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Cognitive Development I ((Infancy
Short attention span, 2-3 years old
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Cognitive Development I
Naturalist Methods
- Diary studies & parental reports: Parents who have time to record child behaviour may also be changing the developmental conditions
- Observation
- Audio- and video-tape
Controlled Methods
- Head-turning, looking & gaze
- Cardiac deceleration
- High amplitude sucking
- Operant conditioning
- Imitation
Challenges to studying learning and memory in infants (Hayne, 2004):
- Preverbal nature of human infants
- Rapid development within infancy
- Immature motor skills
- Rapid shifts in behavioural states
Infant AttentionInfant’s attention is attracted by the same things that attract adult’s attention (flashing lights, peripheral motion, noise, novel stimuli)
- 2-day olds prefer to look at (pay more attention to) faces than to other visual patterns Suggests that infants are born with certain visual preferences
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2-3 years old
- Sharply increasing span
- Prefrontal cortex
continues to mature
- Allows for complex
play
- Scaffolded by others
- Begins to be more selective
Middle childhood
- Gradually more selective
- Can pick out what is relevant to focus on
- This improves a lot 6-10
- Also more able to adapt and control attention
- Switch and select strategies
- This is made possible by inhibition (ability to control attention in the presence of distracting stimuli)
Infantile amnesia: difficulty experienced by most people when attempting to recall memories from infancy/early childhood
- The average age of the earliest memory reported is 3.5 years
Understanding age-related changes in memory can help to account for the existence and offset of infantile amnesiaIn addition to memory, there are other important factors to account of infantile amnesia e.g., development of a sense of self, culture, language development, brain development
Visual recognition memory procedures (paired comparison tasks): In the paired-comparison task, infants are initially exposed to a particular stimulus for a fixed duration or until they have accumulated a specified amount of time looking at that stimulus. Following this familiarization period, infants are then tested with two stimuli that are presented simultaneously. One of the test stimuli was present during the familiarization period and the other stimulus is novel. The proportion of time that the infants spend looking at the familiar and the novel stimulus is assessed during this test period. When this task is used to study memory, a delay is inserted between the end of the familiarization trial and the beginning of the test.
Familiarization: presentation of a stimulus; duration fixed or infant-controlled
Test (novelty preference): presentation of
familiarization stimulus plus novel stimulus
Memory measure: novelty preference (=looking to
novel vs. familiar stimulus)
Mobile conjugate reinforcement
Without exception, the operant procedure that has been used most widely to assess infant memory is the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm.
In the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm, infants learn to kick their feet to produce movement in an overhead mobile. Mobile movement is made possible by a length of ribbon that is secured to the infant’s ankle and to a flexible stand that supports the mobile. The original task was designed for use with 2- and 3-month-old infants, however, subsequent modifications of the procedure have rendered it appropriate for infants as old as 6–7 months.
Non-reinforcement period (baseline): Assessing infants’ spontaneous rate of kicking
Reinforcement period/training: Kicking causes the mobile to move
Test: Period of non-reinforcement
Memory measure: Kick rate during test relative to kick rate during baseline
High amplitude suckingIn the high-amplitude sucking procedure, infants suck on a nipple to produce visual, auditory, or gustatory consequencesSucking at a certain speed/frequencyproduces a positive outcomeMemory measure: How much does the infant work for a familiar reinforcer in comparison to a novel one? Remember from Psyc103?
Pregnant women were asked to read a story aloud to their unborn child twice a day for the last ~ 6 weeks of pregnancy Shortly after birth, newborns could “chose” to listen to the familiar story or an unfamiliar story The newborns showed a preference for the familiar story
- Auditory information experienced before birth influenced behaviour after birth
Deferred imitation paradigms
In the deferred imitation paradigm, an experimenter demonstrates a novel action using an unfamiliar object. The infant’s ability to reproduce that action is assessed during a test that occurs either immediately or after delays ranging from 1 day to 4 months
Demonstration: A model demonstrates target actions (with objects)
Test: Assessment of infants’ reproduction of target actions after a delay
Baseline control condition: Infants’ spontaneous production of target actions is assessed at test
Memory measure: Do infants in the demonstration condition(s) perform significantly more actions than infants in the baseline condition?
Methods used to establish which memory system is assessed by a specific task:
- Amnesia filter (Can patients with damage to the hippocampal formation solve the task?)
.
- Parameter filter (Which independent variables influence performance in the task?)
Using these filters, deferred imitation, VRM and operant conditioning pass as methods to assess (some form of)
declarative memory
- With increasing age, infants encode new information faster
.
- With increasing age, infants remember new information for longer
.
- With increasing age, infants’ memories become more flexible (young infants’ memory retrieval is characterized by a very high degree of encoding specificity)
With increasing age, infants show impressive progress at different stages of memory processing:Encoding: Older infants learn faster
Storage: Older infants remember longer
Retrieval: Older infants memories are more flexible
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