L&M Development PDF Notes

Development in L&M (Lecture 21 & 22) Development of learning and memory ○ Precocial species: born with well developed behaviors as a result of genetic makeup ○ Altricial species: born with undeveloped behaviors/skills, highly dependent on social support, high capac...

Development in L&M (Lecture 21 & 22) Development of learning and memory ○ Precocial species: born with well developed behaviors as a result of genetic makeup ○ Altricial species: born with undeveloped behaviors/skills, highly dependent on social support, high capacity for ontogenetic adaptation ○ Long running debate in development psychology about what we know about the world from the earliest moments of life (nature vs nurture) ○ In some cases, we may be hard wired to detect important types of information in the environment (identifying faces immediately after birth) ○ Most adaptation reflects a combination of general learning mechanisms and a vast amount of experience during development We aren’t born with knowledge of our native language, but we have the capacity to quickly learn rules of language from environmental input Habituation ○ Spontaneous recovery: a stimulus evoked response that has been weakened by habituation increases in strength or reappears after a period of no stimulus presentation ○ Stimulus specificity: habituation to one event doesn’t cause habituation to all other stimuli in the same sensory modality Response to new stimuli depends on similarity to original, habituated stimulus ○ A study examined habituation to auditory stimuli in fetuses During third trimester (34-36 weeks), sounds played to fetus using speaker placed against mothers abdomen Fetuses respond to novel sounds by moving Operant conditioning ○ Even in absence of explicit instruction, we use feedback signals (reward and punishment) to learn how to behave ○ Operant conditioning: the process where organisms learn to make responses in order to obtain and avoid important consequences Aka instrumental conditioning ○ In one study: infants can identify familiar stimuli from before birth, and those familiar events act as reinforcers Mothers instructed to read a story aloud during third trimester A few days after birth, newborn was placed in a crib with an artificial nipple Sucking on the artificial nipple caused a tape recorder to play either a familiar story or a novel story depending on frequency  Short pause between sucking, familiar story plays Long pause between sucking, novel story plays Over period of 20 minutes, infants changed sucking behavior in order to cause the familiar story to play ○ Like the cats in Thorndike's puzzle boxes, infants’ early motor development relies on operant conditioning Exploring though random actions Those actions that lead to desirable outcomes tend to be repeated ○ Conjugate reinforcement paradigm Infant placed in a crib below a mobile and baseline rate of kicking is measured Infants leg is connected to mobile via ribbon; kicking now produces a desired outcome (movement of mobile) Once response (consistent kicking) has been acquired, test memory of association after a delay ○ Babies as young as 2 months learn through operant conditioning to produce movement ○ Older infants both acquire the response more quickly and retain it for longer periods ○ Exhibit contextual conditioning: same response is not produced in a different environment Category learning and discrimination ○ From very early age, infants begin to organize their experience through category learning ○ Early categorization based on perceptual differences ○ Over first few years, increasing ability to form more abstract categories and reason about non-perceptual knowledge ○ The preferential looking experimental paradigm is used to test responses to previously exposed and novel stimuli Infant first habituates to a stimulus through repeated exposure Then shown multiple stimuli together Measure preferential looking (proportion of time spent looking at each stimulus) ○ Infant first habituates to stimulus through repeated exposure (looking time decreases) ○ After a delay, the original stimulus is presented again along with a novel stimulus: a preference to look at the novel stimulus (an orienting response) provides evidence that the infant recognized the original stimulus ○ Preferential looking can also provide evidence for perceptual discrimination: if the novel image is perceived as highly similar to the  original image, infant won’t exhibit orienting response (more time spent looking at novel stimulus) ○ Newborns can discriminate between different examples of the same object and examples of different objects ○ Newborns don’t have strong representation of object categories, but 3-4 month old infants do 3-4 month olds begin to demonstrate typicality effects consistent with knowledge of category prototype ○ Discrimination of phonemes /ta/ and /Ta/ in Hindi (graph) Development of episodic memory ○ When do children exhibit episodic memories of the details of their own experience? ○ Within the first month after birth, infants begin to imitate specific facial expressions modeled by adults ○ Use deferred imitation (imitation after a delay) to study episodic memory in infants ○ Study: 12-24 month old infants were exposed to Imitation condition: experimenter modeled pulling toy apart Control condition: experimenter simply displaced the toy Tested whether infants performed the same action either immediately or after a 24 hour delay ○ Results showed that most infants imitated the same action they had observed, both at an immediate and 1 day delay ○ Studies using deferred imitation and similar methods have shown that the reliability and durability of memory rapidly increases over the first few years of childhood Young infants require multiple exposures to an event; by 13 months, a single exposure may be remembered over delay of several months ○ Study: 3-4 year old children asked to hide stuffed animals around their home 3 year olds showed poorer verbal recall of episodic details, but still searched in the right places ○ From early in the first year of life, infants can recall many aspects of previously experienced events ○ However, there early memories are often disorganized, lack connection to a stable sense of self Autobiographical memory ○ Knowledge of specific events experienced at particular time points linked together on a personal timeline Narrative about the self: provide sense of continuity and coherence about who you are  Integrates episodic memory with general knowledge about oneself Not simply memory of an event, but awareness that it happened to you Connections to personal meaning and goal attainment ○ Self defining memories: vivid episodic memories that are connected to self identity and goal attainment ○ The emergence of a coherent self concept allows to organize experiences in relation to our personal history and goals Self referential processing (another way of connecting to meaning) ○ In contrast to evidence of episodic memory in young infants, awareness of the self and autobiographical memory develops later in childhood ○ Emergence of a coherent self concept occurs during second and third year of life ○ As self concept strengthens in years 3-6, provides an anchor for organizing and elaborating new memories Better ability to remember that events were part of own experience (vs happened to another person) Increasing advantage for self relevant information (self reference effect) Level of detail of self descriptions is positively related to extent of autobiographical memory in early ages ○ Childhood amnesia: inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories from early childhood Absence of episodic memory from first few years of life Relatively poor episodic memory from childhood ○ Late development of the cognitive self may contribute to early childhood amnesia Although young children exhibit capacity for episodic memory, they lack the ability to link those memories to the self concept and organize events according to a personal timeline ○ Development also characterized by rapid improvement in cognitive functions (working memory, cognitive control) which support memory encoding and retrieval ○ Although childhood amnesia is a general phenomenon, there is wide variability in the age at which autobiographical memories are reported ○ Cultural variation in age of earliest memories For most adults in western cultures, earliest memory is from when they were 3-4 years old Among asian populations, later earliest memories of childhood  ○ Why might there be cultural differences in the extent of childhood amnesia? Parental reminiscing style ○ Shared reminiscing is a social activity that differs among individuals and between cultures Ex: western cultures place greater emphasis on individualized narratives ○ When children participate in parent guided reminiscence of past experiences, they are learning a practice that contributes to the development of autobiographical memory ○ Individual parents differ in the extent to which they engage in elaborative reminiscing with their children (parental reminiscing style) High elaborative parent Provides rich detail for retrieving and elaborating upon memories for child’s experience Encourages the child to participate in construction of a narrative Open ended questions Feedback and evaluation of child’s responses, integrates into coherent narrative Low elaborative parent Asking few and redundant questions Asking about specific details Little elaboration on past events or reacting to responses ○ Study: Does parental reminiscing style affect age of earliest memory? Recorded mother-child conversations about the recent past (events that had occurred in past 6 months) during early childhood Measured each mother’s reminiscing style 10 years later, asked children (now 12-13 years old) to recall childhood memories Children with high elaborative mothers recalled memories from earlier in life ○ Children with more elaborative parents: Have more fully developed personal narratives at the end of preschool years Engage in more detailed autobiographical recall later in development Have a better understanding of their own and others’ mental states and emotions Have a stronger sense of self extended through time Summary  ○ From earliest stages of development, children exhibit basic mechanisms of learning and memory Reliability and robustness of learning improves over the course of development, in part due to increasing control over those processes ○ Although there is evidence of episodic memories in first years of life, the emergence of coherent autobiographical knowledge occurs later Self concept becomes a fundamental way in which we make sense of and organize memories of our experience Reminiscence bump ○ The tendency for older adults to have enhanced memory for events that occurred during adolescence and early childhood ○ Can’t be explained by changes in cognitive ability (which tends to be stable from early to middle adulthood) ○ Why does the reminiscence bump occur? ○ Potential explanations Novelty: period of many firsts that are distinctive events in life Identity formation: high proportion of self defining events involved in formation of self identity Cultural life script: we organize autobiographical memory according to important events in our culture, many of which occur during early adulthood ○ Study: examined how recalled life events (positive or negative) are judged to be important to personal identity (centrality of event scale) Reminisce bump corresponded to positive life script events Positive events were judged as more central to personal identity Autobiographical memory ○ Research on autobiographical memory illustrates how self concept emerges from, and enhances memory for, important life events ○ Ongoing shifts in reminiscing practices and digital memory may have important impacts on how and what you remember Aging and memory ○ Aging is associated with decline in range of cognitive functions, including reduced attentional resources, reduced speed of cognitive processing, and poorer memory performance ○ Healthy older adults generally have preserved memory for well learned material including: Procedural memories (motor skills, highly automatized routines) Semantic memory Remote episodic memories from earlier in life (especially self defining memories) ○ Relative to young adults, exhibit deficits when  Acquiring new associative memories Required to engage in controlled processing (searching memory based on specific retrieval cues ○ Study: compared implicit and explicit memory between young adults (ages 19-29) and old adults (ages 60-76) No difference between young and old adults on stem completion task Preserved priming effect (implicit memory) Older adults were significantly impaired at cued recall (explicit memory) compared to younger adults ○ Priming is generally intact during aging, whereas explicit memory deteriorates Priming is an example of automatic processing (occurs without explicit intention or awareness) Controlled search of memory (trying to retrieve details of a specific event) tends to be impaired Older adults often exhibit poorer performance in recall tasks despite availability of strong retrieval cues ○ Although healthy older adults generally have intact memory for existing, well learned information, they are increasingly impaired at forming new episodic memories Associative deficit hypothesis: older adults have specific deficit in creating and retrieving associative links between different parts of an event ○ Study: compared episodic memory in young (age about 20 years old) and older adults (age about 70 years old) Participants studied name face pairs in preparation for future memory test Instructed to memorize the face, name, and the association between them ○ Older adults recognition memory for experienced items was similar to that of young adults, but they had poorer memory for face-name associations ○ Impairments in episodic encoding are most evident when materials are unfamiliar or unrelated Less of a deficit when older adults can use existing knowledge to organize elements of an experience ○ A study compared young adults and older adults ability to learn associations for either semantically related or semantically unrelated material ○ After exposure to each combination of a number, objet, and location, participants were given cued recall test (for a given location, recall the number and object) ○ When object and location were semantically related, older adults had similar performance to young adults ○ Older adults impaired for semantically unrelated details, including numbers and unrelated objects ○ Older adults with expertise in numerical information (retired accountants) showed memory for numbers at the same level as young adults ○ Even when older adults have intact episodic memory for remote events they may experience decline in ability to form new memories Poor memory for contextual details, including source of information (increasing susceptibility to effects of misinformation) ○ How can older adults overcome deficits in episodic memory? Use familiar or meaningful materials to help organize different aspects of experience Train strategies that engage elaborate encoding (deep processing in relation to semantic memory) ○ Although research on brain training interventions has shown limited success, epidemiological studies suggest that mentally active lifestyle lowers risk of decline during aging Decreased risk of dementia or cognitive decline associated with More complex work related activities Social interaction Novelty seeking behaviors (travel) Leisure activities involving learning or problem solving (games, playing musical instruments)