. Meta-memory requires integrating multiple variables.
7-year olds made no distinction between rehearsal and categorization as the better strategy, but the 9
to 11-year olds judged categorization to be more effective. Some meta-cognitive awareness of the
usefulness of categorization was present by at least 9 years of age.
Older children recalled more pictures than younger children. Children understanding of their own
strategic behavior was related to recall, whether explanations were mentalistic (helped them get in
my mind) or non-mentalistic (don’t know). Most children classified as non-mentalistic did not name
labeling as a memory strategy. Recall was higher for children who gave mentalistic explanations.
Labeling was a more effective strategy for children who understood the behavior.
Self-Monitoring: the ability to keep track of where you are with respect to your memory goals.
Self-Regulation: is the ability to plan, direct, and evaluate your own memory behavior.
Both include executive function. Judgments-of-learning – assessing ones learning both immediately
after studying a list of items, and after a delay of a few minutes. Adequate self-monitoring is necessary
if self-regulation is to be successful. Examined whether 6,8,10 and 12-year olds could distribute their
study time efficiently between easy and hard material. Given two booklets; easy paired associates
(cat-dog) and hard paired associates (book-frog). Goal was to remember all the pairs perfectly and
children’s allocation of study time was measured through videotaping. 6 and 8-year olds spent equal
time on easy and hard booklets. 10 and 12-year olds allocated more time to the hard booklets (12-
year olds the most). 8-year olds did have some ability to allocate study time. Younger children lacked
meta-memorial knowledge, even though they understood problem difficulty it didn’t influence their
time allocation.
Younger children are less good about making prediction about their own memory performance. This
aspect of self-monitoring is now termed ease-of-learning judgments – the ability to predict one’s own
ability to remember items, lists or texts. Younger children are always worse, they are more optimistic
and motivational factors like wishful thinking explain unrealistic predictions. Post-task assessment
shows that children of all ages can monitor their performance accurately, in motor and memory tasks.
However, children did not differentiate between their wishes and expectations. Only 9-year olds show
differentiation. Overestimation was due to their belief in the causal efficacy of effort (if they try
harder, they will perform as they desire). These declines, as children get older. Better to use ease-of-
learning with older children.
,Judgments-of-learning tasks may provide a better indication of children’s ability to monitor their own
memory performance. It relies on paired-associate learning of pictures, participants are asked to
assess their learning: (1) immediately after studying a list of items, and (2) after a delay of a few
minutes. In adults, accuracy is always better in the delayed condition. This is also the case for children
of all ages, even kindergarten children. But trail-by-trail judgments-of-learning are always
overconfident. Self-monitoring is pretty accurate, it may become more wrong for children when the
task difficulty increases.
Feeling-of-knowing does not show improvements in accuracy as children get older. It might be able to
be dissociated from knowing. Feeling-of-knowing is based on the amount of information generated
at retrieval, whether this info is correct or not. In children, errors of omission were more frequent.
Another aspect of meta-memory is being able to accurately attribute the origins of one’s memories,
knowledge, and beliefs (source monitoring). Develops markedly between ages 4 and 6 years. 4-year
olds correctly recalled 24% of the sources of the facts, compared to 47% and 40% for 6 and 8-year
olds. Younger children could also forget they recalled new facts as part of the experiment, falsely
attributing sources of their knowledge to parents, TV or teacher (60%). Older children would forget if
it where the puppet or the experimenter who had taught them. Younger children were displaying
“source amnesia”, seen in frontal lobe dysfunction. There were higher levels of source monitoring in
8-year-old children with shorter delays. Sources were identified correctly 41% of occasions by 6-year
olds, 62% of occasions by 8-year olds and 70% of occasions for 10-year olds. This has implications for
eye-witness testimonies, if they cannot tell the source of their info they can be vulnerable to
suggestibility. Children performed two events with an experimenter and imagined performing the
other two. 4-year olds showed 66% correct recall for events, compared to almost 100% of the 6 and
8-year olds. 4-year olds are better at this when tested immediately. Likely source monitoring develops
from 4 to 8 years, and shows variation depending on the nature of the material. Link these
developments to developments in prefrontal cortex and executive function.
The relationship between measures of meta-memory and memory behavior suggests the relation is
positive. Better meta-memory = better performance on memory tasks, also bidirectional. A significant
relationship was found between conscious awareness of the usefulness of sematic cues and successful
memory performance was found in both 4 and 6-year olds.
Executive Function: the monitoring and self-regulation of thought and action, the ability to plan
behavior and inhibit inappropriate responses. To develop meta-representations, children need to
develop the ability to take a representation itself as an object of cognition. Meta-representational
development plays a critical role of communicative activities involving sharing objects with others.
The central executive was thought to play a central role in cognition via planning and monitoring
cognitive activity. Executive function is thought to be located in the frontal cortex. Executive function
was also thought to involve the modulation of cognitive processes in a top-down manner. Young
children are usually bad at inhibiting inappropriate behaviors, possibly because of poor inhibitory
control – ability to inhibit responses to irrelevant stimuli while pursuing a cognitively represented
goal. The assumption is that younger children have inadequate strategic control over their mental
processes, and that as they gain meta-knowledge about their mental processes strategic control
improves. A typical “executive error” seen in adults with frontal cortex damage is preservative card
sorting. Find it difficult to change from color to shape sorting (even though they know its wrong).
Argued that “executive errors” occur when behavior is controlled by salient features of the
environment, including prior actions, rather than an appropriate rule held in mind. A critical aspect of
many “frontal” tasks like card sorting was that these tasks required the suppression of task-irrelevant
information for effective performance. Impaired inhibitory functioning could thus be an explanation
for children’s difficulties in the strategic control of their behavior. “neo-Piagetian” theories of
cognitive development were effectively theories about the role of working memory in children’s
improved cognition with age. Pascual-Leone argued that processing space increased with age, and
, that as processing space (central computing space) increased, so do the cognitive abilities of the child.
Available capacity was thought to increase as processing became more efficient and consequently
took up less space.
Dimensional Card Sorting task (DCCS) tested for ability to shift their sorting strategy, color to shape. 3
to 4-year-old children can experience considerable difficulty in rule shifting tasks, like frontal
patients, and despite explicit instructions. 5-year-old did have the required cognitive flexibility. 4-year
olds proved to be better at switching their sorting rule with more familiar dimensions of boats and
rabbits. Children become able to make a judgement on one dimension while ignoring another between
3 and 5 years of age. Children cannot inhibit a pre-potent tendency to use the pre-switch rule at will,
even though the post-switch rule is known to them. 89% of the 3-year olds could verbally report the
new rule. But couldn’t change rule in practice because they were cognitively rigid and couldn’t
redirect attention. Adults have difficulty in rule switching tasks, but their difficulty is shown by
elongated reaction times rather than by sorting errors. Older children are thought to be able to handle
if-then rules of increased complexity. Complexity depends on the number of levels of embedding in a
rule system. Age-related changes in complexity were thought to depend on changes in reflection
(metacognition), which in turn were thought to depend on development in frontal cortex.
“Cool” executive function refers to “purely cognitive tasks”, whereas “hot” executive function involves
making decisions about events that have emotionally significant consequences. Adults affective
decision making is typically studied with gambling tasks. Invented a gambling task suitable for
children aged 3 and 4, based on deck of cards but the cards are happy or sad faces and you lose sweets
for each sad face. There was an advantageous deck (a happy face and one or no sad face) or a
disadvantageous deck (two happy faces and more sad faces), hence more advantageous to select the
advantageous deck. 3-year olds chose the disadvantageous deck more than would be expected by
chance. 4-year olds chose the advantageous deck more. A few 3-year-olds did choose the
advantageous deck more. This shows development from age 3 to 4.
Inhibitory Control: the ability to inhibit responses to irrelevant stimuli while pursuing a cognitively
represented goal. One type of task requires children to delay gratification of a desire, ex. Peaking at a
gift. The second type of tasks requires children to respond in a way that conflicts with a more salient
response, ex. Day/night task. Performance in both these types of tasks improves with age during the
period from approx. 3 to 6 years (ceiling performance at 7). Girls outperformed boys at toddler and
preschool ages, and older children had better inhibition.
There are important commonalities between developing reflective awareness of one’s own cognition
and developing reflective awareness of the cognitions of others. There are significant correlations
between performance on executive function tests and performance on ToM tests, such as false-belief
task. To reflect the need to suppress irrelevant perspectives when keeping track of false beliefs and to
keep multiple perspectives in mind. Around 4-year olds, children understand more that mental
representations are causally responsible for a person’s actions or behaviors.
As the frontal cortex is a brain region whose structure matures relatively late, and as the functional
integration of other neocortical regions with frontal cortex is necessarily affected by the maturation of
those regions, the classic view is that advances in cognitive development in later childhood years are
related to maturational changes in frontal cortex. A measure of response inhibition is the go/no-go
task or a measure of interference with a flanker task, for 8-12-year olds and adults. A flanker task,
asked to press a button on the left when the central arrow was pointing to the left, the arrow is
flanked by other shapes or with arrows going the opposite direction. when crosses appeared, that was
a no-go condition. Children did poorer than adults, but accuracy levels were over 90% for children. In
children the left prefrontal lateral showed more activity with interference suppression and for adult
right ventro-lateral prefrontal cortex activity. A more child friendly go/no-go was made based on
Pokémon characters (Meowth is no-go). Children and adult participants activated the same neural
regions during response inhibition, activity was greater in children. Stroop task – asked to name the
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