Developmental Psychology in Memory

9 Key excerpts on "Developmental Psychology in Memory"

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  eBook - ePub

  AP® Psychology All Access Book + Online + Mobile

  • Nancy Fenton, Jessica Flitter, Jessica Flitter(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Research & Education Association

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 11 Developmental Psychology

  Developmental psychology focuses on the physical, cognitive, social, and moral development of humans that occurs across the lifespan from conception to death. Typically developmental psychologists examine these various changes at distinct periods in life, in particular, prenatal and newborn, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Developmental psychologists are ultimately attempting to answer questions about how we become who we are and how much of whom we are is related to nature and how much is influenced by nurture. In regard to developmental psychology, the term nature specifically references influences on development that are genetic or biological. Aspects of developmental change influenced by nature are often related to the process of maturation. Maturation includes the biological growth processes that enable changes in behavior. These growth processes are connected to an individual’s genetic blueprint, meaning that they are relatively uninfluenced by experience. The term nurture involves the influence of environmental factors on development, such as family, nutrition, culture, interactions with others, education, wealth, etc. Developmental psychologists agree that both nature and nurture contribute to physical, cognitive, social, and moral development in people.

  STUDY TIP

  Be able to describe how nature and nurture influence physical, cognitive, social, and moral development.

  Developmental Research Methods

  Developmental psychologists seek to understand how individuals develop over time and determine whether differences among age groups are related to changes in cognitive, emotional, or behavioral abilities; for example, if older children can remember longer lists of words than younger children. Because age cannot be manipulated (individuals cannot be randomly assigned to a particular age group), developmental research is often correlational.

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  Memory Development

  Universal Changes and Individual Differences

  • Franz E. Weinert, Marion Perlmutter(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Thus, study of the structures, processes, and functioning of the memory system continues to be a fundamental endeavor of cognitive psychology in the expectation that the findings will advance theoretical ideas and produce practical benefits. The study of memory development plays a significant role in this endeavor. Systematic observation of the ways in which changes in cognitive resources across the life span affect different types of memory performance is likely to encompass a greater range of phenomena than can be obtained in laboratory investigations with adult subjects. In addition, cross-cultural comparisons and training studies allow the investigation of the plasticity of human memory systems. Such studies have the particular value of providing a basis on which instructional treatments and teaching demands can be adjusted to the developmental levels achieved by the learners.

  Considering the volume of theoretical and experimental work in memory development during the past decades, it is at first glance surprising that the results of current research receive such disparate evaluations in the different chapters of this volume. Whereas some of the contributors note that significant progress has been made in our understanding of memory development (e.g., Borkowski et al., Pressley et al.), others tend to be more skeptical and critical. Thus Perlmutter (this volume) emphasizes that “present understanding of memory is limited by the restrictive focus on only a very special kind of memory, that is on deliberate memory of symbolic information over short time intervals in extremely sterile situations.” Similar deficits are noted by Paris, Ceci et al., Verdonik, and Dixon and Hertzog. In general, although these critiques do not deny that progress has been made within a number of research paradigms, they point to the narrow scope of current definitions of memory development and current methodological approaches. It is worthwhile to examine the progress and shortcomings a little more closely. To this end, I first discuss the highlights of current research on memory development, then attempt to clarify what memory research in developmental psychology really studies, and finally, draw some conclusions concerning the directions that future research should take.

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  Principles of Developmental Psychology

  An Introduction

  • George Butterworth(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  PART 1 History and Methods of Developmental Psychology Passage contains an image

  The origins of developmental psychology 1

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315799186-2

  Defining the subject

  Developmental psychology is concerned with the scientific understanding of age-related changes in experience and behaviour. Although most developmental theories have been specifically concerned with children, the ultimate aim is to provide an account of development throughout the lifespan. The task is to discover, describe, and explain how development occurs, from its earliest origins, into adult-hood and old age.

  Two strands of explanation are involved in developmental psychology. The discipline takes some of its inspiration from the biology of growth and evolution, but other aspects of explanation are concerned with the ways in which different cultures channel development. Explaining human development not only requires us to understand human nature—because development is a natural phenomenon—but also to consider the diverse effects that a particular society has on the developing child. In truth, development is as much a matter of the child acquiring a culture as it is a process of biological growth. Contemporary theories of development make the connection between nature and culture, albeit with varying emphases and, of course, with varying degrees of success.

  This book will examine modern approaches to human development with particular reference to children and their social, physical, and intellectual growth. Intellectual development is concerned with the origins and acquisition of thought and language. This field of study is known as cognitive development and it includes such important abilities as learning to read and write. Problems of cognitive development, for example mental retardation, or the effects of deafness or blindness on the child's understanding, also fall within this domain. Social development is concerned with the integration of the child into the social world, and explaining how the child acquires the values of the family and the wider society.

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  Memory Development Between Two and Twenty

  • Wolfgang Schneider, Michael Pressley(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER

  2

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF MEMORY DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH

  The aim of this book is to give an integrative introduction to theory and research on memory development from early childhood to early adulthood. Research on memory development has been stimulated by a shift in both experimental and developmental psychology away from behaviorist theories toward cognitive theories, a shift that emphasized information-processing considerations. The discovery of Piaget by American developmental psychology (Bruner, 1964; Flavell, 1963) also encouraged the cognitive “Zeitgeist” in developmental psychology (Ornstein, 1978). A “Symposium on Memory Development,” which posed the question “What actually develops?” (Flavell, 1971), was an additional stimulant.

  Whereas in 1965 the key word “memory” was not used in the index of Child Development Abstracts and Bibliography (Kail & Hagen, 1977a), every issue of that outlet now includes abstracts for a number of studies of memory. It would have been much easier to summarize this field two decades ago (Wimmer, 1976), with most of the important research programs covered comprehensively in a single edited volume (Kail & Hagen, 1977a). Since then, there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of research and the approaches taken by memory development researchers. For instance, although Flavell and Wellman (1977) summarized most of the existing metamemory research in a single chapter, Forrest-Pressley, MacKinnon, and Waller (1985a, 1985b) published two entire volumes about metacognition research programs, with much of the research focusing on metamemory. Since then, T. 0. Nelson’s (1992) volume of classic articles on metamemory and Metcalfe and Shinamura’s (1994) edited volume of original chapters about metamemory have appeared.

  Students and scholars not specializing in memory development could easily be overwhelmed by the quantity and diversity of this literature. Thus, a main purpose in writing a book about the highlights of memory development is to make accessible the most important ideas and research in this area. In doing so, we focus on what we view as the main components of the memory system, including short-term memory structures, memory strategies, metamemory, and the nonstrategic knowledge base. In what follows, separate chapters are dedicated to these main components, with interactions between components considered at appropriate places (e.g., strategy development as it relates to development of the nonstrategic knowledge base and to metamemory). The book concludes with chapters that focus on how the components function interactively and the challenge of improving memory through instructional development of components and their interactions. Before turning to recent research on memory development, however, we provide some history in this chapter.

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  Children's Thinking

  What Develops?

  • Robert Siegler(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  1977 , in press a). A general class of information-processing models, with their emphasis on routines controlled and regulated by an executive, seems suitable for describing the major psychological processes of interest in both domains. However, because our charge is to function under the memory development heading, we have decided to refocus our thinking from our usual position of regarding the problem-solving and memory people as those who study the same processes on different tasks. Instead, we have begun by looking for any interesting differences between the major emphases and accomplishments in one field that could intelligently aid the development of the other. There do appear to be some psychologically interesting differences, not only in the tasks and skills studied but in the depth of the analyses of those tasks and skills and in the commitment to addressing instructional goals. In the first part of this chapter we highlight some of these differences between the two approaches and try to illustrate a weakness in the current mainstream of memory-development research. In the second part we concentrate on an area of concern to both the problem-solving and memory-development literatures: self-regulation and control, our candidate for the most fundamental difference between the experienced and the naive. In the final section we indicate new problem areas and new ways of considering what it is that develops with age and experience.

  II Differences Between the Memory Development and Problem-Solving Approaches to Cognitive Development

  Because our task is to consider what memory theorists have to say about development, we approach the issue from the perspective of the memory-development literature. Studies of a few aspects of memory dominate the field at this time, at least in number if not in content. Before we address the issues central to such research, a brief history of the way developmental psychologists interested in memory have approached the question of “What develops?” is illustrative.

  A Early Studies

  Prior to the 1960s, the question “What develops?” would not have been raised. Obviously, memory develops. Lacking a fine-grained analysis of memory processes, early researchers selected tasks and age groups somewhat randomly. They found that on most tasks older children remembered more than younger ones, and slow learners had more difficulty remembering than those of average ability,! The predominant explanation, when one was offered at all, was that immature learners have a limited memory “capacity.” As they mature, this capacity increases, allowing them to retain more. The underlying metaphor, whether implicitly or explicitly stated, was of the mind as a container: Little people have little boxes or jars in their heads, and bigger people have bigger ones. Any demonstration of inferior performance on the part of the smaller person proved the capacity limitation “theory,” not surprisingly since such a theory was merely a restatement of the data (Chi, 1976). The same general state of affairs also characterized the problem-solving literature, where early studies also showed poor performance by young children on a variety of tasks. Explanations of why the young did poorly were either not forthcoming or involved a circular argument: Little people have little problem-solving capacity, a restatement of the data masquerading as a theoretical explanation.

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  Mechanisms of Everyday Cognition

  • James M. Puckett, Hayne W. Reese(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  IV Everyday Cognition Across the Life Span Passage contains an image

  7 The Contextual Nature of Earliest Memories

  Stephen J. CeciCornell University

  Helene HembrookeSUNY Binghamton

  There was a time when the study of infant and young children's memory was the purview of a small group of us who were doing basic research on the mnemonic processes that were developing over the first few years of life. The mid to late 1970s were the heyday of such research in terms of the quantity of studies that were conducted and subsequently published. During those years, we learned so much about the development of strategies, knowledge, and insights that some of us deluded ourselves into believing that the memory development riddle had been solved. As one indication of this, the reader can examine any of the three main developmental journals during that period (Child Development, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, and Developmental Psychology ) to verify that the late 1970s was the apogee of memory development publications. If one searches titles of published abstracts for key words that have to do with memory development (e.g., rehearsal, organization, eidetic imagery, LTM, STM, decay, reminiscence, strategies, trace, semantic knowledge, capacity differences), it is clear that this type of research peaked around the late 1970s. If we compare the number of articles that were concerned with memory development during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the unmistakable trend is one of declining frequency of published memory development articles, starting in 1983, but probably reflecting a decline in the conduct of such studies that began around the late 1970s—since it usually takes several years between the initiation of a study and its fruition as a journal article (see Fig.7.1 ).

  The cause for the decline in memory development research is not apparent in Fig. 7.1

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  The Handbook of Life-Span Development, Volume 1

  Cognition, Biology, and Methods

  • Richard M. Lerner, Willis F. Overton(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  In our treatment of factors that may influence strategy development, we have emphasized linkages between metamnemonic understanding and memory performance, and the importance of considering the assessment context and the goals that are operative in our diagnoses of the memory skills of children and adults. Although much remains to be learned about these topics, the basic questions are being asked by researchers. In contrast, we have devoted less attention to explorations of the developmental context in which memory skills are acquired and maintained. To some extent, this is because not a great deal of research has been devoted to these issues, and some of that which has been conducted does not speak directly to questions of strategy development. For example, although we now have suggestive evidence concerning the importance of the elementary school classroom for the emergence of verbally based strategies for remembering, additional research—both observational and experimental—is clearly needed. Moreover, the extant research on expertise and lifestyle as factors that may serve to maintain strategies in adulthood does strongly support a view of the importance of these key aspects of the context. Clearly, additional research needs to be carried out on those settings across the life span that serve to maintain the strategies that are acquired in childhood and adolescence.

  CONCLUSIONS

  The research summarized here indicates that much has been learned in recent years about the development of memory across the life span, but also that there are many gaps in our understanding. We have focused our efforts on the deliberate memory skills in children and older adults largely because developmentalists working with these age groups have devoted a great deal of attention to the development of memory strategies. We were motivated to attempt this integration, in part, because both cognitive developmentalists and cognitive psychologists interested in memory in older adults differentiate between explicit and implicit forms of remembering, and emphasize the key roles of capacity and underlying knowledge in their accounts of memory. However, in doing so, we are conscious of the limitations of our efforts at integration.

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  Child Development in a Life-Span Perspective

  • E. Mavis Hetherington, Richard M. Lerner, Marion Perlmutter(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  9    COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN LIFE-SPAN PERSPECTIVE: From Description of Differences to Explanation of Changes Marion Perlmutter University of Michigan ABSTRACT The purposes of this chapter are to articulate an agenda for cognitive developmentalists and to consider how well it is being met. It is suggested that cognitive developmentalists should be addressing two major questions: What are the ways that cognition changes with age? and What are the causes of this change? An overview of alternative approaches to the study of cognitive development is presented, and an integrative, three tier model, framed within a multidisciplinary perspective is forwarded. It is argued that research on cognitive development has made considerable progress with respect to describing the ways that cognition changes with age but has failed in explaining the causes of age change. Some conceptual reasons for the paucity of such information are discussed, and recommendations are made for the reconceptualization of research design, adoption of a life span perspective, and reassessment of assumptions. INTRODUCTION Cognition is a psychological construct that refers to all of mental life. It includes perception, memory, intelligence, reasoning, judgment, and decision making. It permits humans to represent and to think about the world, to conceptualize experience, to fantasize beyond experience, to maintain a sense of self, and to communicate with others. It expands individual competence and allows us to solve and to circumvent problems. Memory, for example, keeps track of events that have occurred in different times and distant places. Intellectual skills enable us to reflect upon experiences and to attach meaning and significance to them. As individuals, this ability gives us the power to anticipate and plan for the future, to develop strategies, to hypothesize alternatives, and to evaluate consequences

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  Habituation

  Perspectives from Child Development, Animal Behavior, and Neurophysiology

  • Thomas J. Tighe, Robert N. Leaton(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Ontogeny of memory: Recapitulation. There is clearly an urgent need to study the long-term retention of young animals over a wider range of species than represented in the literature. Nonetheless, the existing data, largely with juvenile rats, are strikingly consistent in demonstrating that young organisms remember less well than do adults. This relation has been observed in a variety of tasks including passive avoidance, active avoidance, escape, spatial avoidance, CER, and taste aversion. In general, the overall data strongly suggest that long-term memory for the events of infancy is either poor or nonexistent.

  DETERMINANTS OF THE DEVELOPMENTAL CHANGES IN LONG-TERM MEMORY

  The data reviewed above have shown that young animals of a number of species are deficient in long-term memory and that this memory impairment appears to be independent of the animals’ ability to learn. Apart from the inherent interest in this phenomenon as one with which we are all familiar, often described as infantile amnesia, it provides a scientific challenge, the solution of which may yield significant insights into the basic mechanisms of memory storage and retrieval.

  We have arbitrarily categorized the processes known to influence memory storage and retrieval as “psychological” and “neurological.” The two categories are clearly not mutually exclusive since both undoubtedly underlie each other and interact as they contribute to any behavioral phenomenon. At this stage of scientific evolution the relative contribution of these two kinds of processes to the poor memory of infancy is not understood. We shall describe below what little is known about the determinants of this phenomenon and speculate about the possible mechanisms that may underlie it.

  Psychological Processes

  These processes are dependent upon an organism’s interaction with its external environment and can be viewed as resulting from “experience.” They can be observed at any age but may be aggravated by the events which occur during development.

  Retroactive and proactive interference

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