Life Span Development

Week 5, Chapter 6
Realms of Cognition in Middle Childhood

Brain and Behavior

Changes in the brain enable and are affected by cognitive and motor developments. In
middle childhood, continuing brain growth is partially a function of ongoing myelination. Both
gross motor and fine motor coordination benefit from continued myelination of the corpus
callosum, connecting the left and right cortical hemispheres, and the cerebellum, as well as other
brain maturation processes.
Some differences in cognitive and behavioral development among children are related to
differences in brain development. For example, in about half of children diagnosed with ADHD,
brain growth is delayed, especially in the frontal lobes, although most catch up by adolescence or
early adulthood. Unevenness in brain development, both between and within children, is to be
expected.

Cognitive Development
Piaget’s theory, children at the concrete operational stage (6 to 12 years) can decenter or think
about more than one dimension or aspect of a situation at one time. Enabling them to:
 Recognize or construct the relationships among the dimensions -
Important for logical thinking.
 Understand reversible relationships, when one change reverses the
effects of another, or one change compensates for the effects of another
- especially important.
 Recognize the nature of the relationships among features of an event
making it possible for children to infer underlying realities.

Concrete Operational Stage

 children’s thinking is most logical when they are solving problems that relate to real,
concrete events.
 They find it difficult to think logically about abstract contents, like their own thought
processes.
 They find it difficult to distinguish between their own theories or assumptions and
objective fact.
Whether or not children are able to solve a problem logically in middle childhood
depends on factors such as the materials or context of the problems. When children have a great
deal of experience with a specific domain of knowledge (expertise), they are more likely to think
logically about problems in that domain.
Information Processing Approach
 Cognition is compared to the functioning of a computer.
 The organization of the cognitive system stays the same across age, but there are age
changes in the amount and efficiency of information flow.
 “Top-down” processes engage executive functions. They require focused attention and
effort.
 “Bottom-up” processes seem to bypass executive functions, not requiring conscious
effort to occur.
 With increasing age, executive functions improve, including control of emotions,
attention, and problem solving.
 The pace of improvement varies across cultures, depending on parents’ socialization
practices.

NeoPiagetians
 Theorists who try to integrate concepts from Piaget’s theory and from information
processing theory to explain cognitive development. They are constructivists.

Theory theorists
 Assume that children form theories about the physical, biological, and social world from
infancy. They are constructivists.

Memory
Two Kinds of Remembering or Retrieval
 Recognition - Realizing that information being experienced now is familiar.
 Recall - Drawing information out of long-term memory and representing it to yourself.

Memories store declarative knowledge

 Semantic - Facts and concepts
 Episodic - Events we have experienced
A Script
 A schematic representation of a frequently experienced event.

Memories Store Nondeclarative Knowledge

 Hard to verbalize
 Often referred to as procedural – “Knowing how” rather than “knowing that.”
 Infants’ and toddlers’ knowledge is largely nondeclarative.
Working memory (an executive function) increases in capacity with age, as indicated on
digit span tests. This seems to be partly a result of faster information processing, perhaps due to
practice, perhaps to maturation, or to both.

Children’s Knowledge Base

 Increases with age
 Helps children reconstruct events.
 They “remember” more accurately because they can infer what must have happened.

An Expanded Knowledge Base

 Helps children learn new information more easily because they can fit the new
information into a well-organized base of knowledge.
 Having an expanded knowledge base also benefits chunking in working memory.

Improving Memory
 Advances in logical thinking can help children improve their memories. The better the
child understands the original experience, the more likely they are to reconstruct it
accurately.
 Increasing facility with language helps children store memories for events in coherent
verbal form and seems to improve later retrieval of those events.
Children improve in the use of memory strategies overtime from preschool through
middle school. Rehearsal is an early strategy. More effective strategies such as organization
come later. Progress in strategy use is bumpy. Children may exhibit production deficiencies or
utilization deficiencies.
Children’s understanding of their own cognitive processes (metacognition) gradually
improves, including memory abilities (metamemory), as they approach the end of middle
childhood, partly accounting for improvements in strategy use with age.
Memory is influenced by social developments, like motivation to learn and the amount of
scaffolding available from adults.
 Schooling is where a great deal of adult
scaffolding of cognitive development occurs.
Many factors contribute to children’s academic
success at the country/culture level, the school
level, and the proximal, teacher–child interaction
level. These factors impact each other’s effects,
so that some factors matter more or less
depending on the presence of other factors.

Effective educational factors three categories:

 Quantity (amount of instruction/practice),
 Stimulation/engagement,
 Valuing (of learning and the learner).

Teacher factors that contribute to effective teaching

 Warmth
 Demandingness (high expectations)
 A “growth” mindset - see intelligence as malleable, more likely to be demanding
regardless of past performance.
 An “ability” mindset - see intelligence as a fixed, less challenge to those they expect to be
poor performers.

Types of proximal, teacher–child interaction processes that matter

 Begin school with informal skills, such as adopting simple counting strategies.
 Invent their own strategies while learning formal procedures and strategies as taught.
 Gradually, more efficient strategies win out.

Helping children build a knowledge base of memorized math facts and procedures is
useful but must be accompanied by support for conceptual understanding. Children assimilate
formal procedures to their own concepts, and often misunderstand. Teachers can encourage
mathematical development by exploring their students’ understanding and by working forward
from what children already understand, such as by providing familiar examples of concepts or
familiar analogies to more difficult concepts.

Children learn other academic skills via similar processes. For example, learning to read
requires strong verbal language skills, such as phonological awareness and a good vocabulary.
Teachers need to assess these skills and work forward from the child’s current capacities.

Social Cognition
Learning about social interactions, including how to make and keep friends, and
acquiring a theory of mind begins in early childhood and is heavily dependent on cognitive
developments. For example, children’s perspective taking improves as they acquire the ability to
think about their own mental experiences and those of another person at the same time. Growth
of executive functions, especially working memory capacity, makes an important contribution.
Advances in perspective taking are also a function of experience in social interactions, with
parents, siblings, and peers.

In Selman’s five-stage theory of friendship development,

improvements in perspective taking affect:
 Friendship understanding
 Influence friendship
valuing
 Affect social skills
 Affect conflict resolution skills
In Selman’s view, a mature interpersonal
orientation balances intimacy and autonomy
strivings. Less effective orientations may be other-
transforming or self-transforming and are more
characteristic of very young children and of socially
immature older children.
Both a bully and a victim may be at a similar developmental level regarding perspective
taking skill.
Assessing the properties of understanding that underlie relationship skill is a helpful
approach to addressing social problems.

References
Broderick, P. C., & Blewitt, P. (2019). The life span: Human development for helping
 professionals. (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Allyn & Bacon.
Vocabulary

Basic trust versus mistrust

When the balance of care is sympathetic and loving, the psychological conflict of the first year,
is resolved on the positive side

Autonomy versus shame and doubt

Is resolved favorably when parents provide young children with suitable guidance and
reasonable choices

Basic emotions
Happiness, interest, surprise, fear, anger, sadness and disgust - are universal in humans and other
primates and have a long evolutionary history of promoting survival

Social smile
Between ages 6 and 10 weeks, the parents communication evokes a broad grin

Stranger anxiety
But the most frequent expression of fear is to unfamiliar adults

Secure base
Babies use the familiar caregiver as this, or point from which to explore, venturing into the
environment and then returning for emotional support

Social referencing
Actively seeking emotional information from a trusted person in an uncertain situation

Self-conscious emotions
Humans are capable of a second higher-order set of feelings, including guilt, shame,
embarrassment, envy, and pride. They are called this because each involves injury to or
enhancements of our sense of self

Emotional self regulation

Refers to the strategies we use to adjust our emotional state to a comfortable level of intensity so
we can accomplish our goals
Temperament
Early-appearing, stable individual differences in reactivity and self-regulation. Reactivity refers
to quickness and intensity of emotional arousal, attention, and mother activity. Self-regulation as
we have seen, refers to strategies that modify the reactivity

Easy child
(40 percent of the sample) quickly establishes regular routines in infancy, is generally cheerful,
and adapts easily to new experiences

difficult child
(10 percent of the sample) is irregular in daily routines, is slow to accept new experiences, and
tends to react negatively and intensely

slow-to-warm-up child
(15 percent of the sample) is inactive, shows mild, low-key reactions to environmental stimuli, is
negative in mood, and adjusts slowly to new experiences

effortful control
the self-regulatory dimension of temperament, the capacity to voluntarily suppress a dominant
response in order to plan and execute a more adapative response

inhabited, or shy, children

who react negatively to and withdraw from novel stimuli

uninhabited, or sociable, children

who display positive emotion to and approach novel stimuli

goodness-of-fit model
to describe how temperament and environment together can produce favorable outcomes.
Goodness of fit involves creating child-rearing environments that recognize each child's
temperament while encouraging more adaptive functioning

attachment
is the strong affectionate tie we have with special people in our lives that leads us to feel pleasure
when we interact with them and to be comforted by their nearness in times of stress
ethological theory of attachment
which recognizes the infants tie to the caregiver as an evolved response that promotes survival, is
the most widely accepted view

separation anxiety
becoming upset when their trusted caregiver leaves

internal working model

or set of expectations about the availability of attachment figures and their likelihood of
providing support during times of stress. The internal working model becomes a vital part of
personality, serving as a guide for all future close relationships

strange situation
a widely used laboratory procedure for assessing the quality of attachment between 1 and 2 years
of age, which takes the baby through eight short episodes in which brief separations from and
reunions with the parent occur. In designing it, Mary Ainsworth and her colleagues reasoned that
securely attached infants and toddlers should use the parent as a secure base from which to
explore an unfamiliar playroom. In addition, when the parent leaves, an unfamiliar adult should
be less comforting than the parent

secure attachment
the infants use the parent as a secure base. When separated, they may or may not cry, but if they
do, it is because the parent is absent and they prefer her to the stranger. When the parent returns,
they actively seek contact, and their crying is reduced immediately.

Avoidant attachment
These infants seem unresponsive to the parent when she is present. When she leaves, they
usually are not distressed, and they react to the stranger in much the same way as to the parent.
During reunion, they avoid or are slow to greet the parent, and when picked up they often fail to
cling

Resistant attachment
Before separation, these infants seek closeness to the parent and often fail to explore. When the
parent leaves, they are usually distressed, and on her return they combine clinginess with angry,
resistant behavior, sometimes hitting and pushing. Many continue to cry after being picked up
and cannot be comforted easily.

Disorganized/disoriented attachment
This pattern reflects the greatest insecurity. At reunion, these infants show confused,
contradictory behaviors - for example, looking away while the parent is holding them or
approaching the parent with flat, depressed emotion. Most display a dazed facial expression. A
few cry out after having calmed down or display odd, frozen postures

Attachment Q-sort
An alternative method, suitable for children between 1 and 4 years, depends on home
observation. Either the parent or a highly trained observer sorts 90 behaviors ("Child greets
mother with a big smile when she enters the room" "if mother moves very far child follows
along") into nine categories ranging from highly descriptive to not at all descriptive of the child.
Then a score ranging from high to low in security is computed

Sensitive caregiving
Responding promptly consistently and appropriately to infants and holding them tenderly and
carefully

Interactional synchrony
Separated the experiences of secure and insecure babies. It is best described as a sensitively
tuned "emotional dance" in which the caregiver responds to infant signals in a well-times,
rhythmic appropriate fashion

Self-recognition
Identification of the self as a physically unique being

Empathy
The ability to understand another's emotional state and feel with the person or respond
emotionally in a similar way

Categorical self
Between 18 and 30 months children develop this as they classify themselves and others on the
basis of age, sex, physical characteristics, and even goodness, versus badness.

Compliance
They show clear awareness of caregivers' wishes and expectations andn can obey simple requests
and commands

Delay of gratification
Waiting for an appropriate time and place to engage in a tempting act