CHAPTER 8
BECOMING SELF-DIRECTED THINKERS:
PROBLEM SOLVING AND MEMORY
Problem Solving- involves having a
goal, determining obstacles to that goal,
developing strategies for overcoming the
obstacles and evaluating the results
Goal-directed behavior- Means end
(that is intentional) problem solving, first
seen in the latter part of the first year.
The Development of Tool Use in
Young Children
By 5 years of age, children around the
world have mastered the use of some
basic tools of their culture
Although the tools older children and
adolescents use, such as toaster,
calculators, and computers, may seem far
distant from anything infants can
understand, childrens eventual use of
tools to solve problem have their origins
in infants manipulation of their physical
The Development of Tool Use in
Young Children
Tool use develops from infants
interactions with objects in
everyday life
In the process children learn how
objects relate to each other and
learn, often through trial and error
Design Stance- The assumption hat
tools are designed for an intended
function
(Thus, pen are for writing, hammer for
hammering, respectively. This makes
selecting tools very efficient, although
sometimes it results in functional
fixedness, the tendency not to identify
alternative uses for familiar objects)
Sex Differences in Tool
Use
Young girls were perfectly capable of using
a tool to solve this simple problem, they
were just likely than boys to spontaneously
use an object to achieve their goal.
Boy spent more time in such play (the
manipulation of the objects, such as
banging or throwing, taking objects apart
and putting them back together again, and
construction)
Reasoning- is a special type of problem solving
that usually requires one to make an inference.
There are two types of reasoning:
1. Analogical reasoning- involves using
something you already know to help you
understand something you do not know yet.
2. Scientific reasoning- involves the generation
of hypotheses and the systematic testing of
those hypotheses
Basic- Level Processes:
The Development of Executive
Function
Executive function- refers to the processes
involved in regulating attention and in
determining what to do with information just
gathered or retrieved from long-term memory
It involves a related set of basic information
processing abilities including:
working memory, how much information one can hold in
the short-term store and think about at a time
(2) how well one can inhibit responding and resist inference
(3) selective attention to relevant information
(4) cognitive flexibility
(1)
The development of five
cognitive abilities associated
with executive function:
1. Speed of processing
2. Working memory
3. Attention
4. Inhibition and childrens abilities
not to respond
5. Cognitive flexibility
Speed of processing- how quickly any
cognitive operation can be executed;
hypothesized to be a measure of mental
capacity and related to performance on
many cognitive tasks.
Working memory- the capacity to
store and transform information being
held in the short-term system.
Attention span- the amount of
time a person can concentrate on
a task without becoming
distracted
Selective attention- the ability
to focus only on chosen stimuli
and not to be distracted by other
noise in the environment.
Inhibition- refers to the ability to
prevent making some cognitive or
behavioral response
Resistance to interference- the ability
to ignore irrelevant information so that it
does not impede task performance
Cognitive flexibility- refers to the
ability to shift between sets of tasks or
rules.
The Origins of Executive
Function
Naomi Friedman and colleagues (2008)
reported that the heritability of executive
function combining test of inhibition, working
memory, and cognitive flexibility is
exceptionally high (99%), making it one of the
most highly heritable psychological traits ever
assessed
With more physically fit children showing
superior executive functioning than less-fit
children
The Origins of Executive
Function
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder (ADHD)-an inability to sustain attention
believed to be caused by deficits
in behavioral inhibition. People
with ADHD display hyperactivity,
impulsiveness, show great
difficulty sustaining attention, and
are at high risk for academic
difficulties.
Strategy Development
Strategies- are usually defined as
deliberate, goal-directed mental
operations that are aimed at solving
problems.
Production
deficiency- that is, although
children do not produce strategies
spontaneously, they can be trained to use the
and enhance their performance as a result
Utilization deficiency- using a strategy that
does not improve performance and is
frequently observed in childrens strategy use
Why should children use an effortful
strategy when it does not result in any
improvement?
Young children lack the mental resources
necessary to both execute a strategy and
devote to the problem at hand
Once, strategies can be executed with
greater efficiency, children will begin to
realize some benefit for their effort
They may realize that the strategy is not
working for them however they overestimate
their physical and cognitive abilities
Children may use a new strategy for the
sake of trying something new
Adaptive strategy choice model- Sieglers model to
describe how strategies change over time the view that
multiple strategies exit within a childs cognitive
repertoire at any one time with these strategies
competing for one another for use
The variety of strategies children use to compute
simple math
sum-
involves counting both addends
min- involves starting with the larger addend and counting
up from there, making the minimum number of counts
fact retrieval- involves memorizing basic math facts
The Development of Memory
Strategies
Children use variety of memory strategies or
mnemonics
oRehearsal- a memory strategy in which
target information is repeated
Passive
rehearsal- style of rehearsing in
which a person includes few usually one unique
items per rehearsal set
Active or cumulative rehearsal- the person
repeats the most recently presented item and
then rehearses it with as many other different
word as possible
The Development of Memory
Strategies
o
Organization- the structured
discovered or imposed upon a
set of items that is to guide
memory performance
Clustering-
recalling items from
the same category together in a
memory tasks
Three factors that influence
childrens strategy use
1.
2.
3.
Mental capacity- a basic tenet of
information processing approaches is that
people have limited mental resources, we
can only think about or do so many things
at once
Knowledge base- the general
background knowledge a person possesses
Metacognition- knowledge about ones
own thoughts and the factors that
influence thinking
Memory
Development
Memory- refers to the contents of
ones mind
Remembering- refers to the
processes of storing new
information and bringing
information to consciousness
Representation of
knowledge
Two types of memory
1. Explicit or declarative memory- is available
to conscious awareness and comes in at least two
forms episodic and semantic
episodic memory- long-term memory of events or
episodes
Semantic memory- long-term memory
representation of definitions and relations among
language terms
2. Implicit or procedural memory- refers to
knowledge of procedures and feelings that are
integrated but unconscious
Characteristics of Implicit and Explicit Cognitive
Systems
IMPLICIT SYSTEM
EXPLICIT SYSTEM
Unconscious
Conscious
Automatic
Controllable
Evolved early
Evolved late
Common across species
Might be unique to humans
Pragmatic, context- dependent
expression
Logical, decontextualized,
abstract representation
Parallel processing of multiple
sources of contextual information
Sequential processing of
decontextualized, abstract
representation
Parallel processing results in high
but effortless information
processing capacity
Sequential processing is limited
to attentional and working
memory resources and is
therefore effortful
Unrelated to general intelligence
Correlated with general
intelligence
Fuzzy traces- imprecise memory representation that are more
easily accessed, generally require less effort to use and are less
susceptible to interference and forgetting than verbatim traces
Verbatim traces- precise, literal memory representations that
are less easily accessed generally require more effort to use
and are more susceptible to interference and forgetting than
fuzzy traces
Fuzzy-trace theory- Brainerd and Reynas theory that
proposes that information is encoded on a continuum from
verbatim to fuzzy or gistlike traces and that many cognitive
developmental differences in aspects of cognition can be
attributed to age differences in encoding and in differences in
sensitivity to output interference
The Development of Autobiographical
Memory
Autobiographical memory- refers to
personal and long-lasting memories, which
are the basis for ones personal life history
Infantile
amnesia- the inability to remember events
from infancy and early childhood
Scripts- a form of schematic organization with realworld events organized in terms of temporal and
causal relations between component acts
Prospective memory- remembering to do
something in the future
