Early Childhood Cognitive Development: Information Processing

1. Early Childhood Cognitive Development: Information Processing HPW 3C1 Living and Working with Children Mrs. Filinov

2. Information Processing • Is another way of examining and understanding how children develop cognitively. • This model, developed in the 1960's and 1970's, conceptualizes children's mental processes through the metaphor of a computer processing, encoding, storing, and decoding data. • By ages 2 to 5 years, most children have developed the skills to focus attention for extended periods, recognize previously encountered information, recall old information, and reconstruct it in the present. • For example, a 4-year-old can remember what she did at Christmas and tell her friend about it when she returns to preschool after the holiday. • Between the ages of 2 and 5, long-term memory also begins to form, which is why most people cannot remember anything in their childhood prior to age 2 or 3.

3. Part of long-term memory involves storing information about the sequence of events during familiar situations as "scripts". • Scripts help children understand, interpret, and predict what will happen in future scenarios. • For example, children understand that a visit to the grocery store involves a specific sequences of steps: Dad walks into the store, gets a grocery cart, selects items from the shelves, waits in the check-out line, pays for the groceries, and then loads them into the car. • Children ages 2 through 5 also start to recognize that are often multiple ways to solve a problem and can brainstorm different (though sometimes primitive) solutions.

4. Between the ages of 5 and 7, children learn how to focus and use their cognitive abilities for specific purposes. • For example, children can learn to pay attention to and memorize lists of words or facts. • This skill is obviously crucial for children starting school who need to learn new information, retain it and produce it for tests and other academic activities. • Children this age have also developed a larger overall capacity to process information. This expanding information processing capacity allows young children to make connections between old and new information. • For example, children can use their knowledge of the alphabet and letter sounds (phonics) to start sounding out and reading words. During this age, children's knowledge base also continues to grow and become better organized.

5. Metacognition, "the ability to think about thinking", is another important cognitive skill that develops during early childhood. • Between ages 2 and 5 years, young children realize that they use their brains to think. • By ages 5 to 7 years, children realize they can actively control their brains, and influence their ability to process and to accomplish mental tasks. • As a result, school-age children start to develop and choose specific strategies for approaching a given learning task, monitor their comprehension of information, and evaluate their progress toward completing a learning task. • For example, first graders learn to use a number line (or counting on their fingers) when they realize that they forgot the answer to an addition or subtraction problem. • Similarly, children who are learning to read can start to identify words (i.e., "sight words") that cannot be sounded out using phonics (e.g, connecting sounds with letters), and must be memorized.

6. How Language is Processed in the Brain • Language has existed for about two million years, but it is only in the last 150 that we have begun to understand what happens when we listen and speak. • Language is uniquely human. But have you ever stopped to think what happens in your brain when someone speaks to you? How you process words, and how you form a response? • Language processing is a vastly complicated affair that, in truth, scientists are light years from fully understanding.

7. the discovery of the two epicenters of language processing Broca and Wernicke • In 1861, neurosurgeon Paul Broca found that patients with speech defects had injuries on the left hemisphere of the brain. • The idea that language is processed in the left hemisphere was born, and the area he discovered was named Broca's area, thought for years to be solely responsible for speech production. • A decade later, neurologist Carl Wernicke discovered an area to the rear of the left hemisphere, now called Wernicke's area that he linked with processing the words we hear. • Broca's area and Wernicke's area are linked by a bundle of nerve fibers called the arcuate fasciculus.

8. Working Theory • From these discoveries came the classic model of language processing: • Sounds are processed by the auditory cortex, go then to Wernicke's area to be understood, travel along the arcuate fasciculus to Broca's area, and the motor cortex, finally resulting in speech- And all this is done in the left hemisphere. Straightforward. • All the areas of the brain are activated simultaneously during language processing. Plus, although each area has its own specialty, they all pitch in and help out with different language processes. • As no other animal has a speech system like ours, scientists were limited to studying the effects of disease and damage on language production for decades.

9. Technological Help Here is a recent sample of the role of technology in helping us to decipher how the brain processes language. • In 2008, researchers used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a non-invasive imaging technique, and found that the arcuate fasciculus in humans is much larger and projects further than it does in monkeys, leading them to hypothesize that we may have language while other creatures don't because our brains are simply better connected. • In 2009, San Diego researchers used Intra-Cranial Electrophysiology (ICE), where electrodes are placed on the brain, to show that Broca's area is involved in both hearing and producing speech, not just production as had been previously thought. • In 2011, New York University researchers used magnetoencephalography, (MEG) where coils are attached to the head to measure magnetic fields produced by the brain's electrical activity. They found that while processing simple two word phrases, neither Broca's or Wernicke's areas are involved. Rather, the left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) showed increased activity. • And that is just a minute slice of the tireless research currently being undertaken. Despite all the uncertainties and changing theories, there have been some irrefutable discoveries that tell us how different people process language in different ways.

10. Left Hemisphere Dominance? • Numerous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have shown that the left hemisphere is dominant for language processing in around 96% of people, not 100% as Broca originally thought. • Still, he based this theory on the examination of just eight patients, which would be unheard of today. • In the remaining 4%, the right hemisphere is dominant. • There is no known reason for why one particular hemisphere dominates language processing.

11. One Hemisphere Only? • A second long-held belief about how we process language is that it takes place in one hemisphere only. However, a review of 23 neuroimaging studies by the University of Leipzig in 2008 concluded that this is not the case. • It is now accepted that while the dominant hemisphere is responsible for the nuts and bolts of language processing, the "minor" hemisphere helps interpret tone, nuance, metaphors and so on.

13. Male vs. Female • We may have long suspected it, but science has proven that men and women are on different wavelengths. • A 2000 study by the Indiana School of Medicine is just one of a raft of fMRI studies showing that men and women listen differently. The study found that men use the dominant hemisphere (usually left) to listen, while women use both hemispheres. • In addition, a 1997 study by the University of Sydney found that Broca's area and Wernicke's area, those two powerhouses of language, are significantly bigger in women than in men, by up to 20%. • These differences may partly explain the statistics indicating that women are more likely to have better developed language skills than men.

14. Bilingual vs. Monolingual • Scientists used to think that learning a second language could only be done at the expense of the first, like there was a finite number of neurons in the brain assigned for language. Now, thanks to human research and fMRI, this belief has been debunked.