COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

1. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT • Does the brain “shrink” with age? • Does memory deteriorate with age? • Can you “teach an old dog new tricks”? • Does intelligence decline with age? Implications for: • jobs • educational opportunities • social status

2. Chapter 6: Attention and Perceptual Processing • Chapter 7: Memory • Chapter 8: Intelligence • Chapter 9: Social Cognition (pp. 317-334)

3. Attention and Perceptual Processing: The Information Processing Model • Basic tenets: • We are active processors. • We process quantitative and qualitative information. • Information is processed through a series of stores or systems.

4. 1st system: sensory memory • Brain’s door to outside world: • New, incoming information first picked up: • sounds, sights, smells, etc. • Very fast but fleeting: • if not attended to, it vanishes from consciousness What determines what is attended to? • Attentional processes: • selective attention: what we attend to gets passed to the next store or system, what we don’t attend to disappears • important feature, as there is too much sensory input around us

5. Attentional processes (Cont’d): • selectivity determined by motivation, interest, previous cues, state of mind, expectations, previous experience, etc. • divided attention: ability to pay attention to more than one thing at the same time, e.g. study and listen to music. More common than we realize in daily life. • sustained attention: focus on task or object for a long time, e.g., waiting for appropriate highway sign to appear. • switching attention: back and forth between two or more items, e.g., looking out the windshield, then the side mirrors, then the rearview mirror, back to the windshield. • Some age differences found in complex tasks. Practice helps, as well as cues.

6. Caveat: • most recent tests of attentional factors, and many other cognitive features, are done using stimuli on computer screens. Younger people much more used to computers. • The fitness factor: • older adults perform better if they exercise regularly.

7. Age differences in processing: • Young adults more likely to exhibit the automatic attention response in laboratory tasks. • This is when a previously learned stimulus automatically gets your attention, it “jumps out” at you from a jumble of other stimuli. • Possible explanation: • general slowing of neural transmissions in older adults. This is known as:

8. Age differences in processing (Cont’d): • Speed of processing: • in order to react to a stimulus, we must process it first: what does it mean? Do we need to respond? And if yes, how? And then produce the response. Attention and memory involved. • Speed of processing tested with reaction time tasks. Three types: • simple RT tasks: one stimulus • choice RT tasks: more than one stimulus • complex RT tasks: many decisions for many complex tasks

9. Age differences in processing (Cont’d): • Simple: • older adults take longer on the cognitive step, not on the motor step (response). • Choice: • different Rs needed for each S. Older adults slower. • Complex: • e.g. driving. Older adults progressively worse as complexity increases. • Possible causes of slower processing: • changes in the neurons and synapses (neural circuits) • In everyday life, older adults have compensations: experience at a specific task (see text: typists, race car drivers)

10. Language Processing: • Important for understanding information processing. • Language comprehension related to sensory capabilities (hearing, vision) • Older adults have more difficulty when • speed increases • there is background noise or interfering sounds • Importance of encoding for language processing: rich encoding: connecting a word to other known words or facts.

11. Language Processing (Cont’d): • Because one’s language is so well encoded, no significant age differences have been found. Research results sometimes conflicting. Read studies as examples for comprehension, but no need to learn thoroughly.