Cognition Development: Childhood and Beyond

Cognition Development: Childhood and Beyond

1. (Stage 3) Concrete Operational Period: 7-11 years old

   • Concrete Operational Thought: Allows logical operations with concrete objects and events, as long as only two dimensions of a problem are to be considered.
     • Piaget's Conservation Task

2. (Stage 4) Formal Operational Period: 11 years through adulthood

   • Formal Operational Period
     • Can be about abstract objects and events.
     • Future-oriented thinking
     • Systematic consideration of all logical relations within a problem, reasoning about more than two dimensions
     • Deductive Reasoning
       • Moves from general premises, to a specific instance of that premise, followed by a conclusion. If the premises are true, the conclusion must logically flow.
     • Logical Syllogism
       • Far North, there's always snow and bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North and there's always snow. What colour are the bears there?
         • Luria (1930/1976)
           • We always speak of what we see; we don't talk about what we haven't seen
     • Inductive Reasoning
       • Reasoning from a specific observation to a general rule.
       • Ability to understand novel concepts and logical relationships. Note: Piaget suggested this begins to emerge in Stage 3 and established in Stage 4.
       • Discovering explanations for a set of facts by weighing evidence in favour of a hypothesis that asserts something about the entire set of facts.
       • Combination of chemicals problems
         • Which combinations of chemicals will turn the mixture yellow?
           • Young children take an unsystematic approach and characterized by repetition. Adolescents are more systematic and try out 2-, 3- and 4- chemical combinations.
       • Gopnik et al. (2001)
         • 16-24 months realized that both A and B are needed to activate the detector.
       • Xu & Garcia (2008)
         • Experimenter sit in front of infants, reach into a box and takes out ping pong balls, some is red and some is white. 4 red taken out 1 white taken out. When you open the box, there should be more red ping pong balls (expected condition). There is more white ping pong balls (unexpected conditions). 8 month olds look longer at unexpected condition as compared to the expected condition. Even 8 month olds have the ability to use inductive reasoning.

3. Cattell-Horn theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence

   • General intelligence is actually a collection of perhaps 100 abilities working together to bring out different intelligences. Varies across people.
   • Fluid Intelligence
     • Fluid abilities drive the individual's ability to: think and act quickly, solve novel problems, encode short-term memories
     • source of intelligence that an individual uses when he doesn't already know what to do.
     • Grounded in physiological efficiency, thus relatively independent of education and acculturation. It is reasoning, abstract thinking, problem-solving about novel concepts and relationships.
     • Generally declines with age. But mature adults become increasingly competent. With increasing experience, information processing and fluid thinking become dedicated to specific knowledge systems (encapsulation). Existing knowledge is refined and can be applied in flexible ways to real-life situations. Usually automatic, intuitive.
   • Crystallized Intelligence
     • Stems from learning an acculturation, reflected in: tests of knowledge and general information, use of language (vocabulary), wide variety of acquired skills.
     • Personality factors, motivation, educational and cultural opportunity are central to its development. Only indirectly dependent on the physiological influences that mainly affect fluid abilities.
   • Age changes in intelligences
     • Cornelius and Capsi (1987)
       • Cross-sectional study on US community sample. Groups equivalent in formal education.
       • Tests: Crystallized intelligence (Verbal comprehension), Fluid intelligence (letter series tests), everyday problem solving.
       • Results: Fluid intelligences decreases with age. Crystallized intelligence and everyday problem solving increases with age.
     • Training cognitive skills in the elderly
       • Tests alternative theories of decline in cognitive performance with age. Irreversible decrement model of aging (decline directly reflects underlying effects of physical aging), decline at least partly reflects pattern of disuse.
       • Personal and societal benefits of remediation of at least part of age-related cognitive decline.
       • Schaie's training study (1996)
         • Participants: 63+ (in 1983) tested every 7 years.
         • Classed as stable or declined in relation to two tests of fluid intelligence: Inductive reasoning (letter, number and word-series tests) and spatial orientation (mental manipulation of 2-D spatial configurations).
         • Training: Five one-hour sessions. Results: transfer effects are limited to tests of the skills that were specifically trained. Did not reflect the effects of additional attention and novelty of study (Hawthorne effect).
         • Those who had shown decline previously, training returned performance to original levels; for those who were stable, training improved performance.

4. Good days vs bad days

   • Moment-to-moment fluctuations in cognitive performance are sizable. (Rabbit, Osman, Moore & Stollery, 2001)
   • Schmiedek, Lövdén & Lindenberger (2013)
     • Younger/older adults worked on a battery of computerized cognitive tasks measuring the abilities of working memory, episodic memory and perceptual speed on an average of 100 daily occasions (looked to see whether day-to-day variability or moment-to-moment variability has the most influence on abilities.
     • Day-to-day variability in cognitive performance reliably exists across a wide range of tasks representing broad cognitive abilities. However, day-to-day fluctuations contribute less to observed variability in performance than do moment-to-moment fluctuations.
     • Bad day may actually be a series of bad moments.
     • Older participants showed less fluctuation in performance at both levels. Maybe because of setting lower goals regarding performance levels, more stable levels of motivation, lifestyles/circumstances characterized by fewer stressful events and a lesser need to cognitively self-regulate.
   • Desptite having lower average levels of performance, older adults maintain more stable day-to-day levels of performance than younger adults. Good for many vocational, voluntary and leisure settings.

5. Formal vs post-formal thought

   • Post-formal thought
     • flexible, open, adaptive, individualistic, and reliant on intuition as well as logic. Able to deal with uncertainty, inconsistency, contradiction, imperfection and compromise. Often stimulated by experiences that open up the possibility of looking at things in unaccustomed ways. No particular age at which it is attained, usually early adulthood.
   • Formal operational thought
     • Polarized thinking: excellent in relation to structured problems with single solutions.
     • Not as good in more complicated dilemmas. Can be seen in social/emotional clashes (blame the other person vs accept some responsibility).
   • Understanding social dilemmas (Blanchard-Fields, 1986)
     • Three Accounts of conflict: fictional war between North and South Livia, Teenager's unwilling visit to his grandparents, couple faced with unwanted pregnancy.
     • Task: say what each conflict was about and answer questions including who is at fault, who won or lost, how the conflict was resolved, if the two accounts differed significantly/could be reconciled.
     • Results: Middle adults had the best probed reasoning.

6. IQ tests

   • Good at measuring certain mental faculties, including logic, abstract reasoning, learning ability and working-memory capacity (how much info you can hold in mind). But don't necessarily measure those abilities crucial to making good judgements in real-life situations.

7. Post-formal thought and wisdom

   • The highest levels of post-formal thought are in some ways similar to wisdom (but not equivalent).
   • Wisdom
     • Expert knowledge about fundamental life matters (Smith & Baltes, 1990)
     • Capacity for acknowledging other people's point of view, appreciation of contexts broader than the issue at hand, sensitivity to the possibility of change in social relations, acknowledgement of the likelihood of multiple outcomes of a social conflict, concern with conflict resolution and preference for compromise.
     • Wisdom and age
       • No correlation between wisdom and age, rather reflects individual and specific life experience.
       • Older Americans make greater use of wise-reasoning schemas in response to social conflicts than do young and middle-aged Americans (Grossmann et al., 2010)
       • Grossman et al., 2010
         • Japanese vs American use of wise-reasoning schemas. Three age groups (Younger, middle-aged, older adults).
           • Intelligence measure: Comprehension and vocabulary subtests of the WAIS, dot matching and pattern matching. (Fluid intelligence)
           • Wisdom measure: read three newspaper articles describing an intergroup conflict and reasoning about interpersonal conflicts among close others.
           • Results: Japanese culture encourages interpersonal harmony, gain wisdom about social conflict and its avoidance earlier than Americans do.