Chapter 6.PDF

Chapter 6 Realms of Cognition in Middle Childhood Learning Objectives After reading this chapter, you should be able to: 6.1 Describe brain development and concomitant cognitive and behav- ioral changes in middle childhood and explain atypical variations such as attention-...

Chapter 6 Realms of Cognition in Middle Childhood Learning Objectives After reading this chapter, you should be able to: 6.1 Describe brain development and concomitant cognitive and behav- ioral changes in middle childhood and explain atypical variations such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). 6.2 Discuss theoretical views of cognitive development that examine conceptual change, logical reasoning, memory, and executive func- tions in middle childhood, and identify contextual factors that influence children’s cognitive and academic growth. 6.3 Analyze children’s progress in developing social cognition with specific focus on perspective taking and psychosocial competencies and suggest relevant therapeutic interventions. Malik is 8-1/2 years old and in the third grade. He lives in a blue-collar, urban neigh- borhood that borders on a much poorer section of the city. He’s on schedule when it comes to learning to read, and he’s particularly good in math. There are three kids in his class who are pulled out for an advanced math class, and he is one of them. The school’s playground has little to offer except a basketball hoop at one end. The most active and aggressive boys tend to take over that end of the playground during recess. Malik usually spends recess at the opposite end, with a couple of good friends, includ- ing his next-door neighbor, Benj. They like to play a complex game of tag, often nego- tiating and changing the rules. Malik lives with his mother, father, grandmother, and 3-year-old twin brothers. All of the adults in his family work, and so after school each day Malik lets himself into their row home with his key, fixes himself a snack, and either does his home- work or plays video games (usually the latter). He is not permitted outside, or to have friends in, unless one of his parents or grandmother is home to monitor him. His mom arrives home about 5:30, along with his brothers, who spend their weekdays in a child care center. After they talk for a bit, his mom expects Malik to take charge of the twins, playing games or reading to them while she prepares dinner. Malik is good at distract- ing the boys, and after being on his own for several hours he’s usually happy to have their company until everyone else gets home. When dinner is over, Malik has respon- sibility for taking out the trash, but otherwise, if his homework is done, he watches TV or plays video games with Benj until bedtime. Development is so rapid during the early childhood years that it is not uncom- mon for parents to view their elementary school aged child as having grown up, almost 207 208 Chapter 6 overnight. However, children are still far from grown up in middle childhood. They face a whole new set of developmental challenges. Many youngsters begin to spend longer periods away from home, some face hours on their own, and all children must adjust to more rigorous schedules. They must learn to control their behavior, monitor their attention, and acquire formal and complicated academic competencies. They must make friends and learn to navigate the schoolyard, with its greater demands for athletic prow- ess, social skill, and cooperative negotiation of conflicts. They must also learn the rules of the group and when to abide by them. They must discover what it means to be male or female, not to mention what it means to be themselves. So many challenges await them. However, children of elementary school age are also more adept at almost every task when compared to their preschool-aged siblings. Observing the eagerness and energy children exhibit in the early school years makes it easy to understand the capacity for industry that Erikson described (see Chapter 1). For most children, the challenges of school and peer group will be mastered gradually, and in many differ- ent ways. Armed with foundational skills in language, mobility, self-regulation, and understanding of self and others, the youngster is now poised to assume membership in a larger social network. Clearly, the years of elementary school, as the years to follow, are marked by ups and downs. These normal fluctuations create opportunities for helpers to provide sup- port or guidance for children, their families, and their teachers. What are the cognitive, emotional, and social needs of children at this stage? What approaches are most help- ful given children’s developmental level? In the next two chapters, we will attempt to provide you with information that will be useful when working with children at this point in their development. Your understanding of cognitive development, the focus of this chapter, will enable you to understand children’s ways of construing the world, helping you appreciate their academic needs as well as the intellectual bases for their friendships, gender roles, moral understanding, and conflicts. Brain and Behavior 6.1 Describe brain development and concomitant cognitive and behavioral changes in middle childhood and explain atypical variations such as atten- tion-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Let’s begin by briefly considering the child’s changing brain. Changes in brain size and organization accompany the accomplishments of middle childhood. It is tempting to assume that these brain changes are “maturational,” that is, triggered by pre-pro- grammed genetic activity. But remember the epigenetic process when you think about brain development: “it is the ongoing interaction of the organism and the environ- ment that guides biological... development. Brains do not develop normally in the absence of genetic signaling, and they do not develop normally in the absence of essen- tial and contingent environmental input” (emphasis added; Stiles, 2009, pp. 196–197). Put more positively, genes and experience dynamically interact to influence emerging brain organization (Stiles, Brown, Hoist, Hoist & Jernigan, 2015). There is no simple answer to the question, “Is this brain/behavioral change genetic or determined by experience?” It is both. Even though the brain is at 95% of its peak size by age 6, it grows measurably in middle childhood (Blakemore, 2012; Mills et al., 2016). Cortical gray areas increase in volume up to about age 9 or 10, at least partly because the surface of the cortex expands (Mills et al., 2016; Ziegler, Ridgway, Blakemore, Ashburner, & Penny, 2017). There is some dispute about whether the cortex thickens during this period as well, or whether it starts to thin from about age 3 (Walhovd, Fjell, Giedd, Dale, & Brown, 2017). But there is no disagreement that much of the growth of the brain during childhood is due to increases in the volume of white matter (Piccolo et al., 2016; Walhovd et al., 2017). These brain changes slow down by late adolescence, although some continue into adulthood. Let’s consider the growth of white matter in middle childhood. As you learned in Chapter 2, white matter is “white” because of the fatty myelin sheaths that form  Realms of Cognition in Middle Childhood 209 around the axons, insulating them so that electrical impulses travel faster from one neuron to another. Myelination increases the speed of neural signals dramatically. Also, functional neural networks become more integrated because myelin changes the timing and synchrony of neuronal firing (Giedd & Rapoport, 2010). Overall then, increasing white matter seems to reflect increasing neural connectivity and communi- cation between neurons and between brain areas. For example, one important area of white matter increase is the corpus callosum. This is the system of connecting fibers (bundles of axons) between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. As the corpus callosum myelinates, the left and right sides of the body become more coordinated. The upshot is that children have much greater motor control, something you can appreciate if you compare the awkward full frontal running of a 3-year-old to the ducking and weaving you might see by Malik and his friends as they avoid capture during a game of tag. Changes in the corpus callosum (along with other brain areas, like the cerebellum) influence and are influenced by the great strides school age children make in both gross motor (e.g., riding a bicycle, skating, climbing trees, jumping rope) and fine motor (e.g., cutting, drawing, writing) skills. Much of this chapter is focused on typical (normative) development in middle childhood, but there are many individual differences among children. Researchers are beginning to link some of these to brain development. For example, children diag- nosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) can show atypical variations in brain development (e.g., Sowell et al., 2003). Between 5% and 10% of school-age children are diagnosed with ADHD based on one or more of a cluster of symptoms that are especially problematic for school performance: poor attentional control (dis- tractibility, problems sustaining attention), restlessness or hyperactivity, and impul- MyLab Education sivity (e.g., Martel, Levinson, Langer, & Nigg, 2016). Studies comparing structural Video Example 6.1 MRIs for children with and without ADHD have found differences in several brain This video introduces one case of a areas. These include the frontal lobes, where normative growth is associated with young child with ADHD. Note the improvements in attention and other higher order cognitive processes. Other areas biological and environmental fac- include the parietal lobes, basal ganglia, corpus callosum, and cerebellum (e.g., Fried- tors contributing to Eric’s diagnosis man & Rapoport, 2015; Kumar, Arya, & Agarwal, 2017; Wyciszkiewicz, Pawlak, & of ADHD in the doctor’s assess- Krawiec, 2017). ment summary. For many children with ADHD, the “difference” is really a delay, especially in the growth of the cerebral cortex. The middle prefrontal cortex shows the greatest delay, with growth for ADHD children lagging behind typically developing children by as much as 5 years (e.g., Shaw et al., 2007, 2012). Fortunately, about half of ADHD cases diagnosed in childhood remit by late adolescence or early adulthood. For those chil- dren, it appears that brain development follows a delayed but typical trajectory. For cases of ADHD that do not remit, researchers have found unusual, progressive loss of brain volume in some brain areas, such as the cerebellum (Mackie et al., 2007; Shaw et al., 2013). Note that there is some disagreement about whether ADHD actually com- prises more than one disorder, with different frontal brain areas more affected in one type versus another (see Diamond, 2005). Many children not diagnosed with ADHD are behaviorally different from aver- age—they have better or worse attentional control or they are more or less impul- sive or active than other children their age. Giedd and Rapoport (2010) suggest that “ADHD is best considered dimensionally, lying at the extreme of a continuous distri- bution of symptoms and underlying cognitive impairments” (p. 730). In line with this argument, they report that for children who are considered typically developing but more active and impulsive than average, brain changes also take place at a slower rate. Thus, researchers are beginning to identify some neurological differences among chil- dren that align with their behavioral differences. In general, helpers need to remember that there is a significant amount of unevenness in brain development in middle child- hood, both between and within children (e.g., Berninger & Hart, 1992; Myers et al., 2014). It is not unusual for children to show lagging performance in some skills and more rapid advances in other skills than their age mates. MyLab Education Self-Check 6.1 210 Chapter 6 Cognitive Development 6.2 Discuss theoretical views of cognitive development that examine conceptual change, logical reasoning, memory, and executive functions in middle child- hood, and identify contextual factors that influence children’s cognitive and academic growth. When children leave behind the preschool years, they begin to seem more savvy to adults. As you saw with Malik, they can be given fairly complex responsibili- ties (“Come straight home from school and lock the door after you’re in the house. Don’t forget to have a snack and then do your homework.”). They can participate in ­discussions of local or world events, and they often appreciate humor that would have been lost on them earlier. The cognitive developments that underlie these new capacities have been described and studied from several different theoretical tradi- tions. We will first present Jean Piaget’s characterization of cognitive change in middle childhood. Piaget’s View: The Emergence of Concrete Operations Let’s review the basic points you have already learned about Piaget’s description of cognitive development. One key idea is that knowledge is constructed; it is not just “stamped in” by experience or teaching. Children assimilate new information, meaning that they change it, interpreting it in ways that fit in with what they already know or with the way their thinking is structured. Simultaneously, they accommodate or adjust their existing knowledge structures somewhat. The result can be that when children are presented with new information, what they actually learn and understand FIGURE 6.1 Children’s images of a about it often is not completely consistent with reality or with the informa- round Earth. tion that adults mean to convey. Gradually, as new experiences are assimilated and accommodated, children’s knowledge and understanding come closer and closer to matching reality. Sphere THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE IN MIDDLE CHILDHOOD Children in the middle years are confronted with lots of new information every day, especially in school. Let’s consider one illustration: the information that the Earth is round. Children all over the world are taught the “round Earth concept” early in elementary school. But the Earth looks flat, so much so that Flattened Sphere for thousands of years, until Copernicus came along in the 16th century, even scholars believed that it was flat. It will not surprise you then that children start out believing that the Earth is flat. So how do they reconcile what they believe, based on what they perceive, with what they are told? Piaget (1929) and many Hollow Sphere other researchers since have found that children construct some surprising theories as they try to fit the information their elders give them to the concepts (a) (b) they already have. For example, Vosniadou and her colleagues did a series of studies inter- viewing children about how the Earth could be round. Figure 6.1 illustrates a few of the ideas Minnesota children in grades 1 to 5 came up with (Vosniadou Dual Earth & Brewer, 1992). It appears that children begin by trying to fit the informa- tion that the Earth is round to their naïve view that the Earth is flat. Some children said the Earth was a flat disc—like a coin. Some thought it was a ball that has a flat surface within it and a domed sky overhead. Others saw the Disc Earth Earth as spherical but with a flattened side where people live. The researchers found that the older the child, the more likely he was to represent the Earth as the sphere that scientists believe it to be. But even in fifth grade, 40% of the Rectangular Earth children still had some other idea of what it meant for the Earth to be round. Similar ideas have been found among school children from countries around SOURCE: Republished with permission of Elsevier Ltd. from Mental models of the Earth: A study of the world, including Israel, Nepal, India, Greece, Samoa, Australia, and China conceptual change in childhood. Cognitive Psychol- (see Hayes, Goodhew, Heit, & Gillan, 2003; Tao, Oliver, & Venville, 2013), and ogy, by Vosniadou, S., & Brewer, N. F. (1992). 24, 549; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance from different subcultures within the United States (e.g., Native Americans; Center, Inc. Diakidoy, Vosniadou, & Hawks, 1997).  Realms of Cognition in Middle Childhood 211 It appears that what adults teach is not necessarily what children learn. One of the practical implications of Piaget’s constructivism is that teachers are likely to be more effective in promoting change in children’s naïve concepts if they are mindful of how new information is being assimilated and accommodated by their students. Asking probing questions can be quite useful. Carey (e.g., 2000, 2015) has argued that it helps to know as much about the structure of children’s current conceptual ideas or “theo- ries” as possible. Then, teaching can focus on modifying the pieces of the structure that are, in a sense, supporting each other. So, for example, Vosniadou’s interviews of children about round Earth concepts uncovered that two important beliefs were MyLab Education connected. First, children saw the Earth as flat. Second, children had a simple idea of Video Example 6.2 The teacher in this fourth grade gravity: Things fall down, not up, which makes it difficult to understand why things class assesses students’ prior knowl- wouldn’t fall off the Earth on the “bottom side” of a round Earth. Some of children’s edge before introducing a new strange models of a round Earth were efforts to integrate the round earth concept with concept. This allows him to address both of these ideas. possible misconceptions before the lesson and help students accurately LOGICAL THINKING AND PROBLEM SOLVING IN MIDDLE CHILDHOOD assimilate and accommodate the new concept. You’ll recall that despite the gradual construction process that Piaget described, in which knowledge structures are continually changing, he considered there to be stages of thought development, so that within a relatively broad period of time, children’s thinking about many different things has some similar organizational properties. We have already discussed some of the characteristics that Piaget attributed to the senso- rimotor (0 to 2 years) and preoperational (2 to 6 or 7 years) stages (see Chapter 3). In this chapter, we will consider his view of children’s thinking in the concrete operational stage, the period spanning the elementary school years from about age 6 to 12. To understand how Piaget described the thinking of school-aged children, recall the limitations of the younger, preoperational thinker. Generally, preschoolers focus on one salient dimension of a situation at a time, and so they often miss the important relationships among aspects of a situation. Logical thinking is difficult to character- ize, but it certainly includes the ability to recognize and take into account all of the relevant information in a problem situation and then to identify how those pieces of relevant information are related to each other. Consider the following simple problem in deductive logic: “All glippies are annoying. George is a glippy. Is George annoy- ing?” To answer correctly, you must take into account a number of pieces of informa- tion—that there are glippies, that they are annoying, that there is an individual named George, and that George is a glippy. The important relationship you are then in a posi- tion to identify is between George and the characteristics of glippies: If he’s one of them, he must be like them. From there you can infer that George is, indeed, annoying. As we saw in Chapter 3, in very simple situations, even preschoolers can some- times take into account more than one piece of information at a time. For example, sometimes they can solve very simple deductive inference problems, like the glippy problem (e.g., Blewitt, 1989; Smith, 1979). But more often, their thinking is centered, making it seem quite illogical. Remember the number conservation problems that Piaget invented? Three-year-olds actually think that the number of candies in a row increases if the row is spread out. They focus (center) on the change in length, but they fail to note the corresponding change in the density of the row. When children are in the concrete operational stage, they usually answer number conservation questions correctly. They may look at the “spread out” row of candies and say “it looks like more,” but they can logically conclude that it remains the same number of candies as before. Piaget argued that their logic is dependent on being able to understand the relationship between the row’s increasing length and decreasing den- sity (the candies are not as close together). Because children can decenter (think about MyLab Education more than one dimension of the situation at once), they can discover the relationships Video Example 6.3 among those dimensions. Concrete operational thinkers The compensatory relationship between the length and density of the row of can- benefit from visuals and concrete dies is a kind of reversible relationship. In essence, one change reverses the effects of representations of the aspects of a the other change. Piaget thought that being able to recognize reversible relationships problem. This teacher provides a is especially important for solving many kinds of logical problems, allowing children a model for children to think logically deeper understanding of the world around them. For example, preschoolers can learn about the comparison of fractions. 212 Chapter 6 the following two number facts: “2 + 1 = 3” and “3 – 1 = 2.” But only when a child rec- ognizes reversible relationships is he likely to realize that the second fact is the inverse of the first and therefore that they are logically connected. If the first fact is true, then the second fact must be true. To put it differently, knowing the first fact allows the child to deduce the second one if he can think reversibly. When children’s thinking becomes efficient enough to decenter, and thus to identify reversible relationships, children can begin to draw logical conclusions in many situations. This is the hallmark of the concrete operational child. Piaget also identified limits to concrete operations. School-aged children seem to be most capable when the problems they are solving relate to concrete contents, and they seem to expect their solutions to map onto the real world in a straightforward way. But when a problem is disconnected from familiar, realistic content, these chil- dren have a difficult time identifying the relevant aspects of the problem and finding how those aspects are related to each other. Here are two versions of the same logical problem. (Logicians call it a modus tollens conditional reasoning problem.) The first version is completely abstract—disconnected from any familiar content. The second is framed in terms of familiar, concrete events (adapted from Markovits, 2017). Try to solve the first one before reading the second one. 1. Suppose it is true that if P occurs, then Q occurs. And suppose that Q has not ­occurred. Has P occurred? 2. Suppose that it is true that if a rock is thrown at a window, then the window will break. And suppose that the window is not broken. Has a rock been thrown at the window? The logical relationship among the pieces of information is the same for each problem, and the answer to each is the same: “No.” Concrete operational children can usually give the right answer to the second problem, but not the first. You may have found the first problem more difficult too; most of us find completely abstract problems a challenge. But we adults are much more likely to solve them correctly than elementary school children. Here is another example of how important concrete experience is for elementary school children to think logically. In a classic study, Osherson and Markman (1975) asked children to say whether certain statements were true, false, or “can’t tell.” The experimenter made statements such as “The [poker] chip in my hand is either green or it’s not green.” Sometimes the poker chip was visible; at other times the chip was hidden in the experimenter’s fist. If the chip were hidden, children in the elemen- tary school years would usually say, “can’t tell,” asking to see the chip to judge the statement. But the statement’s truth was not determined by the actual color of the chip; it was determined by the linguistic elements in the sentence and the relationships between them (e.g., “either-or”). No check with the concrete world was necessary or even helpful. A chip, any chip, is either green or it’s not. In other words, the abstract, formal properties of the statement, not concrete objects, were the contents of impor- tance. Concrete operational children find it difficult to think logically about abstract contents, and they seek out concrete or realistic equivalents to think about in order to solve a problem. Children’s tendency to “hug the ground of empirical reality” (Flavell, Miller, & Miller, 1993, p. 139) is especially obvious when they need to think logically about their own thinking. Suppose for a moment that you are a child who believes you have a pair of lucky socks. You think that if you wear your lucky socks, you’re more likely to hit a home run playing baseball than if you don’t wear them. To test this theory scientifi- cally, you would need to weigh the evidence, pro and con. But before you could do this effectively, you would need to recognize that your belief about your lucky socks is really an assumption or a theory, only one of many possible theories. As such, it could be wrong. Because you already believe your theory, it will seem like a fact to you. You would need to apply careful logical thinking to your own thought processes, first to distinguish your belief from true facts or observations and then to see the relationship between your theory and those facts. However, if you are 8 or 9 years old, you have  Realms of Cognition in Middle Childhood 213 trouble thinking logically about anything abstract, and theories (or thoughts) are cer- tainly abstract. So, logically evaluating any of your own beliefs or theories is not likely to be easy for you. As a result, researchers have found that although elementary-school-aged chil- dren can think scientifically sometimes, identifying simple theories and checking them against evidence, they make a muddle of it if they already believe a certain theory (e.g., Kuhn & Franklin, 2006; Moshman, 2015). Children get better at evaluating their own theories as they move into adolescence and become capable of what Piaget called formal operational thought—logical thought about abstract material. As you will see in Chapter 9, adolescents often extend their logical thought processes to many kinds of highly abstract contents, including their own thinking. As you have already seen though, even adolescents and adults find this kind of abstract thinking a challenge and may make some of the same errors as concrete thinkers. Even though middle childhood has its cognitive limitations, Piaget was on to something in identifying it as a time when children can be expected to think logically. In every culture in the world, adults seem to recognize that somewhere between ages 5 and 7 children become more sensible, reliable problem solvers. In societies with formal schooling, kids are sent to school to work at serious tasks that will prepare them to take their place in the community of adults. In societies without formal schooling, chil- dren are given real work to do by age 6 or 7, tasks that are essential to the community (such as watching younger children, planting, or shepherding). Piaget’s description of the concrete operational child as a logical thinker about concrete contents has proved a useful one, and it seems to capture the typical cogni- tive characteristics of middle childhood quite well. However, as we saw in Chapter 3, some of Piaget’s own research and much of the newer work makes it clear that there are no sharply defined stages in development. Just as adults sometimes have trouble thinking clearly about abstract problems, younger children sometimes solve problems that we might expect only adolescents or adults to manage. Take a concept like “pro- portionality” in math. It refers to a relationship between two things, such that if one thing changes by a certain ratio the other thing will change by the same ratio (e.g., we might find that the amount of food children eat is proportional to how much they grow). Proportionality is an abstract concept that generally is difficult for children to reason correctly about before age 11 or 12 (e.g., Inhelder & Piaget, 1955/1958). But with some materials, especially liquids, even 6- and 7-year-olds find the concept easier to intuit, and they often solve proportionality problems correctly with these materials (Boyer, Levine, & Huttenlocher, 2008). On the whole, logical thinking seems to emerge over an extended period of devel- opment and “must be achieved at successively greater levels of complexity” (Kuhn, 2011, p. 502). Many factors affect how advanced a child’s reasoning will be in any situation. Among these are the particular properties of the materials or context (as pro- portionality problems illustrate); the child’s general knowledge; his experience with the technology he is using (see Box 6.1); and his particular expertise (see Ricco, 2015). Expertise refers to how much a child has learned about a specific domain of knowl- edge (that is, a particular subject matter or content area). If a child has a lot of knowl- edge about a particular domain, say dinosaurs or chess, his ability to think logically about problems within that domain is often more advanced than in other content areas (Chi, Hutchinson, & Robin, 1989). It seems that a child or adult with a lot of domain knowledge is better at identifying the important features of a problem within that domain and at identifying the relationships among those important features (Moran & Gardner, 2006). Thus, logical thinking is at least somewhat domain specific (that is, applicable to a particular area of knowledge) rather than strictly domain general and determined by one’s stage of development, as Piaget’s stage theory implies. For a child who loves experimenting with chemistry sets, reasoning about chemistry is likely to advance more quickly than for a child whose passion is music. In the next sections, we will consider some other ways of characterizing chil- dren’s cognitive abilities in the middle years, starting with the information processing approach. We will examine what we have learned about some abilities, combining research from the Piagetian, information processing, and other research traditions. 214 Chapter 6 Box 6.1: Techno-Kids: Cognitive Development in a Wired World Across from the reference desk at the local public library, Kim, associations. In the research where links have been found there Jeanine, and Serena, third-grade classmates, huddle together may be alternative explanations (Courage & Setliff, 2009). For in front of a computer screen, looking for information for a group example, temperament differences in infants and toddlers predict project. They are accustomed to using computers, both at home how much video viewing parents allow them to do (Brand, Hard- and at school. As the girls take turns speedily clicking the mouse, esty, & Dixon, 2011; Brand & Dixon, 2013). Children who are scanning screens, jumping from one webpage to another, an difficult to soothe watch more TV, probably because parents find elderly woman at the next desk observes them with wonder. She that it has a calming effect on them. Attention problems at 7 or 8 too is using a computer, but the children have a facility and com- may be the result of these early temperament differences instead fort with the equipment that she can only dream about. How else of the amount of early TV viewing children have done. might their “tech savvy” make them different from the woman? Do infants and toddlers actually learn from videos that are Are there developmental consequences for children to having intended to be educational? Marketers claim great educational easy access to television, video, computer games, the Internet, benefits, but the evidence does not support these claims (Barr, or any of the myriad electronic media that are part of our techno- 2013; Choi & Kirkorian, 2016). For example, DeLoache and her logically saturated environment? Are the consequences different colleagues (2010) tested the effectiveness of a best-selling DVD depending on whether access begins early or late in childhood? designed and marketed for infants from “12 months and up.” What practical advice should helpers give to parents who want to The video shows a variety of house and yard scenes and repeat- protect their children from harm but also to provide them with the edly presents labels for household objects. Parents enthusiasti- advantages that make sense? cally endorse the video in marketing testimonials. Yet babies These are among the questions that developmental scien- who watched the video at least 4 times a week over 4 weeks tists are tackling, as a technological tsunami engulfs us. Let’s performed no better on a test of the target words than babies consider some of what we have learned so far. who never viewed the video. In a condition where mothers were asked to teach the target words to their babies “in whatever way seems natural to you” over a 4-week period, those children Infants and Toddlers performed substantially better on the final word test than babies Babies automatically orient to novel stimuli. Visual electronic who had watched the video. Interestingly, mothers who liked the media like television, videos, and computer games tend to video also believed that their babies had learned a lot from it, draw their attention with rapidly changing sights and sounds. even though they had not, which may account for some of the There is little evidence that this attentional pull is good for very enthusiastic testimonials on marketing websites! young children and some evidence that it may be harmful (see These findings are consistent with a survey of over 1,000 Kostyrka-Allchorne, Cooper, & Simpson, 2017). In longitudinal parents of 2- to 24-month-old children (Zimmerman, Christakis, studies of television use, Christakis and his colleagues (Christa- & Meltzoff, 2007). Parents reported on the children’s video view- kis, 2011; Zimmerman & Christakis, 2007) found a link between ing (including television) and completed a measure of children’s infant/toddler viewing and later attention problems, even though language development. For 8- to 16-month-olds, viewing “edu- several other sources of attention difficulties, such as low family cational” DVDs was actually linked to a slower pace of language income, were controlled in their research. In one study, the more development, and the more viewing there was the worse the television children watched before age 3, the more likely they language delay was (even when factors such as SES were con- were to have difficulty regulating attention at age 7. In a second trolled; although see Ferguson & Donellan, 2013 for a different study, the actual content of television programs turned out to be interpretation). Sometimes parents interact in positive ways with important. Amount of educational television viewing (e.g., Barney, babies when they watch educational media together. When they Sesame Street) before age 3 was not a predictor of attention do, children seem to learn more, but high quality interactions are problems later, but children’s entertainment television (e.g., car- much more likely when there is no TV or video playing (Simcock, toons) was. Also, the more violent the content, the more serious Garrity, & Barr, 2011). Twelve- to 30-month-olds can learn to the later attention problems were. The researchers hypothesize some degree from video—for example, they will imitate some of that a key factor in these content differences may be the pac- the actions that they see on screen—but they imitate substan- ing of visual and auditory changes. Entertainment programming tially more when they witness live demonstrations of the same tends to have shorter scenes with more frequent changes that actions (Barr, 2013). may “overstimulate the developing brain” (Zimmerman & Chris- In sum, it is still uncertain whether early use of electronic takis, 2007, p. 990). Language use is also much more quickly media actually causes harm (such as later attention problems) paced in these programs than the slower “parentese” that young (e.g., Fields, 2016). But one thing is clear. These media can children hear in actual interaction with adults (see Chapter 3); displace, or take time away from, other activities that are more educational programs are more likely to mimic the pacing of critical for positive cognitive development. Interactions with sensi- parentese. tive, responsive adults are central to the processes of acquiring While some studies implicate early video viewing as a cause language skills, building event and autobiographical memories, of attention problems, not all researchers have found similar and learning about emotions, the self, and others. The “full  Realms of Cognition in Middle Childhood 215 body” exploration of objects and spaces that characterizes early solving (Comstock & Sharrer, 2006). What are the costs and ben- play—smelling, tasting, manipulating, climbing, opening, closing, efits when children use interactive media, such as computers and putting together, taking apart—helps babies and toddlers build gaming devices? To begin, there is little doubt or disagreement a foundation of temporal, spatial, and physical knowledge that that giving all children means and opportunity to become com- prepares them for later developments (see Chapter 3). Unfor- puter literate is an important educational goal. Learning to use tunately, even when they are engaged in play with objects, if a basic computer software and the Internet as tools for acquiring, television is on in the background, babies frequently turn toward organizing, storing, and communicating information should be the screen, reducing the length of play episodes and disrupting part of every child’s experience. Some schools are even teach- focused attention (Schmidt, Pempek, Kirkorian, Lund, & Ander- ing basic programming in elementary school, another useful skill son, 2008). Short play episodes and reduced attention during for children in today’s world. Individuals who lack computer skills play are “marker(s) for poor developmental outcome” (Schmidt will be disadvantaged in many settings, especially the workplace. et al., 2008, p. 1148). Despite such concerns, many parents Also, having access to computer technology and the Internet and other caregivers give infants and toddlers access to these can benefit academic performance. For example, Jackson et al. media. For example, one startling finding from a large survey of (2006) analyzed data from HomeNetToo, a longitudinal project in families by Common Sense Media in 2013 is that 16% of infants which low-income families were offered free computers, Internet and 37% of 2- to 4-year-olds in the United States actually had access, and in-home technical support in return for permission televisions in their bedrooms. Concerns about brain and behav- to monitor each family member’s Internet use. Children in these ioral development have led the American Academy of Pediatrics families were mostly low achievers in school, but those who used (AAP) to recommend no use of digital media (e.g., television, the Internet more during the 16 months of the project had higher videos, and computer games) for children under 18 to 24 months GPAs and reading achievement scores at the end (but not at the of age, except for video-chatting (Council on Communications beginning) than children who used it less. The authors suggest and Media, 2016a). For 18- to 24-month-old toddlers, the AAP that surfing web pages gave children substantially more reading suggests that parents might introduce a child to digital media practice than they would otherwise have had, helping to explain with high quality programming if child and adult watch or play the benefits. together, but recommends no solo viewing yet. Such benefits do not seem to be limited to low-income children. In another longitudinal study, 1,000 adolescents from a range of backgrounds were surveyed in the 9th or 10th grade Children and Adolescents and then again in the 11th or 12th grade (Willoughby, 2008). As children grow older, controlled exposure to electronic media Controlling for factors such as parents’ education, moderate use is less problematic for perceptual and cognitive development. of the Internet (about 1 to 2 hours per day) was more predictive For example, television watching by 4- and 5-year-olds does of better school grades than either nonuse or high levels of use. not appear to be associated with long-term attentional problems It appears that nonuse is an academic liability in today’s schools (Stevens & Muslow, 2006; Zimmerman & Christakis, 2007), and that excessive use is also problematic. although children this age are still likely to have short-term atten- Academic performance today depends on achieving a bal- tion difficulties after watching violent programs (Freidrich & Stein, ance between on- and off-screen activities (Anderson & Kirkork- 1973; Geist & Gibson, 2000). On the positive side, preschoolers’ ian, 2015). Another study of reading skills helps to demonstrate. experience with some age-appropriate educational program- As you have just seen, the more that low-income children use ming, such as Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer, is linked to the Internet, the better they tend to score on standardized tests improved school readiness, vocabulary growth and better num- of reading, apparently because of the practice that reading web ber skills by kindergarten (Anderson & Kirkorian, 2015), and with pages gives them. But if screen use displaces reading books better school achievement by adolescence (Kostyrka-Allchorne and other printed matter, then children’s reading skills are likely et al., 2017), even when other characteristics of the home envi- to suffer. In a large study of 8- to 13-year-olds in Great Britain, ronment and parenting are controlled. Among the features to the larger proportion of reading kids did on screen versus with look for in quality programming for young children are “the use print material, the more poorly they performed on measures of of child-directed speech, elicitation of responses, object label- reading (Clark, 2012). That may be because off-screen read- ing, and/or a coherent storybook-like framework throughout the ing sources often provide more challenging content. Electronic show” (Bavelier, Green, & Dye, 2010, p. 693). Unfortunately, the games, whether they are played on a computer or on some other more exposure to entertainment programming in the preschool platform, such as an Xbox or Play Station, can help develop the and elementary school years, including child-directed program- skills that the games use (see Markey & Ferguson, 2017). There ming like cartoons, the less likely children are to perform well is more research on these practice effects with adults than with in school. Just as we have seen with infants and toddlers, part children, but for skills that have been studied in children the same of the problem seems to be that watching television displaces benefits apply, and they seem to be wide ranging, from improve- more achievement-related activities. Another problem may be ments in vision and attention to refinements in motor skills. For that early television exposure socializes children’s tastes, build- example, playing action video games improves the ability to find ing preferences for superficial, rapid action, formulaic sequences small details in cluttered scenes or to see dim signals (Benady- and plots, and reducing the appeal of slower paced, more intel- Chorney, Yau, Zeighami, Bohbot, & West, 2018). Many stud- lectually challenging entertainment, such as reading and puzzle ies indicate that playing action video games also can improve (continued) 216 Chapter 6 children’s visual-spatial abilities, such as spatial rotation skill. The emphasize the dangers of preschool computer use, especially latter involves looking at an image of a three-dimensional object because time with electronic media displaces social interac- or scene and recognizing a representation of that object or scene tion, pretend play, and constructive, creative problem solving in from another perspective, a skill that many games use (Uttal et al., the three-dimensional world (e.g., Healy, 1998). Unfortunately, 2013) and that plays an important role in mathematical problem although some truly constructive computer learning games are solving (Newcombe, Levine, & Mix, 2015). Some games are available, much of the programming for preschoolers is focused designed specifically for educational purposes, such as improving on superficial and largely rote activities. Research on electronic math skills or vocabulary. Some are effective; some are not. Many books, for example, suggests that children’s attention is often are not substitutes for other educational experiences, but can be drawn to flashy elements—such as clicking on icons that are helpful supports. Interestingly, younger children seem to prefer peripheral to the story—at the expense of attending to the story. educational games to games designed purely for entertainment. The result is that children’s story comprehension is not as good Research on the cognitive benefits of interactive media with electronic books as it is with traditional books (Bus, Takacs, for children is in its infancy. There is certainly potential not only & Kegel, 2015; Parish-Morris, Mahajan, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, for teaching specific knowledge or skills but also for achieving & Fuller Collins, 2013). There are also concerns about possible broader cognitive impact (see Adachi & Willoughby, 2017). Imag- health effects: muscular skeletal injuries, visual strain, and obesity ine a program that asks probing questions and encourages the due to inactivity (Alliance for Childhood, 2000). Because of such child to hypothesize solutions, then to test and evaluate hypoth- concerns, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP; 2016a) eses, and so on. Or consider that many games have multiple recommends limiting screen time for 2- to 5-year-olds to 1 hour levels of skill and require extended practice and intensive effort, a day. They also urge that adults choose quality programming, rewarding the persistent player with the pleasure of achieving and that parents view with children to help them understand the mastery at one level and the opportunity to face the challenge of content and learn how to apply it to the real world (Council on a new level (e.g., Gee, 2007). These kinds of experiences seem Communications and Media, 2016a). likely to promote good problem solving and learning strategies if For children older than 6 or 7, the AAP suggests developing they generalize to other situations. But whether they do is not yet a clear plan for family media use (Council on Communications clear (see Markey & Ferguson, 2017, for a discussion of when and Media, 2016b). The primary concerns are that parents con- learning from video games is likely to transfer). trol content exposure and set time limits on media use so that it Extrapolating from decades of research on children’s televi- does not displace other important developmental experiences. sion viewing, it seems very likely that the content of a game or Children should avoid screen use for one hour before bedtime web page, along with the level of parent or teacher engagement and should not sleep with devices in their bedrooms. Parents in screening, explaining, and discussing that content, is more also need to monitor whom their children communicate with important than the electronic tool that delivers the content. What through the Internet, scaffold children’s efforts to master pro- we know about television is that educational content can promote grams, and help children to evaluate not only programming con- learning, and prosocial portrayals encourage prosocial behavior. tent but also commercial messages, which can be as ubiquitous Violent content can promote aggressive behavior, at least for indi- on the Internet as they are on television. viduals who are prone to aggression, and, as we noted earlier, may Parents and educators need to recognize that to make effec- have problematic consequences for the development of attention tive use of computers and the Internet in the classroom, teachers in very young children. Exposure to explicit sexual content and to must be well trained in their use and know how to judge the value sexism (e.g., women washing floors, men washing cars) and per- of educational programs (e.g., Roschelle, Pea, Hoadley, Gordin, vasive commercial propaganda about what is “fun” and important & Means, 2000). Does the teacher, for example, know how to to own affect children’s beliefs and values about sexual behavior, guide children to information that comes from a reliable, objective gender, and what is important in life. We also know that when car- source as opposed to a source with an agenda (commercial or ing, knowledgeable adults help children to choose content and cause driven)? Time and money invested in teacher training is at when they join children in their media use, scaffold their problem least as important as investments in hardware and software. “The solving, and discuss and interpret media messages, children are best results from all technology use for children come accompa- less negatively and more positively affected (see Calvert, 2015). nied by a skilled adult ‘coach’ who adds language, empathy, and flexibility” (Healy, 1998, p. 247). A number of authors and organizations provide helpful guide- Guidelines for Parents lines and information for parents and educators, who often are When should interactive media be introduced? Experts tend to not as savvy or comfortable with newer electronic media as chil- agree that children under age 2 are better off not being “wired” dren are. Some valuable websites are: at all, but opinions about access for preschoolers are much American Academy of Pediatrics (aac.org) more mixed. On the one hand, organizations like the National U.S. Department of Education (ed.gov) Association for the Education of Young Children and the Fred Common Sense Media (commonsensemedia.org) Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media (2012) The Children’s Partnership (childrenspartnership.org) are cautiously in favor of integrating “developmentally appropri- Children Now (childrennow.org) ate” exposure to computers and educational software into the Entertainment Software Rating Board (esrb.org) preschool classroom. On the other hand, many researchers Center for Media Literacy (medialit.org)  Realms of Cognition in Middle Childhood 217 An Alternative Perspective: The Information Processing Approach Many interesting studies of middle childhood cognition—especially memory and problem solving—have been done by researchers in the information processing tradi- tion. Information processing theories compare cognitive functioning to a computer’s processing of information (see Chapter 1). The structural organization of the cogni- tive system is thought to be the same throughout development. A typical example of the kinds of structural components through which information is thought to “flow” during cognitive processing is presented in Figure 6.2. In this view, there are no quali- tative, stage-like changes that characterize most of a child’s thinking or processing. There are some changes with time, however, mostly in the amount and efficiency with which information can be processed. With increasing age, children can work with more information at once, and the strategies that children use to organize, understand, or remember information may also change. However, children apply different process- ing strategies to different specific contents, such as math, reading, and spatial con- cepts, so that strategies are not usually considered to be the result of broad cognitive skills that are applied across different domains. Instead, strategies appear to be largely domain specific. Information processing researchers focus heavily on what children do with infor- mation of particular kinds: what they pay attention to, how they encode it, what and how much information they store, what other information they link it with, and how they retrieve it. In other words, information processing theories are focused on the mechanics of thinking. A Piagetian researcher might try to demonstrate that one cogni- tive achievement, perhaps in math, is related to another, perhaps in social perspective taking, to illustrate the global effects of some underlying stage characteristic. An infor- mation processing researcher typically tries to track the specific information handling that underlies a child’s increasing mastery of a single domain. FIGURE 6.2 The information processing system. Executive Control Implicit memories perception learn (save) Sensory Working Long-Term Memory Memory Memory directs attention retrieve (activate memories) Knowledge influences SOURCE: Adapted from Woolfolk, A. (2014). Educational psychology: Active learning edition (12th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc. 218 Chapter 6 The skills that appear to guide the flow of information are called executive func- tions (EFs), as you saw in Chapter 3. These include working memory, self-regulation (or inhibitory control), and cognitive flexibility. Improvements in the efficiency of these skills in particular are seen as supporting other cognitive advances throughout childhood. Longitudinal studies find that good executive functions in childhood are related to many positive outcomes in adolescence (e.g., frustration tolerance) and adulthood (e.g., higher socioeconomic status) (Zelazo & Carlson, 2012). Interestingly, some of the negative consequences of poverty on children’s academic performance are related to slower development of executive functions in poor children. As you have seen in earlier chapters, many children in low-income families experience chronic stress, which affects neuroendocrine pathways and the development of the body’s typical reactions to stress. This in turn affects how well children can modulate their emo- tions and exercise control over attention and other higher order cognitive functions (e.g., Obradović, 2016). As EFs improve, children get better at consciously controlling their thinking (e.g., planning, strategically problem solving), their actions (e.g., inhibiting automatic responses), and their emotions. Self-regulation or inhibitory control is typically quite good by the end of middle childhood. For example, Bunge and colleagues (2002) asked 8- to 12-year-olds to push a button on the left side of a panel if a central arrow pointed to the left and to push a button on the right if the central arrow pointed to the right. It’s a simple task—unless the central arrow is surrounded by arrows pointing the wrong way. Then it takes some doing to inhibit the tendency to push the button that all the other arrows point toward. Children were not as good at the task as adults, but they nonetheless were about 90% accurate. Children show improvement on measures of executive functions through middle childhood and adolescence (Boelema et al., 2014; Zelazo et al., 2013; see Zelazo, Blair, & Willoughby, 2017 for a review). Neural circuits that heavily involve the prefrontal cortex mediate these functions, and their development is dependent on experience or practice. Genetic processes are certainly at work here, but social, cultural, and educa- tional experiences make important contributions (see Hughes, Roman, & Ensor, 2014). The role of experience is clear when we examine cross-cultural differences in executive functions. From early childhood through adolescence, children from Asian countries, such as Japan and China, make more rapid progress in the development of executive functions than children from Western countries, such as Great Britain and the United States, even though adults in these different countries eventually achieve similar levels of performance on EF tasks (e.g., Ellefson, Ng, Wang, & Hughes, 2017; Imada, Carlson, & Itakura, 2013). Culturally based differences in socialization practices may be impor- tant here. For example, Asian parents put more emphasis than Western parents on teaching children to inhibit their own desires in order to conform with the collectivist (versus individualistic) norms of their culture. Such practices may encourage earlier development of some self-regulation skills. Information processing theorists have traditionally paid special attention to the executive function of working memory and its role in cognitive development. This is the part of the cognitive machinery that holds information we are actively thinking about at the moment. It “works” with that information in ways that allow us to main- tain our attention, to plan, to solve problems, and to learn. That’s why it is depicted so centrally in Figure 6.2. You will also notice in Figure 6.2 that some information coming in from the senses bypasses working memory. This is because information processing seems to occur at two general levels (e.g., Evans & Stanovich, 2013; Ricco, 2015). The first level of pro- cessing tends to be automatic, intuitive, and unintentional. Processes of this type are usually fast, and they do not need working memory. They are sometimes called “bot- tom up” processes. So, for example, you might automatically jump up when you hear the soft beeping sound of your microwave. You’re conditioned to do it and you do not need to make a conscious decision to respond. In comparison, working memory and other EFs govern a second level of processing that is slower, more intentional, and deliberative. These are sometimes called “top-down” processes (e.g., Diamond, 2013). If you are conditioned to react to the sound of your microwave, not responding to the  Realms of Cognition in Middle Childhood 219 sound might actually require that you use your working memory to think through what you want and take conscious control of your behavior. We will take a closer look at working memory and its development later in this chapter. You will also learn more about the importance and modifiability of executive functions during middle childhood in the Applications section. Some Other Approaches to Understanding Cognitive Development The influence of both Piagetian and information processing approaches has fueled a rapid increase in our understanding of cognitive development, and it is not surprising that some theorists have attempted to marry the best components of each. NeoPiag- etians explain Piaget’s stages, or revise the stages, using many information process- ing concepts (e.g., Case, 1985, 1992; Fischer & Bidell, 2006; Halford & Andrews, 2006; Pascual-Leone & Johnson, 2017). For example, Case (1985) specifies four stages com- parable to Piaget’s, but explains the transition from one to another partly in terms of increases in the capacity of working memory. Another example, offered by Halford and colleagues (see Halford, 2014; Halford & Andrews, 2006), analyzes many of Piag- et’s tasks in terms of “complexity theory.” Instead of assessing logical problem solving as dependent on how concrete or abstract the contents are, they suggest that the dif- ficulty children have with problems depends on the number of variables that must be related to each other, that is, the size of the “processing load.” The idea is that younger children can process fewer variables at once than older children. Theory theorists (see Carey et al., 2015; Gopnik & Wellman, 2012) suggest that children quite spontaneously construct theories about how the world works: about mind, matter, physical causality, and biology. Many theory theorists argue that humans have some innate knowledge of these domains, even in infancy, which is not consis- tent with Piaget’s view. And theory theorists do not typically agree with the idea of stage-like changes in overall cognitive functioning. But following Piaget, theory theo- rists are constructivists. They claim that children’s understandings in each conceptual domain are re-constructed over time, as children acquire new information. Children’s efforts to include information about the Earth being round into their concept of the physical world is an example. Like neoPiagetians, most theory theorists see executive functions as the mechanisms that make re-construction possible. Working memory, for example, makes it possible to hold more information in mind while reflecting on problems within a domain. Focus on Memory: Why Does It Improve in Middle Childhood? So far, we have considered major theoretical approaches to explaining cognitive devel- opment in middle childhood. We have talked about conceptual change (e.g., the round Earth concept) and the growth of logical reasoning skills (e.g., deductive inference) to illustrate these theories. Now, let’s focus on another cognitive ability, memory. By examining how memory improves during the elementary school years, you will be able to see how a whole host of factors contribute to the growth of intellectual functioning. Let’s begin by imagining a child who has just had his annual medical examina- tion. With his parent’s consent, an interviewer asks a set of questions to explore what the child remembers about the experience. Some are open-ended questions, such as “Can you tell me what happened when you went to the doctor?” Others are specific yes–no questions, such as “Did she look in your nose?” A subset of the yes–no ques- tions are strange or silly, such as “Did the doctor cut your hair?” As you might expect, elementary-school-aged children usually answer such ques- tions more accurately than preschoolers do. If you wait for several weeks and then ask about the doctor’s exam again, a 3-year-old will forget more of what he could origi- nally remember than a 7-year-old will. In one study, by 12 weeks after the checkup, 3-year-olds’ responses to the silly questions were at chance levels of accuracy (mean- ing that they were saying “yes” to about half of the silly questions), but 7-year-olds 220 Chapter 6 averaged about 90% accuracy, despite the delay. The older children’s answers had also remained relatively consistent over time, so that if they answered “yes” to a question right after the exam they tended to do so on repeated tests at later times (Gordon, Orn- stein, Clubb, Nida, & Baker-Ward, 1991, as cited in Ceci & Bruck, 1998). Almost all aspects of memory seem to improve with age, at least up through young adulthood. Before we consider some of the cognitive changes that contribute to these improvements, let’s briefly define terminology that is commonly used in discus- sions of memory. Many of these terms were first introduced by information processing theorists, and some are included in the information processing flow model depicted in Figure 6.2. MEMORY TERMINOLOGY First, we can describe memory as consisting of different memory stores. Sensory memory refers to a brief retention of sensory experience. For about one third of a sec- ond, when we first see a scene, we store most of the sensory information that has come in, almost as though our eyes have taken a snapshot of the whole scene. A similar phenomenon occurs with hearing. Interestingly, sensory memory capacity does not seem to change much with age. At least for visual information, even infants’ sensory memory is similar to that of adults (e.g., Blaser & Kaldy, 2010). Working memory is the next storage “unit.” It is partly a “short-term store.” As you have learned, working memory allows us to focus attention, plan, execute problem- solving strategies, and make inferences. It also organizes information for transfer into long-term memory, the almost unlimited store of knowledge. The information we pay attention to in working memory comes from our immediate sensory experience and from long-term memory. For example, suppose you are watching a movie about an African adventure, and an array of color and movement suddenly fills the screen. Your working memory combines the sensory data coming from the screen with information drawn from long-term memory to create a meaningful interpretation: It’s a charging zebra. Or suppose your supervisor reminds you that your counseling approach to a client’s new problem is similar to one that was not very successful in the past. Your thinking about the strategy (in working memory) combines elements of the supervi- sor’s input with stored memories of prior interactions. Unlike long-term memory, working memory is thought to have a limited capac- ity. We can pay attention to, and think about, a limited number of meaningful units of information at one time, and material is lost from working memory in 15 to 30 seconds unless we engage in rehearsal (i.e., unless we actually keep working with it, mak- ing an effort to pay attention, such as repeating it to ourselves). Explicit learning that results in our ability to recall information later requires working memory. To get new information into long-term memory in a form that we can access later, we must pay attention to it and think about it. For example, you may hear the music playing as the zebra on the screen charges, but unless you pay attention to it, you are not likely to be able to intentionally recall the tune later. Or if you’re mulling over another problem while your supervisor gives you feedback, you will be unlikely to recall her comments later. So, much of learning seems to require real work or effort. If you find you have to go back and reread a section of this chapter to commit it to memory, you are making the kind of mental effort that characterizes working memory and accounts for success- ful learning. We should note that some learning does seem to bypass working memory. It involves the kind of lower level, automatic processing we mentioned earlier. You can store connections or associations between stimuli that you experience together even when you’re not paying attention. Much of infant learning seems to be of this sort. So, even though you weren’t paying attention to the music when the zebra was on the screen, hearing that music later might remind you of the zebra, although you probably couldn’t say why. This kind of learning is sometimes referred to as implicit. Learning, or acquiring knowledge, involves the storage of information. Retrieval is what we usually mean by remembering, that is, getting information out of storage so we can use it. In Chapter 3, we talked about two kinds of remembering or retrieval: recognition and recall. Recognition happens when the information to be remembered  Realms of Cognition in Middle Childhood 221 is immediately available to your senses. For example, you see a clerk from your local grocery store crossing the street in front of you, and you realize that you’re experienc- ing someone who is familiar. Your sensory image elicits information about the clerk stored in long-term memory. We saw in Chapter 3 that some ability for recognition seems to be present from birth, and generally young children’s recognition skills are very good, especially for visual-spatial information, such as memory for pictures. (Try playing a game that involves visual memory with a 4-year-old. You might not win!) However, long-term retention of visual-spatial information does improve over the pre- school years (Morgan & Hayne, 2011), and recognition of verbally presented informa- tion shows even longer-term developmental improvement (Schneider & Bjorklund, 1998). Recall is more work. The to-be-remembered information is not present, and you must somehow draw it out of long-term memory and re-present it to yourself, as when you must answer an essay question on an exam. Or, as we described in the opening of this section, a researcher asks a child to remember what he experienced when he went to the doctor. When a child has problems with recall, it could be because he did not attend to the information in the first place, because he did not store the information in long-term memory despite having paid attention to it, or because the child does not have adequate strategies for finding the stored information. Clearly, recall depends on many processes. One feature of human memory is that we can store different kinds of information or knowledge. Knowledge about facts and events, called declarative knowledge, is of two kinds. The first kind is semantic knowledge, which includes factual information (“the Earth is round”), rules (“red lights mean stop”), and concepts (“an elephant is a large, gray animal”). The second kind is episodic knowledge, which refers to our knowledge of the events that we have experienced. When researchers ask children to recall their visit to a doctor’s office or when your supervisor asks you to describe a counseling session, they are asking about episodic knowledge. Episodic knowledge is organized around time and space—what happened in what order, where, and when. After we’ve had several experiences with one kind of event, such as being examined by a doctor, we begin to form a schematic representation of the typical features of such an event and the order in which they happen. This is called a script. In addition to declarative knowledge, we have nondeclarative knowledge that we cannot adequately put into words and that may not even enter our awareness. For example, you may know how to shift the gears in a standard transmission vehicle, but you might have a difficult time explaining how to do it. Many physical skills are based on this kind of unconscious, nondeclarative knowledge, which we usually call procedural. You may remember that we have used the term procedural knowledge to describe what infants “know” about how to do things or what to expect from interper- sonal interactions (see Chapter 5). Early working models of attachment are probably a kind of procedural knowledge. Much of what infants and toddlers know seems to be nondeclarative rather than declarative. WHAT IMPROVES WITH DEVELOPMENT? Now that we have a vocabulary of memory terms, let’s take a look at how memory seems to work in middle childhood and what improves with age. Perhaps most impor- tantly, working memory seems to expand. Because working memory expands, chil- dren’s capacity for learning and for retrieving information from long-term memory also expands. So understanding what contributes to working memory development will help us understand how memory in general grows. Like Piaget, most observers, regardless of theoretical orientation, have noted that older children usually pay attention to more pieces of information at one time than younger children. Their performance on digit span tests illustrates this change in working memory capacity. You may recognize these tests as a typical part of most intelligence tests. A series of digits is presented to the test participant, who must immediately repeat them in the same order. A child of 2 years can usually reproduce about two digits accurately; by the time he is 7, he will probably be able to remember a five-digit string. Adults, on average, can recall about a seven-digit string. 222 Chapter 6 What accounts for increases in working memory capacity with age? There could literally be, somehow, more “room” in the older child’s working memory (Cowan, 2016). But many other cognitive changes seem to contribute and may actually be more important. We will consider several of these. Processing Speed. The first cognitive change that contributes to memory improve- ment is that children can process information more quickly as they get older. How rapidly children can make a simple response (e.g., pushing a button) to a stimulus (e.g., the onset of a light on a computer screen) increases from early to middle child- hood, and it continues to improve until about age 15 (e.g., Kail, Lervåg, & Hume, 2016; Spanoudis, Demetriou, Kazi, Giorgala, & Zenonos, 2015). Piaget attributed the decentering skill of school-aged children (their ability to pay attention to more than one thing at a time) to the speeding up of mental activities with practice, and mod- ern research does support the idea that practice can accelerate information processing (Mackey, Hill, Stone, & Bunge, 2011). In addition, speed of processing can increase with physical maturation—that is, simply as a function of age (Toga et al., 2006). The upshot is that as children get older, they can do more with more information at one time (e.g., Demetriou et al., 2014). Breadth and Depth of Knowledge. The second cognitive change that affects mem- ory improvement is that as children get older their knowledge about many things increases. They expand their knowledge base. Consider the study of children’s recall of a medical examination mentioned earlier. One reason that a 7-year-old might have recalled information more accurately than a 3-year-old is that the older child probably knew more about medical exams. By 7, a child has formulated a script of the typi- cal medical exam. When an interviewer asks questions about a particular exam, even many weeks after it happened, the 7-year-old may not actually remember whether the doctor cut his hair, for example, but he knows that doctors don’t do that sort of thing in medical exams, and so he answers correctly. In general, older children know more about most events, and so they are more likely than younger children to be able to reconstruct accurately what probably happened in any given situation. It should be noted that prior knowledge can also lead to false memories. For example, in a series of classic studies by Liben and colleagues, children were shown videos or pictures of people playing roles such as that of a doctor or a nurse (see Liben, Bigler, & Hilliard, 2014). Sometimes the gender of the adult was consistent with tradi- tional expectations—such as a man playing the role of doctor—and sometimes the per- son’s gender and occupation were not traditionally consistent, such as a man playing the role of nurse. Children’s preexisting beliefs about gender and work roles—that is, their gender stereotypes—influenced what they later recalled about what they saw. In one particularly interesting study, Signorella and Liben (1984) found that elementary school children with strong gender stereotypes were more likely than children with less stereotyped beliefs to misremember who had played what role in the pictures they had seen when gender and occupation were not traditionally matched. So, for example, if they had seen a woman doctor, the children with strong stereotypes would be likely to remember that it was a man they had seen instead, or that the woman had been a nurse. (See Box 6.2 for other examples of how false memories can be induced.) So prior knowledge affects your ability to reconstruct what you have experienced. In addition, the more you know about a particular subject, or domain of knowledge, the more easily you can learn new information in that domain and the better you will remember it later. If knowledge in most domains expands with age, then learning and retrieval of information in most domains should get better with age. But age is not what is most important—knowledge is. Suppose, for example, that you show an 8-year-old child a chessboard with chess pieces arranged as if in the middle of a chess game. Later, you ask the child to reconstruct the placement of all the pieces on an empty board—that is, to recall the layout of the pieces. If the child happens to be an “expert” chess player—someone who plays in competitions and is highly knowledge- able about the game—his performance on this recall task will be much better than that of an average adult “novice,” who knows how to play but who does not have  Realms of Cognition in Middle Childhood 223 Box 6.2: Children’s Eyewitness Testimony The following is an experience reported by Bill, a 4-year-old: many states end restrictions on children serving as witnesses (see Ceci & Bruck, 1998). My brother Colin was trying to get Blowtorch [an action Modern memory research has helped increase the accep- figure] from me, and I wouldn’t let him take it from me, tance of children’s testimony in America. Many studies indicate so he pushed me into the woodpile where the mousetrap that what children remember can be accurate, although the num- was. And then my finger got caught in it. And then we ber of details a child will recall and with what accuracy improves went to the hospital, and my mommy, daddy, and Colin with age. But at any age, a witness’s memory for observed [older brother] drove me there, to the hospital in our van, events could be incomplete or distorted or simply wrong, some- because it was far away. And the doctor put a bandage times as a result of exposure to suggestion. And in most situa- on this finger (indicating). (Ceci, Loftus, Leichtman, & tions the younger the child, the more susceptible he is likely to be Bruck, 1994, quoted in Ceci & Bruck, 1998, p. 749) to suggestion (see Ceci, Hritz, & Royer, 2016). Bill appeared to have a clear memory of this scary event, and We have seen that preschoolers’ difficulties with reality moni- he was confident even about details such as where his father was toring can be a source of suggestibility, and there are several at the time of the accident. But the experience Bill described so other sources as well, many of which children might encounter convincingly never happened! It was a false memory, induced by in the course of being interviewed by parents, police, social a researcher who had read brief descriptions of a set of pictures to workers, therapists, and other court officials. When interview- Bill each week for 9 weeks. The description for one of the pictures ers are biased, they may guide children’s testimony, planting had said, “Got finger caught in a mousetrap and had to go to the suggestions without realizing that they are doing so. So, for hospital to get the trap off.” The researcher then said, “Think real example, if an interviewer is already convinced that a child has hard and tell me if this ever happened to you. Do you remember been abused, she may encourage a child’s admission of abuse going to the hospital with a mousetrap on your finger?” In the first by asking leading questions, such as, “Where did he kiss you?” session, Bill said he had not had such an experience. By the tenth instead of open ended questions, such as “What did he do?” session, as you have seen, he seemed convinced that he had. The interviewer might also ask the same question repeatedly if Preschoolers can have some difficulty with reality monitor- the child’s initial answers are not consistent with the interviewer’s ing, distinguishing fantasies from realities. Young children can tell belief. Studies of interview transcripts indicate that even the most the difference between what is real and what is not and between well-meaning and concerned interviewers, including parents, use what it feels like to only imagine something versus to actually many such tactics to try to get at what they believe, or fear, is experience it (e.g., Flavell, Flavell, & Green, 1987), but they have the truth (e.g., Bruck & Ceci, 2013). Unfortunately, they may be more difficulty with these distinctions than older children or adults planting suggestions that can lead the child to reconstruct his (e.g., Tempel, Frings, & Mecklenbräuker, 2015). In particular, if memory of an event. they imagine an event, they are somewhat prone to say later A study by Pettit, Fegan, and Howie (1990) is just one of that it actually happened. One charming and usually harmless many that illustrates how effective such suggestions can be example occurs when a child becomes devoted to an imaginary with young children. Two actors visited a preschool classroom. friend. But a young child’s problems with reality monitoring can They pretended to be park rangers and talked to the children make him more susceptible to suggestion than older children or about helping a bird find a nest for her eggs. In the middle of adults, a serious concern when children serve as eyewitnesses. the discussion, one “ranger” knocked a cake off the top of a For example, in child sexual abuse cases, interviewers and thera- piano “by accident.” The cake was smashed, and there was pists have sometimes used a technique called guided imagery silence for a few moments in the classroom, creating a rather as an aid to memory. A child might be asked to pretend that an distinctive event. Two weeks later, each of the children in the event occurred, then create a mental picture of the event and its class was interviewed about the incident. Before the children details (Ceci & Bruck, 1998; Gilstrap, 2004). Unfortunately, if an were questioned, the researchers gave some of the interview- adult encourages a child to construct a fantasy about what might ers an accurate account of what had happened. Others were have happened, the child may eventually come to believe that it provided with false information, and a third group was given no did happen, even if it did not. information at all. The interviewers’ instructions were to find out In considering whether children should serve as eyewit- what had happened from each child, but without asking lead- nesses, the key issue is, how valid can children’s reports be ing questions. Despite the instructions, the interviewers did ask expected to be? In the late 1600s, children’s testimony at the leading questions—30% of the time—and half of these were witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, led to the execution of misleading. Naturally, the interviewers who had false beliefs 20 defendants. Young girls testified convincingly that they had about the event asked the most misleading questions. And the seen defendants doing fantastic things, like flying on broom- children were often misled, agreeing with 41% of the misinfor- sticks. Some of the testimony was later recanted, and the mation suggested to them. Apparently, interviewers biased by whole episode created such a negative view of children’s tes- false beliefs can unwittingly maneuver children into providing timony that for three centuries child witnesses were not often false information (see Bruck et al., 2006 for other experimental seen in American court proceedings. Only in the 1980s did examples). (continued) 224 Chapter 6 Elementary-school-aged children are generally less sug- (Lytle, London, & Bruck, 2015). Interviewers are now encour- gestible than preschoolers (Brown & Lamb, 2015; Ceci et al., aged not to use these props with young children (Lamb et al., 2016). For example, their reality monitoring is more adequate, 2015). Interviewers should not use inducements such as telling and they are less affected by leading questions. But even older children they can help their friends by making disclosures. In children and adults are not immune to suggestion (Ackil & Zara- one criminal investigation, for example, investigators said things goza, 1995; Loftus, 1979). Fortunately, witnesses of all ages can to children such as “Boy, I’d hate having to tell your friends that provide more accurate information if they are interviewed under you didn’t want to help them” and “All the other friends I talked conditions designed to minimize suggestion. Even traumatic to told me everything that happened.... You don’t want to be experiences can be recalled well by young children under the left out do you?” (quoted in Ceci & Bruck, 1998, p. 745). Such right conditions. Research on children’s eyewitness testimony pressure might have the effect of encouraging children to produce reveals a number of characteristics that may reduce the influ- responses even when they do not recall the events in question. ence of suggestion in interviews (Ceci et al., 2016; Lamb, Malloy, Another interview strategy to be avoided is stereotype induc- Hershkowitz, & Rooy, 2015). Of course, interviewers should ask tion, that is, slanting the interviewee’s view of an individual. Some- open ended questions, such as “What happened last night?” and times interviewers will encourage children to make revelations by “What happened next?” They should avoid leading questions, as indicating that the alleged perpetrator is a bad person or does bad we have seen, and they should keep both the repetition of ques- things. But in studies where this strategy was implemented, young tions and the number of interviews to a minimum. The interview- children were found to produce incorrect, negative recollections of er’s tone should also be neutral, rather than urgent, aggressive, such an individual’s behavior more often than children who were or accusatory. For example, an accusatory tone may b