Operant conditioning

• Rovee-Collier's study involving operant conditiong of a positive reinforcement (invovling a mobile) shows that babies are able to positively ecall and engage the positive reinformcent (making the mobile jinggle).
• her research showed that 2-month-olds can retain information for up to 2 days.

Object search

• looking behaviour of infants from 'A-not-B' Errors is indicative of memory.
• A-not-B errors is the tendency for Infants to search for the object in the place they last found it, and not where they most recently saw it being hidden

Habituation

• Habituation—learning not to respond to a repeated stimulus— might be thought of as learning to be bored by familiar stimulus.
• Newborn prefer a new stimulus to something they have to experience many times

Imitation techniques

• infants as young as 6 months display deferred imitation, the ability to imitate a novel act after a delay, which clearly requires memory ability and represents an early form of explicit or declarative memory

Problem solving

• Problem solving involves using our information-processing system to reach a goal or make a decision.
• In Willat’s study, infants had to pull on a cloth in order to drag an interesting object towards them
  
  • 6-month-olds could not perform the task, but 9-month-olds were able to
  • By 14 months, infants recognise that adults are useful sources of information and assistance in problem solving
  • They increasingly solicit help from adults (think about Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development)

Encoding of information improves over the first several years of life as the prefrontal cortex and medial temporal lobes mature.

Speed of mental processes improves with age, as neurons become myelinated. This allows older children and adults to simultaneously perform more mental operations in working memory than young

The basic capacities of the sensory register and longterm memory do not change much with age. There are, however, improvements in operating speed and efficiency of working memory, which includes improvements in the encoding and consolidation processes through which memories are processed for long-term storage

• Perseveration errors decline by age 4
• Perseveration error is the continued use of a strategy that was successful in the past despite the strategy’s current lack of success
• E.g. If a favourite toy was found under the sofa previously, the child looks under the sofa again the next time the toy goes missing

• Children increase their use of rehearsal strategy—the repeating of items they are trying to learn and remember

• Children master organisation from around 9-10 years of age. That is, the classifying of items into meaningful groups

• Finally, the child adopts elaboration strategy which involves actively creating meaningful links between items to be remembered.
• Elaboration is achieved by adding something to the items, in the form of either words or images

Children then transition to production deficiency – children can use strategies they are taught but cannot produce them on their own.

The third phase is the utilisation deficiency; children can produce a
strategy, but its use does not benefit task performance (i.e.their mental capacity is fully engaged in memory and cannot actively engage in task-switching which may also be a requirement to complete certain tasks)

Initially, children experience mediation deficiency – cannot spontaneously use or benefit from strategies, even if taught how to use them

In the final stage, children can produce and benefit from using a memory
strategy

• Meta-memory Knowledge of memory and understanding how to monitor, engage and regulate memory processes.
• metamemory is one
  aspect of metacognition.
• E.g. Knowing one’s own memory limits, which memory strategies are more or less effective, what type of memory tasks are more or less difficult

• During childhood, children’s knowledge base, or their knowledge content develops and expands:
  
  • can be accelerated through Expertise allows children to form more and larger mental chunks, which allows them to remember more.
    

Rule assessment approach

• According to Siegler's rule assessment approach, children assess the given problem and information and then formulate rules to tackle problems.
• In this perspective, children fail to solve problems because they fail to encode all the critical aspects of the problem and are guided by faulty rules.

Overlapping waves theory

• Rather than picturing development as a series of stages resembling stair steps, Siegler argues, we should picture it as overlapping waves.
• Children’s selection and use of problem-solving strategies become more efficient with experience.
• They reduce the use of less-adaptive strategies, increase the use of more-adaptive strategies and New strategies may also emerge

Script or (GERs)general event representations

• Scripts or GERs represent the typical, general sequence of actions related to an event and guide future behaviours in similar settings.
• Constructed out of daily routine.
• Scripts affect how children form memories of new experiences as well as how they recall past events.
• For example, when presented with information inconsistent with their scripts, preschoolers may misremember the information so that it better fits their script