Chapter 7

Chapter Outline

The Development of Cognitive Abilities

The Development of Representation

Piaget’s Theory

• Assumptions and Principles of Piaget’s Theory
• Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

Representation in Infancy

• Object Representation
• Deferred Imitation

Representational Development Beyond Infancy

• Learning to Use Symbols
• Symbolic, or Fantasy, Play

Summary: The Development of Representation

Information-Processing Approaches to Cognitive Development

Some Assumptions of the Information-Processing Approach

The Development of Executive Function

• Age Changes in Working Memory
• Age Changes in Inhibition
• Age Changes in Switching
• Factors Influencing the Development of Executive Functions

Memory Development

• Implicit and Explicit Memory
• Infantile Amnesia and the Development of Autobiographical Memory
• The Development of Prospective Memory

The Social Nature of Human Cognitive Development

Sociocultural Theory

• Tools of Intellectual Adaptation
• Zone of Proximal Development

The Development of Social Cognition

• Viewing Others as Intentional Agents
• Social Learning
• Theory of Mind

Individual Differences in Intelligence

Intelligence Tests and Testing

• Factors of Intelligence
• The IQ Test
• What does IQ Predict?
• Stability of IQ Over Time
• Black-White Differences in IQ
• The Historical Increase in IQ

The Origins of Individual Differences in Intelligence

• Gene X Environment Interactions
• Establishing, Maintaining, and Modifying Intellectual Functioning

Conclusion

Suggested Readings

Bauer, P. J. & Fivush, R. (Eds.), The Wiley handbook on the development of children’s memory. Chichester, UK.

Bjorklund, D. F. (2012). Children’s thinking: Cognitive development and individual differences (5th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Bjorklund, D. F. (2013). Cognitive development: An overview. In P. D. Zelazo (Ed.), Oxford handbook of developmental psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 447–476). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Csibra, G., & Gergely, G. (2011). Natural pedagogy as evolutionary adaptation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Biological Sciences, 366, 1149–1157.

DeLoache, J. S., & Marzolf, D. P. (1992). When a picture is not worth a thousand words: Young children’s understanding of pictures and models. Cognitive Development, 7, 317–329.

Flynn, J. R. (2012). Are we getting smarter? Rising IQ in the twenty-first century. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Gauvain, M. (2013). Sociocultural contexts of development. In P. D. Zelazo (Ed.), Oxford handbook of developmental psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 425–452). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Gopnik, A. (2009). The philosophical baby: What children’s minds tell us about truth, love, and the meaning of life. New York: Farber, Straus, and Giroux.

Gottlieb, G. (2007). Probabilistic epigenesis. Developmental Science, 10, 1–11.

Nielsen, M. (2012). Imitation, pretend play, and childhood: Essential elements in the evolution of human culture? Journal of Comparative Psychology, 126, 170–181.

Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1969). The psychology of the child. New York: Basic.

Salthouse, T. A. (2004). What and when of cognitive aging. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13, 140–144.

Spelke, E. S., & Kinzler, K. D. (2007). Core knowledge. Developmental Science, 10, 89–96.

Sternberg, R. J. (1997). The concept of intelligence and its role in lifelong learning and success. American Psychologist, 52, 1030–1037.

Tomasello, M. (2009). Why we cooperate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Zelazo, P. D., Carlson, S. M., & Kesek, A. (2008). The development of executive function in childhood. In C. S. Nelson and M. Luciana (Eds.), Handbook of developmental cognitive neuroscience (2nd ed., pp. 453–474). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Glossary

Accommodation: In Piaget’s theory, the process of changing a mental structure to incorporate new information; contrast with assimilation.

Active rehearsal: See cumulative rehearsal.

Adaptation: In Piaget’s theory, the process of adjusting one’s cognitive structures to meet environmental demands; includes the complementary processes of assimilation and accommodation.

A-not-B task: Object permanence task, in which the infant has to retrieve a hidden object at one location (B), after having retrieved it several times previously from another one (A).

Anterograde amnesia: A phenomenon in people who are unable to form new explicit memories but are able to form new implicit memories after damage to the hippocampus.

Assimilation: In Piaget’s theory, the process of incorporating information into already existing cognitive structures; contrast with accommodation.

Autobiographical memory: Personal and long-lasting memories that are the basis for one’s personal life history.

Belief-desire reasoning: The process whereby we explain and predict what people do based on what we understand their desires and beliefs to be.

Cognition: The processes or faculties by which knowledge is acquired and manipulated.

Concrete operational stage: In Piaget’s theory, the third major stage of cognitive development (extending approximately between 7 and 11 years), in which children can decenter their perception, are less egocentric, and can think logically about concrete objects.

Core knowledge: Expression used by some infant researchers to refer to the set of knowledge that young infants possess in certain domains, including objects, people and social relations, numbers and quantities, and geometry.

Crystallized abilities: In Cattell’s theory of intelligence, intellectual abilities that develop from cultural context and learning experience; contrast with fluid abilities.

Cumulative (active) rehearsal: In memory research, type of rehearsal in which a person repeats the most recently presented word and then rehearses it with as many other different words as possible.

Cumulative deficit effect: The phenomenon by which multiple risks persisting over many years add up, resulting in children who display deficits in social, emotional, and cognitive functioning.

Declarative memory: Facts and events stored in the long-term memory, which come in two types: episodic and semantic memory; see also explicit memory; contrast with nondeclarative memory.

Deferred imitation: Imitation of a modeled act sometime after viewing the behavior.

Dual representation (dual encoding, dual orientation): The ability to represent an object simultaneously as the object itself and as a representation of something else.

Egocentrism: A view of the world where a child is less able to take the perspective of another and assumes that if they know something, so too do other people.

Emulation: A form of social learning that refers to understanding the goal of a model and engaging in similar behavior to achieve that goal, without necessarily reproducing the exact actions of the model.

Episodic memory: Long-term memory of events or episodes that can be consciously retrieved; contrast with semantic memory.

Executive functions: The processes involved in regulating attention and in determining what to do with information just gathered or retrieved from long-term memory. Includes the processes of working memory, inhibition, and switching.

Explicit memory: See declarative memory.

False-belief understanding: A child understands that another person does not possess knowledge that he or she possesses (that is, that other person holds a belief that is false).

Fluid abilities: In Cattell’s theory of intelligence, intellectual abilities that are biologically determined and reflected in tests of memory span and spatial thinking; contrast with crystallized abilities.

Flynn effect: The systematic increase in IQ scores (about 3 to 5 points per decade) observed over the 20th century.

Formal operational stage: In Piaget’s theory, the final stage of cognitive development (extending approximately between 11and 16 years), in which children are able to apply abstract logical rules.

g (Spearman’s g, general intelligence): In psychometric theory, the idea that intelligence can be expressed in terms of a single factor, general intelligence or g, first formulated by Spearman in the early 1900s.

Hypothetico-deductive reasoning: In Piaget’s theory, a formal operational ability to think hypothetically.

Imitation: A form of social learning in which the learner recognizes the model’s goal and uses the same behaviors as the model to attain this goal.

Implicit memory: See nondeclarative memory.

Infantile amnesia: The inability to remember events from infancy and early childhood.

Inhibition: The ability to prevent from making some cognitive or behavioral response.

Intelligence: Acting or thinking in ways that are goal-directed and adaptive.

Intentional agents: Beings whose behavior is based on what they know and what they want, and who act deliberately to achieve their goals.

IQ (intelligence quotient) tests: Tests, such as the Stanford-Binet and Wechsler scales, that are intended to measure aspects of intellectual functioning.

Learning: Changes in behavior over time due to experience, traditionally studied using operant and classical conditioning.

Limited capacity: The concept that one’s information processing ability is restricted (that people can only do so many things at any single time). Metaphors for capacity include mental space, mental energy or effort, and time.

Long-term store: In information-processing approaches to cognition, the large and presumably permanent repository of information in the brain.

Memory span: The number of items a person can hold in the short-term store, assessed by testing the number of (usually) unrelated items that can be recalled in exact order.

Multistore model: Theoretical model of how information from the outside world is moved through a series of stores, including the sensory register, the short-term store, and the long-term store.

Nondeclarative, (or procedural or implicit) memory: Knowledge in the long-term store of procedures that is unconscious; contrast with declarative memory.

Object permanence: The knowledge that objects have an existence in time and space independent of one’s own perception or action on those objects.

Overimitation: Imitating all of the model’s actions, including the actions that are irrelevant to attaining the goal.

Passive rehearsal: Style of rehearsing in which a person includes few (usually one) unique items per rehearsal set; contrast with cumulative rehearsal.

Preoperational stage: In Piaget’s theory, the second major stage of cognitive development (extending approximately between 2 and 7 years), characterized by symbolic but prelogical, intuitive thought.

Priming: A form of implicit memory in which the processing of a stimulus is facilitated as a result of prior exposure to it.

Principle of persistence: An idea by Baillargeon that infants enter the world with the idea that objects exist continuously and cohesively while retaining their individual properties.

Prospective memory: Remembering to do something in the future.

Representation: The mental encoding of information.

Representational insight: The knowledge that an entity can stand for something other than itself.

Resistance to interference: The ability to ignore irrelevant information so that it does not impede task performance; its inverse is interference sensitivity.

Reversibility: In Piaget’s theory, the knowledge that an operation can be reversed, characteristic of the concrete operational period.

Scaffolding: An expert, when instructing a novice, responding contingently to the novice’s responses in a learning situation, so that the novice gradually increases his or her understanding of a problem.

Semantic memory: Long-term memory representation of definitions and relations among language terms; contrast with episodic memory.

Sensorimotor stage: In Piaget’s theory, the first major stage of cognitive development (birth to approximately 2 years), in which children understand their world through sensory and motor experiences.

Sensory register: In the multistore model, the earliest memory store in which perceptually intact information is held for a brief period of time before the information is passed to the short-term store.

Shared attention (joint attention): Two people both attending to the same thing or event and sharing that experience.

Short-term store (primary memory, contents of consciousness): Memory store that can hold a limited amount of information for a matter of seconds; cognitive operations are executed in the short-term store and information can be maintained indefinitely in the short-term store through operations such as rehearsal; see also working memory.

Social cognition: Thinking about the self, other people, and social relationships.

Social referencing: Interpreting an uncertain or ambiguous event by attending to another’s emotional cues.

Sociocultural theory: A perspective of cognitive development that emphasizes that development is guided by adults interacting with children, with the cultural context determining to a large extent how, where, and when these interactions take place.

Spearman’s g: See g (general intelligence).

Stanford-Binet: Highly standardized IQ test. Also see IQ (intelligence quotient) tests.

Stereotype threat: Phenomenon in which minority members perform worse on IQ or other tests after being reminded of the negative stereotype concerning their groups’ performance on such tests.

Strategies: Goal-directed and deliberately implemented mental operations used to facilitate task performance.

Switching: A component of executive functions involving the ability to shift between sets of tasks or rules.

Symbolic function: In Piaget’s theory, the underling cognitive mechanism responsible for symbolic thinking during the preoperational stage, expressed through, imagery, symbolic play, deferred imitation, and language.

Symbolic (or fantasy) play: A type of play that appears between 15 and 18 months and includes counterfactual orientation to actions, objects, and people.

Theory of mind: A person’s concepts of mental activity; used to refer to how children conceptualize mental activity and how they attribute intention to and predict the behavior of others; see also belief-desire reasoning.

Tools of intellectual adaptation: Vygotsky’s term for tools a culture provides for thinking and problem solving.

Violation-of-expectation method: Based on habituation/dishabituation procedures, techniques in which increases in infants’ looking time are interpreted as reflecting a violation of an expected outcome.

Weshler scales: Highly standardized IQ tests. Also see IQ (intelligence quotient) tests.

Working memory: The capacity to store and transform information being held in the short-term system.

Zone of proximal development: In Vygotsky’s theory, the difference between a child’s actual level of ability and the level of ability that he or she can achieve when working under the guidance of an instructor.