Information Processing Approach

The information processing approach views thinking as the processing of information. It developed alongside the rise of computers and uses the computer as an analogy for the human mind.

Computer analogy

Computer	Human cognition
Processor	Brain
Hardware	Brain structures/neural connections
RAM	Working memory
Hard drive/storage	Long-term memory
Mouse/keyboard input	Sensory input
Software	Mental processes/strategies

Human “software” = mental programs controlling how information is:

• received
• interpreted
• stored
• retrieved
• analysed

Both computers and humans also engage in parallel processing.

Babies aren’t “blank slates”

Babies already have powerful innate/pre-programmed capacities that allow them to:

• process information
• form representations
• make predictions
• interact with others

Development then involves learning and neural rewiring — essentially adding to and modifying the programs already present.

Other humans are also naturally inclined to support this development. For example:

• adults vocalise → babies imitate → helps develop vocalisation/language
• caregivers are drawn to infant-like features and motivated to nurture infants
• social interaction gives children opportunities to practise developing abilities

Development is continuous

A major difference from Piaget:

Information processing = continuous development rather than stage-like development.

Children don’t suddenly gain an entirely new type of cognition when entering a stage. Instead, their processing abilities gradually become more powerful.

Children differ from adults mainly because they are more limited in how much information they can:

• take in
• store
• manipulate
• retrieve

Development ≈ continually upgrading both the hardware and software.

The neural-development images on slide p. 5 illustrate this nicely: pyramidal neurons become dramatically more interconnected from newborn → 3 months → 6 months → 2 years.

Basic Information Processing Model

Learning involves three broad processes:

1. Encoding

Encoding = transforming sensory input and experiences into a usable form that can be stored and later retrieved.

Information initially enters through sensory systems:

• vision
• hearing
• touch
• smell etc.

Importantly, effective encoding involves learning to:

encode relevant information while screening out irrelevant information.

2. Storage

Information can be stored through systems including:

• working memory
• short-term memory
• long-term memory

3. Retrieval

Getting previously stored information back.

Two major forms:

Recognition

• stimulus/cue is provided
• generally easier

Recall

• retrieve information without the stimulus being present
• more demanding

Siegler’s Processes in Children’s Thinking

Siegler (1998) identified four important developmental processes.

Encoding

Getting information into memory.

Children increasingly improve at identifying what is relevant and ignoring irrelevant information.

Automaticity

Ability to process information with little or no conscious effort.

As processes become automatic, they consume fewer cognitive resources.

→ This frees working memory for other tasks.

Clear evidence of automaticity appears from around age 2.

Strategy construction

Children discover new ways of processing information.

Even 4–5-year-olds may use multiple strategies to solve the same problem.

Generalisation

Using information or strategies learned in one situation to solve other problems.

→ improves with age.

Development of Attention

Attention gradually shifts from being largely stimulus-driven to being under deliberate cognitive control.

Age	Attention
Newborn	Scans novel stimuli; mainly stimulus-driven
~4 months	Can selectively attend briefly, but struggles to ignore distractions
Toddler	Can rapidly shift attention between activities but is easily distracted
4–5 years	Can perform selective-attention tasks but still attends to irrelevant stimuli
6–7 years	Much better cognitive control; attends efficiently to relevant task dimensions
7–9 years	True selective attention — deliberately filters distractions
~11+	Incidental learning begins declining rapidly
Young adulthood	Excellent attentional control
Older adulthood	Attentional abilities decline

Selective attention

Selective attention = deliberately focusing on relevant information while screening out irrelevant stimuli.

The lecture’s animal task demonstrates this: children are told to remember only the animals while being shown animals mixed with irrelevant objects.

Interestingly, younger children may actually remember more of the irrelevant objects than adults.

Why?

Their attentional filtering isn’t as strong yet.

Incidental Learning

Incidental learning = learning information that wasn’t deliberately being attended to.

Children show high incidental learning because their brains process lots of information, including things that aren’t currently relevant.

This remains relatively strong until approximately age 11, then decreases rapidly.

The lecturer’s explanation was essentially:

Young brains don’t necessarily know what information will eventually be important, so they take in a huge amount of it.

As cognitive control improves, the brain becomes increasingly selective.

Multitasking

Our ability to shift attention between tasks improves during development.

BUT:

Humans cannot genuinely perform multiple conscious cognitive tasks simultaneously.

What we call multitasking is actually:

Task A → switch → Task B → switch → Task C

Every attentional switch creates a cognitive cost:

• consumes cognitive resources
• takes time
• reduces efficiency

This cost exists even in adults.

Memory in Infancy

Researchers can’t simply ask babies what they remember, so developmental psychologists use clever behavioural measures.

Deferred imitation

Deferred imitation = reproducing an observed behaviour after a delay.

If the infant can reproduce it later, they must have retained some representation of the behaviour.

Age	Memory demonstrated
6 months	Deferred imitation
9 months	Imitation after 24 hours
12 months	Remembers simple sequences
14 months	Imitation after 7 days
2 years	Remembers complex behavioural sequences

Memory therefore becomes both more durable and more complex.

Habituation

Habituation = responding less to a repeatedly presented stimulus.

For habituation to occur, the infant must remember that they’ve encountered the stimulus before.

Habituation is present from birth.

Early memory is:

• recognition-based
• stimulus-cued
• extremely brief
• demonstrated across auditory, visual and tactile stimuli

So even newborns possess a rudimentary form of memory.

Operant Conditioning as Evidence of Infant Memory

Another clever method involves conditioning infants to move a mobile.

A ribbon is attached so that kicking/pulling causes the mobile to move.

The infant learns:

movement → interesting mobile response

Researchers then examine how long they retain that learned response.

Age	Retention
2 months	~3 days
3 months	~8 days
5 months	Only 5–10 sec exposure needed for learning
6 months	Up to ~21 days

Reactivation — Rovee-Collier

Three-month-old infants initially retained the conditioned response for about 8 days.

However, researchers later briefly showed them the ribbon/mobile again.

Just 3 minutes of exposure to this cue 24 hours before testing could reactivate the memory after gaps of 14 or even 28 days.

→ The memory hadn’t necessarily disappeared; it could sometimes be reactivated by an appropriate cue.

Encoding Specificity

Encoding specificity = retrieval is better when the retrieval environment resembles the environment in which the information was originally encoded.

In simple terms:

Memory is easier to retrieve when the context matches the context in which you learned it.

Recognition vs Recall

Recognition

Cued memory

Present from birth.

Recall

Uncued retrieval

True recall begins around 8–11 months.

By approximately 2 years, children demonstrate much more complex and durable memories.

Implicit vs Explicit Memory

Implicit memory

Memory that influences behaviour without conscious awareness.

Includes:

• motor/body memory
• skills
• conditioned learning
• associative memory
• repetition priming

Example: knowing where your fingers need to go when playing an instrument without consciously recalling every movement.

Implicit memory:

• matures quite early (~2–3 years)
• does not improve substantially with age
• is relatively stable across development
• can remain strong even in some children who have explicit-memory learning difficulties

Explicit memory

Conscious recollection of past information or events.

True recall emerges around 8–11 months.

Evidence includes:

• searching for hidden objects
• deferred imitation
• reproducing sequences of actions

Unlike implicit memory:

Explicit recall continues improving with age and matures through adolescence.

Why Does Memory Improve With Age?

Four major reasons:

1. Faster processing

Neural processing becomes faster and more efficient.

Older children can hold and manipulate more information simultaneously in working memory.

2. Better memory strategies

Children gradually acquire more effective ways of encoding and retrieving information.

3. Larger knowledge base

Existing knowledge gives new information somewhere to “fit.”

4. Better metamemory

Children increasingly understand how their own memory works.

Development of Memory Strategies

Rehearsal

Repeating information.

Example:

4917… 4917… 4917…

Basic but useful.

Scripts

Develop from approximately 2–3 years.

Scripts represent expected sequences of events.

Example — birthday party:

cake → presents → play → home

Organisation

Develops around 9–10 years.

Information is organised into meaningful groups.

Example: chunking a phone number rather than remembering every digit independently.

Elaboration

Develops around 12+ years.

Elaboration = creating meaningful connections between new information and existing knowledge.

Examples:

• associations
• visualisation
• examples
• linking concepts to familiar locations

Elaboration becomes especially powerful as the person’s knowledge base expands.

Tired Learning & the Cognitive Tipping Point

The lecturer highlighted an extremely relevant study point:

You can read something while exhausted and feel like you’re processing it, while actually encoding very little.

This occurs after the cognitive tipping point — the point where fatigue prevents effective learning.

Good learning therefore needs:

sleep → learning → sleep

You need adequate sleep:

• before learning → effective encoding
• after learning → consolidation into long-term memory

So cramming while exhausted is particularly ineffective.

Schemas

A schema is a mental framework representing some aspect of experience.

Schemas contain:

• knowledge
• expectations
• emotions
• related memories
• action tendencies
• scripts

Example: supermarket schema

Seeing a supermarket activates knowledge about:

• what supermarkets look like
• where products usually are
• how shopping works
• what happens at checkout
• what you’re expected to do

Why are schemas useful?

They’re cognitive shortcuts.

Instead of analysing every familiar situation from scratch, the schema automatically guides expectations and behaviour.

This frees cognitive resources for other tasks.

BUT schemas also bias perception

Schemas frame how we interpret ambiguous situations.

The lecture’s images on pp. 17–18 illustrate this: the same ambiguous image can produce different interpretations depending on the observer’s existing expectations, such as whether two children appear to be fighting or playing.

Scripts & Constructive Memory

A script is a schema describing the expected sequence of events in a familiar situation.

Children develop scripts for:

• school
• weekdays
• weekends
• restaurants
• bedtime
• birthday parties

Scripts help memory because new information can be attached to an existing knowledge structure.

Expertise effect

A child who is a chess expert can remember chess information better than an adult chess novice.

Why?

The child has an existing schema into which the new information can be encoded.

Downside: schema-consistent memory

People tend to:

• encode information that fits existing schemas
• overlook information that contradicts schemas

This helps explain processes such as stereotyping.

Metamemory

Metamemory = knowledge about memory and how your own memory works.

Even around age 5, children understand that:

• remembering requires effort
• short lists are easier than long lists
• important/salient events are easier to remember
• distraction makes remembering harder
• adults remember more than babies
• yesterday is easier to remember than last month

Older children become increasingly aware of their own memory limitations.

This allows them to choose adaptive strategies.

Why Might Someone Fail a Test?

Poor performance doesn’t necessarily mean the information was never learned.

Possible failures can occur at different stages of information processing:

Attention
→ didn’t attend to the relevant information.

Working memory
→ couldn’t hold/manipulate all relevant information.

Encoding
→ learned while tired / past cognitive tipping point.

Storage
→ lacked strategies for transferring information to long-term memory.

Retrieval
→ information is stored but can’t be accessed effectively.

Executive control
→ difficulty coordinating the steps needed for problem solving.

Memory & Ageing

Memory does decline with age on average, but ageing does not affect every person or every type of memory equally.

General patterns

Older adults tend to:

• learn new material more slowly
• recall it less effectively

BUT:

• expertise can compensate
• some older adults experience very little memory decline
• different memory systems age differently

Memory process	Ageing
Episodic memory	Declines
Semantic memory	Knowledge retained, but retrieval becomes slower
Processing speed	Begins declining relatively early (~25)
Working memory	Declines later (~45)
Explicit memory	More affected
Implicit memory	Relatively preserved
Memory strategies	Used less often

Contextual factors

Greater memory problems are associated with:

• lower education
• longer time outside the workforce
• chronic/degenerative disease
• less active lifestyles
• fewer cognitively demanding activities
• negative stereotypes about ageing

Main principle

Use it or lose it.

Maintaining cognitively challenging activities and meaningful social interactions helps keep the brain active.

Sociocultural Approach to Cognitive Development

Information processing still largely examines what happens within the individual.

Sociocultural theorists argue:

Cognition develops within a social and cultural world.

Important theorists:

• Lev Vygotsky
• Urie Bronfenbrenner

Processes such as attention, learning and memory are affected by what occurs outside the child.

What Is Culture?

Culture includes shared:

• beliefs
• values
• knowledge
• relationships
• customs
• symbols
• language
• social settings
• physical environments
• objects/tools
• historical influences

For sociocultural theorists, culture isn’t simply an external variable influencing development.

Culture helps determine what skills children learn and how they learn them.

Vygotsky vs Piaget: Basic Difference

Piaget

Cognitive development = individual discovery.

The child explores the environment and constructs knowledge.

Vygotsky

Cognitive development = socially mediated learning.

Children don’t learn alone. They:

• ask questions
• receive instruction
• imitate others
• receive assistance
• interact with more knowledgeable people

Parents, siblings and older peers:

• introduce new challenges
• assist difficult tasks
• provide instruction
• encourage learning

Vygotsky’s basic idea:

The route between the child and the world often passes through another person.

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

Higher cognitive functioning derives from social life.

Development is mediated through cultural tools and signs, particularly:

• words
• language
• discourse
• interaction

Social interactions are gradually internalised and become part of the child’s own cognitive functioning.

Sociocognitive Conflict

Doise & Mugny (1975) used Piaget’s conservation task.

Children initially had no conservation skills.

Conditions

Experimental group

• children shared/completed task socially

Control group

• completed it without sharing

Results

• 24/37 children in social condition improved
• only 2/12 controls improved
• improvements remained one month later

Why might interaction help?

Seeing someone give a different answer creates disequilibrium.

The child thinks:

“Wait… they’re doing this differently from me.”

This:

• challenges existing thinking
• provides useful cues
• encourages cognitive activity
• promotes restructuring of knowledge

Scaffolding

Scaffolding = temporary, step-by-step assistance that allows a learner to perform something they could not yet perform independently.

Like scaffolding around a building:

• provides support
• extends what is possible
• is placed where needed
• is gradually removed

Guided participation

Parents, teachers, siblings or skilled peers guide the learner.

Crucially:

The adult doesn’t simply solve the problem.

Instead, they provide the means for the child to discover the solution.

Example:

Child: “What’s 6 + 6?”

Rather than:

“12.”

A scaffolded response might be:

“How could we work it out?”

Then provide a strategy.

As competence grows → support is gradually withdrawn.

Zone of Proximal Development

One of Vygotsky’s central concepts.

The Zone of Proximal Development is the gap between:

what the learner can do independently

and

what the learner can do with guidance from a more capable person.

Think of three zones:

Zone	Meaning
Already knows	Too easy / little learning
ZPD	Challenging but achievable with guidance
Cannot yet grasp	Too difficult even with help

The middle zone is where skills are “ripe” for development.

Good teaching targets the ZPD

Teachers/parents should:

1. identify what the child can currently do
2. introduce something slightly beyond that level
3. provide scaffolding
4. allow the child to practise
5. gradually remove support
6. child internalises the skill

So scaffolding essentially builds a bridge between current ability and potential ability.

Limitations of Scaffolding/ZPD

The process assumes suitable social support exists.

Problems:

• responsive adults aren’t always available
• adults differ in scaffolding ability
• some mentors provide better guidance than others
• older/more experienced guides often scaffold more effectively

Language Mediates Thought

For Vygotsky:

Language doesn’t simply express thought — language helps construct thought.

Children internalise socially supported ways of solving problems.

The process is:

external dialogue → internal dialogue

The structure of conversations children have with others gradually becomes part of the structure of their own thinking.

Social → Private → Inner Speech

Social speech — ~1 year

Talking aloud to other people.

Private speech — ~3 years

Talking aloud to yourself to guide behaviour.

Example:

“I need the blue pencil… no, I’ll use the red one…”

Private speech helps:

• plan behaviour
• guide actions
• monitor performance
• solve problems

Inner speech — ~7 years

Private speech becomes internalised.

→ silently thinking in words

Piaget vs Vygotsky

Piaget:

Private speech reflects egocentrism/cognitive immaturity.

Vygotsky:

Private speech reflects developing self-regulation and cognitive competence.

Evidence discussed in the lecture supports Vygotsky’s interpretation.

Importantly, even adults may revert to private speech when a task becomes cognitively difficult.

Dynamic Assessment

Traditional assessment asks:

What can this child do independently right now?

Vygotsky was more interested in:

What could this child potentially do with appropriate assistance?

Dynamic assessment

The researcher:

• gives the child a problem
• provides tools/clues
• offers assistance
• observes how performance changes

The emphasis is on the process of learning, rather than simply whether the child initially gets the correct answer.

Assessment should also be culturally appropriate.

Educational Applications of Vygotsky

Useful principles include:

• provide just enough assistance
• ask children how they think they could solve a problem
• use more skilled peers as teachers
• use mentoring/vertical groupings
• encourage private speech
• identify and teach within the child’s ZPD
• treat learning as interpersonal
• use meaningful real-world contexts

Rogoff’s Apprenticeship Concept

Barbara Rogoff extended sociocultural ideas through the concept of cognitive apprenticeship.

Children develop through guided participation in everyday social activities.

Learning occurs collaboratively:

current understanding → social participation/guidance → new understanding

Much of this learning is informal.

The lecturer compared it to learning a trade as an apprentice: you learn not simply from formal instruction, but by being around skilled people, watching them, participating and gradually doing more yourself.

Culture & Cognitive Apprenticeship

Cultures differ in:

• developmental goals
• valued skills
• activities children participate in
• communication with children
• methods of instruction

Therefore:

There is no single universal form of cognitive apprenticeship.

Children learn from:

• parents
• teachers
• peers
• schools
• neighbourhoods
• communities

Skills that a culture values are more likely to be actively transmitted to children.

Why Cross-Cultural Research Matters

Cross-cultural research helps distinguish:

Universal development
→ processes found across cultures.

from

Culture-specific development
→ patterns shaped by particular social/cultural environments.

This helps psychology avoid overgeneralising findings from one cultural group to everyone.

Examples discussed included cultural differences in:

• infant sleeping arrangements
• how babies are held
• preschool adult:child ratios
• value placed on academic vs non-academic activities
• expectations of infant temperament

Vygotsky, Strengths & Limitations

Strengths

Attention to sociocultural context

• corrects overly individualistic theories

Integration of learning and development

• focuses on developmental change and potential

Dynamic assessment

• considers what children can achieve with support

Sensitivity to diversity

• recognises different developmental pathways

Less Western middle-class bias

• explicitly considers culture.

Limitations

ZPD is difficult to measure precisely.

It’s difficult to:

• operationalise developmental potential
• explain variability across contexts
• empirically connect broad cultural/historical influences to specific parent-child interactions

So the theory contains powerful ideas, but some are difficult to test scientifically.

Piaget vs Vygotsky

Piaget	Vygotsky
Cognitive development is universal	Development differs across cultural contexts
Growth through exploration	Growth through social interaction
Child constructs knowledge individually	Knowledge is co-constructed
Environment/objects central	Social/cultural context central
Individual processes become social	Social processes become internalised
Strong emphasis on peers	Strong emphasis on more capable/older others
Development → learning	Learning → development
Private speech = egocentrism	Private speech = self-regulation

Social Cognition

Social cognition = children’s developing understanding of other people’s minds.

Piaget originally argued that preoperational children (2–7) had considerable difficulty understanding mental life.

Realism

Young children may struggle to distinguish:

• reality
• thoughts about reality
• fantasy

Animism

Children attribute mental/living properties to inanimate objects.

Example:

“My teddy is lonely.”

More recent research suggests children understand other minds earlier than Piaget originally proposed.

Theory of Mind

Theory of Mind (ToM) = a coherent understanding that other people are mental beings.

Children understand that people have:

• thoughts
• feelings
• beliefs
• desires
• intentions

and crucially:

These mental states guide behaviour.

Theory of Mind allows children to understand:

• guessing
• remembering
• deception
• tricks
• secrets

and predict:

• what someone will do
• how someone might feel

Development of Understanding Other People

Birth

Newborns already treat humans as special.

They:

• prefer human faces
• imitate facial expressions
• coo/babble
• elicit caregiver responses

8–12 months, Joint Attention

Joint attention = monitoring another person’s gaze and attending to what they’re looking at.

This demonstrates an early understanding of intentionality.

8–12 months, Social Referencing

Infants look to caregivers to determine how to respond to uncertain situations.

Example:
visual cliff

The infant effectively asks:

“Should I be worried about this?”

This shows emerging awareness of other people’s emotional states.

Around 2 Years, Egocentricity

Children still often assume:

• others see what they see
• others use objects the same way
• others like the same things

So their understanding of other perspectives remains limited.

18–24 Months, Desire

Children begin understanding:

Other people can want different things from me.

They can:

• recognise others’ desires
• explain behaviour through wants
• recognise conflicting desires
• begin showing empathy

Example:

• comforting another child
• caring for an injured toy

However, they still don’t properly represent other people’s belief states.

Around 3 Years, Reality

Children become better at understanding different physical perspectives.

For example:

“If you’re standing over there, you see something different from what I see.”

They’re moving beyond spatial egocentrism.

BUT they still struggle with false representations of reality.

They essentially treat the mind like a photocopier:

world → mind accurately represents world

Around 4 Years, Belief Psychologists

Major development:

Children understand that the mind is an active, constructive system.

They realise:

• people mentally represent reality
• representations can differ between people
• representations can be wrong
• people act according to what they believe, not necessarily according to reality

This is the basis of false-belief understanding.

False Belief Tasks

A child understands false belief when they recognise:

Another person can believe something that I know is false.

Unexpected Transfer Task

A character places an object somewhere and leaves.

Someone moves the object.

The child knows the new location.

Question:

Where will the original character look?

To answer correctly, the child must separate:

what I know

from

what the character believes

Classic findings show children under ~4 often struggle because they assume the character knows what they know.

Around age 4, children become much more successful.

What Does Having Theory of Mind Require?

At minimum:

1. understanding the relationship between beliefs and behaviour
2. understanding mental-state language
3. understanding that beliefs can be false

How Does Theory of Mind Develop?

Nativist explanation

Theory of Mind emerges primarily through neurological maturation.

Proposes specialised “mind-reading” cognitive systems/modules.

Classic argument:

Around age 4 the relevant neurological system matures → ToM emerges.

Research involving autism has historically been used to support this account, although the lecture notes that more recent thinking increasingly emphasises learning and experience.

Learning & Experience Explanation

Children tend to perform better on ToM tasks when they have:

• stronger language development
• older siblings
• regular extended-family contact
• parents who discuss people’s feelings
• parents who use mental-state language
• parents who discuss intentions
• more opportunities to encounter different perspectives

Research discussed in the lecture links ToM with:

• mother-child discussion of feelings
• parental mind-mindedness
• discussion of mental states during discipline
• sibling interactions

Why might this help?

Children encounter conflicting perspectives:

“I think X, but you think Y.”

That conflict forces them to recognise that different minds can represent the same situation differently.

Social experience therefore provides an informal apprenticeship in understanding minds.