EARLY CHILDHOOD COGNITIVE

DEVELOPMENT: INFORMATION
PROCESSING

HPD 4C Working with School age Children and Adolescents

– Mrs. Filinov
INFORMATION PROCESSING
 Is another way of examining and understanding how
children develop cognitively.
 This model, developed in the 1960's and 1970's,
conceptualizes children's mental processes through
the metaphor of a computer processing, encoding,
storing, and decoding data.
 By ages 2 to 5 years, most children have developed
the skills to focus attention for extended periods,
recognize previously encountered information, recall
old information, and reconstruct it in the present.
 For example, a 4-year-old can remember what she did at
Christmas and tell her friend about it when she returns to
preschool after the holiday.
 Between the ages of 2 and 5, long-term memory also
begins to form, which is why most people cannot
remember anything in their childhood prior to age 2
or 3.
 Part of long-term memory involves storing
information about the sequence of events
during familiar situations as "scripts".
 Scripts help children understand,
interpret, and predict what will happen in
future scenarios.
 For example, children understand that a visit to
the grocery store involves a specific sequences of
steps: Dad walks into the store, gets a grocery
cart, selects items from the shelves, waits in the
check-out line, pays for the groceries, and then
loads them into the car.
 Children ages 2 through 5 also start to
recognize that are often multiple ways to
solve a problem and can brainstorm
different (though sometimes primitive)
solutions.
 Between the ages of 5 and 7, children
learn how to focus and use their cognitive
abilities for specific purposes.
 For example, children can learn to pay attention
to and memorize lists of words or facts.
 This skill is obviously crucial for children
starting school who need to learn new
information, retain it and produce it for
tests and other academic activities.
 Children this age have also developed a
larger overall capacity to process
information. This expanding information
processing capacity allows young children
to make connections between old and new
information.
 For example, children can use their knowledge of
the alphabet and letter sounds (phonics) to start
sounding out and reading words. During this
age, children's knowledge base also continues to
grow and become better organized.
 Metacognition, "the ability to think about
thinking", is another important cognitive skill
that develops during early childhood.
 Between ages 2 and 5 years, young children
realize that they use their brains to think.
 By ages 5 to 7 years, children realize they can
actively control their brains, and influence
their ability to process and to accomplish
mental tasks.
 As a result, school-age children start to develop
and choose specific strategies for approaching a
given learning task, monitor their
comprehension of information, and evaluate
their progress toward completing a learning
task.
 For example, first graders learn to use a number line (or
counting on their fingers) when they realize that they
forgot the answer to an addition or subtraction problem.
 Similarly, children who are learning to read
can start to identify words (i.e., "sight words")
that cannot be sounded out using phonics (e.g,
connecting sounds with letters), and must be
memorized.
HOW LANGUAGE IS PROCESSED IN THE BRAIN
 Language has existed for about
two million years, but it is only
in the last 150 that we have
begun to understand what
happens when we listen and
speak.
 Language is uniquely human.
But have you ever stopped to
think what happens in your
brain when someone speaks to
you? How you process words,
and how you form a response?
 Language processing is a vastly
complicated affair that, in
truth, scientists are light years
from fully understanding.
THE DISCOVERY OF THE TWO
EPICENTERS OF LANGUAGE PROCESSING
Broca and Wernicke
 In 1861, neurosurgeon Paul
Broca found that patients with speech
defects had injuries on the left
hemisphere of the brain.
 The idea that language is processed in
the left hemisphere was born, and the
area he discovered was named Broca's
area, thought for years to be solely
responsible for speech production.
 A decade later, neurologist Carl
Wernicke discovered an area to the
rear of the left hemisphere, now called
Wernicke's area that he linked with
processing the words we hear.
 Broca's area and Wernicke's area are
linked by a bundle of nerve fibers
called the arcuate fasciculus.
WORKING THEORY

 From these discoveries came the

classic model of language processing:
 Sounds are processed by the auditory
cortex, go then to Wernicke's area to be
understood, travel along the arcuate
fasciculus to Broca's area, and the motor
cortex, finally resulting in speech- And all
this is done in the left hemisphere.
Straightforward.
 All the areas of the brain are
activated simultaneously during
language processing. Plus, although
each area has its own specialty, they
all pitch in and help out with
different language processes.
 As no other animal has a speech
system like ours, scientists were
limited to studying the effects of
disease and damage on language
production for decades.
TECHNOLOGICAL HELP
Here is a recent sample of the role of technology in helping us to
decipher how the brain processes language.
 In 2008, researchers used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a non-
invasive imaging technique, and found that the arcuate fasciculus in
humans is much larger and projects further than it does in monkeys,
leading them to hypothesize that we may have language while other
creatures don't because our brains are simply better connected.
 In 2009, San Diego researchers used Intra-Cranial Electrophysiology
(ICE), where electrodes are placed on the brain, to show that Broca's
area is involved in both hearing and producing speech, not just
production as had been previously thought.
 In 2011, New York University researchers used
magnetoencephalography, (MEG) where coils are attached to the
head to measure magnetic fields produced by the brain's electrical
activity. They found that while processing simple two word phrases,
neither Broca's or Wernicke's areas are involved. Rather, the left
anterior temporal lobe (LATL) and the ventromedial prefrontal
cortex (vmPFC) showed increased activity.
 And that is just a minute slice of the tireless research currently
being undertaken. Despite all the uncertainties and changing
theories, there have been some irrefutable discoveries that tell us
how different people process language in different ways.
LEFT HEMISPHERE DOMINANCE?
 Numerous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
studies have shown that the left hemisphere is
dominant for language processing in around 96% of
people, not 100% as Broca originally thought.
 Still, he based this theory on the examination of just eight
patients, which would be unheard of today.
 In the remaining 4%, the right hemisphere is dominant.
 There is no known reason for why one particular
hemisphere dominates language processing.
ONE HEMISPHERE ONLY?

 A second long-held belief about how

we process language is that it takes
place in one hemisphere only.
However, a review of 23
neuroimaging studies by the
University of Leipzig in
2008 concluded that this is not the
case.
 It is now accepted that while the
dominant hemisphere is
responsible for the nuts and
bolts of language processing,
the "minor" hemisphere helps
interpret tone, nuance,
metaphors and so on.
MALE VS. FEMALE

 We may have long suspected it, but

science has proven that men and women
are on different wavelengths.
 A 2000 study by the Indiana School of
Medicine is just one of a raft of fMRI studies
showing that men and women listen
differently. The study found that men use the
dominant hemisphere (usually left) to listen,
while women use both hemispheres.
 In addition, a 1997 study by the University of
Sydney found that Broca's area and
Wernicke's area, those two powerhouses of
language, are significantly bigger in women
than in men, by up to 20%.
 These differences may partly explain the
statistics indicating that women are
more likely to have better developed
language skills than men.
BILINGUAL VS. MONOLINGUAL

 Scientists used to think that learning a second

language could only be done at the expense of the
first, like there was a finite number of neurons in
the brain assigned for language. Now, thanks to
human research and fMRI, this belief has been
debunked.