Cognitive Development and Working Memory

A Dialogue between Neo-Piagetian Theories and Cognitive Approaches

Pierre Barrouillet, Vinciane Gaillard

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136930058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

The intellectual development of human beings from birth to adulthood is a fascinating phenomenon. Understanding the constraints that limit children's intelligence, as well as discovering methods to improve it, has always been a challenging undertaking for developmental psychologists. This book presents a unique attempt to address these issues by establishing a dialogue between neo-Piagetian theorists and researchers specialized in typical and atypical working memory development.

The book integrates recent advances in studies of working memory development with theories proposed by the most prominent neo-Piagetian researchers who have emphasized the role of cognitive resources and working memory capacity in the development of thinking and reasoning. In the opening section, the main proponents of this tradition develop their theories of cognitive development in terms of available mental attention, processing efficiency and speed, inhibition and relational complexity. The second part of the book addresses the mechanisms that underpin the increase in working memory capacity and the respective roles of processing efficiency, storage capacity, and the use of reactivation processes of memory traces such as rehearsal. Finally, the central role played by working memory in atypical development and learning difficulties is examined.

This book provides psychologists, students and researchers who are interested in child development with an integrated and up-to-date series of chapters written by prominent specialists in the areas of working memory, attention, and cognitive development.

1
Introduction

From neo-Piagetian theories to working memory development studies

Pierre Barrouillet and Vinciane Gaillard

The changes occurring in human intelligence from birth to the end of adolescence and the corollary increase in knowledge, skills, and abilities are probably among the most striking phenomena that can be studied in natural sciences. Though physical growth from the embryo to the mature organism is by itself astonishing, cognitive development is even more impressive as unique to our species and appears as the main fact of the extended developmental period that characterizes Homo sapiens sapiens. It does not come as a surprise that, from the very beginning of scientific psychology at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, the discovery of the mechanisms underlying cognitive development has been a fascinating challenge. There is no doubt that among these psychologists, Jean Piaget was the author who offered the most vivid picture of these developmental changes, contrasting the limitations of the young child’s thinking with the capacity of the adolescent’s and adult’s formal thinking to grasp complexity and deal with abstract and hypothetical matters.

As noted by Nelson Cowan in this book, no scientific enterprise starts within an individual, and Piaget acknowledged the influence on his thinking, among others, of the ideas put forward by J. M. Baldwin (1894) about the role of the span of attention, which he conceived as the maximum number of mental elements that the child can simultaneously take into account, a limitation resulting from neurological constraints and a slow physical development. Of course, Piaget described cognitive development as a progression towards rationality through the construction of logical structures underlying behavior, but his account of the egocentric and intuitive thinking of young children as the incapacity to coordinate different points of view and dimensions echoes Baldwin’s notion of a limited span of attention in children. Thus, right from the start, developmental psychologists surmised that most of the developmental differences between children and adults would come from the limited capacity of the former in embracing all the relevant aspects and dimensions of the situations they are faced with and try to understand. The cognitive revolution that occurred during the 50s and Miller’s magical number provided the general theoretical framework to describe this limitation and how it is overcome with age. The mind was then understood as an information processing system whose capacity is limited by the amount of information that can be held active and ready for treatment and by the speed at which this information can be processed. The integration of this information processing approach within the Piagetian constructivism and structuralism led to theories of cognitive development known as neo-Piagetian (Case, 1985; Demetriou & Efklides, 1987; Demetriou & Raftopoulos, 1999; Halford, 1978, 1993; Pascual-Leone, 1970).

Among the main tenets of the neo-Piagetian theories is the idea that cognitive activities impose a load to the processing system (Morra, Gobbo, Marini, & Sheese, 2008), with the corollary idea, whose origin can be traced back as we have seen to J. M. Baldwin, that there is some processing or cognitive capacity, often considered as attentional, which is limited but increases with age and permits to cope with higher information load. Within the contemporary experimental cognitive psychology, this general processing capacity is described as the capacity of working memory. Devoted to maintain information temporarily active and ready for treatment in face of any distracting events, working memory is considered to be the “workbench of cognition” (Jarrold & Towse, 2006). From the seminal work of Baddeley and Hitch (1974), many theories have been proposed to account for the functioning and limited capacity of this system (Baddeley & Logie, 1999; Barrouillet, Bernardin, & Camos, 2004; Cowan, 2005; Engle & Kane, 2004; Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995), and for its development (Barrouillet, Gavens, Vergauwe, Gaillard, & Camos, 2009; Case, Kurland, & Goldberg, 1982; Towse & Hitch, 1995). From the commonality of concepts developed by neo-Piagetian and working memory theorists, a tradition of exchanges and mutual enrichment could have been expected between the two traditions of research. Surprisingly, and apart from some noticeable exceptions (Baddeley & Hitch, 2000; Cowan, Saults, & Elliott, 2002; Halford, Cowan, & Andrews, 2007; Kemps, De Rammelaere, & Desmet, 2000; Morra, 2000), the two realms have remained separated. The aim of the present book was to bridge this gap by offering an opportunity of dialog between both traditions. Issuing from a series of conferences held in Geneva in July 2008 for the 18th Advanced Course of the Archives Jean Piaget, it gathers preeminent neo-Piagetian theorists of cognitive development with specialists of the development of working memory.

A first part is devoted to neo-Piagetian theories and the role they assign to working memory in development. Though each of these theories develops its own account of what the cognitive resources are underlying cognitive development, these resources being described as mental attention, central executive resources, or capacity of a processing system, all of them agree that there is some limited capacity that increases with age and permits solution of more and more complex problems. With Juan Pascual-Leone’s theory of constructive operators (TCO), Halford’s Relational Complexity (RC) theory, and Demetriou’s theory of experiential structuralism, three of the most important neo-Piagetian theories are represented and developed here. A second part addresses the arduous problem of the nature of the processes underlying working memory development. As Towse, Hitch, and Horton (2007) noted in their recent survey of the literature, although an extensive body of research has been devoted to working memory in children, it is not easy to discern a developmental model of working memory. Three contributions are presented here, issued from three different conceptions of working memory (the seminal multi-component model of Baddeley and Hitch, Cowan’s embedded process model, and Barrouillet and Camos’ time-based resource-sharing model). Of course, these contributions do not constitute a definitive answer to Towse, Hitch, and Horton’s observation, but rather a body of proposals that could delineate the bases for a future integrative theory of working memory development. Finally, a third part illustrates the role of working memory in atypical development by investigating its impact on learning disabilities and the working memory profile of several atypical populations.

Neo-Piagetian theories and working memory

In Chapter 2, Juan Pascual-Leone and Janice Johnson present their theory of constructive operators (TCO), stressing the role of mental attention in cognitive development. They cogently note that working memory capacity has proven to be difficult to measure, and suggest that this is due to a failure to identify the functional units of processing, the “chunks,” that can be activated, and to develop a theoretically grounded method for task analysis. They claim that TCO provides us with the organismic theory and the method of task analysis that permits the measurement of the hidden resources. According to this view, the functional units are the different schemes, and the hidden resource is mental attention. This construct can be measured by the size of the set of distinct schemes that can be endogenously activated and coordinated at a given developmental level. Mental attention increases with age, enabling the transition from one developmental stage to the next. From several original tasks including either verbal or visuo-spatial material, Pascual-Leone and Johnson observe that the maximum number of symbolic schemes that can be simultaneously activated, which is called M-power, evolves from 1 in the low preoperational stage to 7 in adolescents and adults, echoing Miller’s magical number. Interestingly, they show that although the precise nature of the schemes involved changes from one task to another, M-power values remain remarkably constant across tasks and domains for a given developmental level. Finally, Pascual-Leone and Johnson evoke recent fMRI studies (functional magnetic resonance imaging) supporting their M-capacity construct.

Quantifying the complexity of cognitive tasks is also the main concern of Glenda Andrews and Graeme Halford in Chapter 3. According to their Relational Complexity (RC) theory, complexity is defined in terms of the complexity of the mental models that underlie thinking. Here, cognitive development is no longer characterized by the capacity to simultaneously activate an increasing number of schemes, but by the capacity to construct mental models involving more and more complex relations. A metric of complexity is provided, which is the number of independent variables that are related in a cognitive representation. Thus, whereas young children can only apprehend one dimension in unary relations, adolescents and adults can represent quaternary relations involving four slots, such as proportions, a developmental level corresponding to the stage of formal operations in Piaget’s theory. Using traditional Piagetian tasks as transitive inferences and inclusion tasks, as well as a version of the Iowa Gambling Task adapted for children, Andrews and Halford show that children’s performance depends on the relational complexity involved by the tasks, with evidence of consistency within individuals. All the tasks involving a same level of complexity are either failed or passed depending on the developmental level reached. As other neo-Piagetian theorists, Andrews and Halford assume that cognitive development is underpinned by a growth in processing resources, which are conceived as the capacity of the central executive component of Baddeley’s model. The upper limit is not 7 as in Pascual-Leone’s account, but 4, which corresponds to the working memory limitation of four chunks proposed by Cowan (2005). A large part of their chapter is devoted to brain imaging studies showing that activations in the prefrontal cortex are related to the relational complexity of the tasks.

In Chapter 4, Andreas Demetriou and Antigoni Mouyi present their theory that integrates the experimental, differential, and developmental traditions to propose a comprehensive model of the mental architecture of the mind. Their theory distinguishes three levels. A first level, named the Specialized Domains of Thought, is dedicated to the representation and processing of different aspects of our physical and social environment. This level reflects and processes the different fields of reality, namely the categorical, quantitative, spatial, causal, social, and verbal domains. These systems involve processes and abilities. A second level, named the Hypercognitive System, corresponds to a set of metacognitive representations and processes directed to the self. It involves processes such as self-monitoring, self-representation, and self-regulation. Consciousness is part of this system. Finally, a third system, named Processing Potentials, the most basic, involves general processes and functions such as processing, control of processing, and representational capacity or working memory. Interestingly, Demetriou and Mouyi integrate both Pascual-Leone’s and Halford’s views in suggesting that working memory capacity is defined as the maximum amount and complexity of the representations and mental acts that can be handled simultaneously. Another original proposal is that these components are involved in a cascade model in which age-related changes in speed of processing open the way for changes in control of processing, which in turn open the way for the enhancement of working memory that permits development in high-level cognitive processes such as reasoning. These hypothesized relations between processing speed, processing efficiency, working memory capacity, and reasoning performance echo Case’s conceptions and are directly addressed in the following chapter by Anik de Ribaupierre and her colleagues.

In Chapter 5, Anik de Ribaupierre, Delphine Fagot, and Thierry Lecerf directly address the role of working memory in cognitive development. Do measures of working memory capacity predict children’s performance in developmental tasks such as traditional Piagetian tasks? Using tasks designed by Pascual-Leone to measure mental attention capacity, they assess working memory capacity in large samples of children and observe that working memory measures account for almost all the age-related variance in Piagetian tasks. Interestingly, they extend their investigation to the entire life-span and to a large range of cognitive tasks including measures of fluid intelligence, processing speed, and inhibition. In several studies, they observe that there are global mechanisms underpinning cognitive development, but that a single factor is not sufficient to explain it. Moreover, the relative weight of the different factors seems to evolve along the life-span, with inhibitory processes playing a more important role in older adults. The...

Table of contents

• Cognitive Development and Working Memory
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Neo-Piagetian theories and working memory
• Part II Underlying processes of working memory development
• Part III Working memory in typical and atypical development
• Author index
• Subject index