Information Processing in Children

The Seventh of an Annual Series of Symposia in the Area of Cognition under the Sponsorship of Carnegie-Mellon University

Sylvia Farnham-Diggory

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780122495502
• eBook ISBN: 9781483268804
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Information Processing in Children is a collection of papers from the Seventh Annual Series of Symposia in the Area of Cognition. This collection discusses developmental data that are important to a complete theory of human information process and describes information-processing technologies used in developmental function studies. One paper reviews the developments in information processing in children that includes descriptions of the sensory system, intermodal connections, short- and long-term memory. Several papers also discuss developments in the basic mechanisms, such as those relating to perceptual phenomena, equivalence systems, and memory strategies. Several papers then deal with psychological considerations in building a model to cognitive development and learning. An example pertains to information processing tendencies in empirical studies and theoretical implications for cognitive learning abilities. One paper then discusses computer simulation, while another reviews papers written by Cellerier, as well as by Klahr and Wallace, which tackle the role of simulation in developmental research. This compendium can prove helpful for child psychologists, counselors, pediatricians, and child educators and teachers.

Part I

OVERVIEW

Outline

Chapter 1: ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROCESSOR

CHAPTER 1

ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROCESSOR^*

H.A. Simon, Carnegie-Mellon University

Publisher Summary

This chapter discusses the development of the processor. At the sensory end—the eyes and the ears—the detail of physiological mechanism determines, to a great extent, the ways in which information is processed. The sensory organs and their central connections form a complex interface between man and his environment. Information held in short-term memory for a sufficient period of time can be transferred to the more permanent store that is usually called as long-term memory. The left hemisphere in brain usually plays a special role in storing knowledge of oral language, while the right hemisphere can be preferentially involved in processing certain information about visual form. The task of discovering process explanations for behavior is work of induction, not deduction. There is no known way to go directly and inexorably from the facts to a theory that explains those facts. The child generally learns oral language in the presence of objects and situations that he can already represent semantically.

Herbert Simon is Carnegie-Mellon’s R. K. Mellon Professor of Computer Science and Psychology. With Allen Newell and other colleagues, Dr. Simon has been engaged for more than a decade in research in information processing psychology. A summary of his views may be found in Sciences of the Artificial (Simon, 1969), and a more extensive discussion in Human Problem Solving (Newell & Simon, 1971).

The papers in this volume deal with information processing in children. One way to give them a common framework—beyond their concern with the young—is to relate them to the schemes we usually use to organize our knowledge of human information processing in general. Against such a background description of the human information processor, the specifically developmental aspects of the work reported here will come into greater relief.

The human information processor is always struggling with the limits of his own processing and storing capabilities in the face of a wealth of information to be processed and stored. Scientists in general, and psychologists in particular, have earned no relief from the processing limits that are common to all men. They cope with these limits by organizing information, detecting the patterns and redundancies contained in it, and recoding it in terms of those powerful systems of generalizations called theories.

In the past several decades, we have progressed a good distance toward describing man as an information processor, and have reached some agreement as to the important components of the description. I will not undertake here to elaborate on them, but rather remind you of what you know about them (Simon, 1969; Newell & Simon, 1971).

1. At the sensory end—the eyes and the ears—the detail of physiological mechanism determines, to a great extent, the ways in which information is processed. The sensory organs and their central connections form a complex interface between man and his environment.

2. As we move through perception to cognition, we find that central processes are less affected by detailed features of the system’s construction, and seem to be shaped mainly by its broad architectural outlines and a few key parameters.

3. In describing this architecture, particularly as it affects development and learning processes, we need to give special prominence to these features:

a. The short-term memory, limited in capacity to holding a few chunks;

b. The mechanisms of attention that determine what small fraction of the sensorily available information will be selected for central processing;

c. The long-term memory, potentially unlimited in capacity: probably organized in terms of quite general systems of associations and directed associations; slow to store new information;

d. Hemispheric specialization in long-term memory for storage of information relating to different modalities—visual and auditory, for example;

e. The control of behavior, including the internal behavior of thinking, by stored, learnable and modifiable, strategies or programs.

The largest part of our knowledge of these subsystems and their relations comes from experiments on adults, particularly college sophomores. Therefore, a useful way of looking at the material that was presented at this symposium is to ask to what extent the data on children’s information processing fit the theory we have constructed for adult information processing. What new insights do these data give us into that theory, and what extensions do they suggest? What new mechanisms or concepts, if any, do we have to add to it in order to accommodate the data on children?

In this approach of fitting new data into established frameworks, there is a danger that something will be stretched or crushed in the process. Some safeguard against distortion is provided by the fact that this overview precedes the papers about which it comments. If I have not done right by the evidence, you will soon discover my mistakes as you read on in the volume.

Of course, I exaggerate when I suggest that the studies reported in this volume constitute an independent check on our theories of human information processing. Most of the research discussed here is a part of that same concern with man as symbol manipulator that inhabits much of psychology today. The investigators cannot claim that they framed their questions or gathered their data in innocence of information processing theories. On the contrary, during the long period when most of cognitive psychology lay frozen under the glaciers of behaviorism—a glaciation that somehow never touched Swiss valleys—the area of child development, flourishing in these sheltered Alpine valleys, kept alive the concern for complex central processes.

Let me now take up, one by one, the components of the human processing system that I have listed previously, and suggest what the papers in this volume have to say about them.

The Sensory System

The paper by Robert Pollack, which initiates Part II, places appropriate emphasis on the sensory end of the sensory-perceptual-cognitive continuum. As his main text, he takes a series of ingenious and persuasive experiments on some of the standard visual illusions. There has been an increasing tendency in recent years to see how successfully these illusions can be explained by reference to known or hypothesized central mechanisms, and without reference to any very specific physiological properties of the sensory organs. I have indulged in this kind of exercise on a couple of occasions myself (Simon, 1967; Simon & Barenfeld, 1969).

Pollack shows that this approach is only a part of the story. Taking as “simple” a stimulus as the Mueller-Lyer figure, he demonstrates that the magnitude of the illusion varies with the hue and saturation of the stimuli. Perhaps the most striking single result he reports is that if we rank colors according to the magnitude of the illusion they produce, the ranking is reversed in going from colors of low saturation to colors of high saturation.

Pollack then extends his methods and findings to developmental questions. For example, the change in magnitude of illusion with age depends significantly upon whether the figures employ lightness contrast or hue contrast. Hence, Pollack concludes that “ontogenetic trends in the magnitude of the illusion cannot be attributed entirely to cognitive processes; the notion that receptor aging plays a dominant role remains tenable.”

None of the other papers presented at the symposium attributed development specifically to physiological changes in the sensory mechanisms. Pollack’s results therefore serve as a useful warning to all of us that the eye and ear have very specific properties which affect the information they gather and transmit, and that changes in these properties may have important consequences for the working of the central system. Having stated this caveat, I will join my fellow symposiasts in largely neglecting the sensory end of the system and focusing my remarks on more central aspects.

Short-Term Memory

While there is still disagreement on numerous details, there is also a great deal of consensus today on the broad organization of the human memory systems. Incoming visual information is stored briefly (up to about 1 sec), after recognition, in visual immediate memory (VIM). Auditory information (including visual information that has been recoded into auditory mode) and perhaps also unrecoded verbal information is held in a short-term memory (STM) whose capacity is limited to the celebrated seven chunks (possibly fewer), and whose contents can be retained indefinitely, but probably only if they are rehearsed periodically. Information held in STM for a sufficient period of time can be transferred to the more permanent store we usually call long-term memory (LTM). How long a time is “sufficient” is not precisely known: It is unlikely to be less than 2 sec or more than 10, but the exact time requirements are irrelevant to the present discussion.

Now if we are to use a piece of research to test or enlarge our knowledge about this structure of memories, we must understand which memories are exercised by the task presented to the subjects. Attributing the results of experiments to particular features of the memory system becomes especially important in research on development, because we wish to know much more than simply that a child’s “memory” changes with age. We need to discover in which memory structure the change occurs, what features or parameters of the structure are altered, and by how much. By varying the task, we can exercise different parts of the structure to varying degrees, hence produce differential effects.

I am not always in agreement with the authors of the papers in their own characterizations of their memory experiments. For example, John Hagen describes what he calls a “short-term memory task” the first part of which involves retaining information about a set of four to six relatively simple stimuli; but the second part involves retrieving information after 14 such sets of stimuli have been presented. It is consistent with what we know about adult STM to suppose that the retention for the first part of the task is indeed occurring in STM. On the other hand, the retention for the second part of the task must almost certainly be attributed to LTM, except perhaps fo...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• CONTRIBUTORS
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Inside Front Cover
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Part I: OVERVIEW
• Part II: BASIC MECHANISMS
• Part III: BUILDING A MODEL–PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
• Part IV: COMPUTER SIMULATION
• Part V: FINAL COMMENT
• REFERENCES
• Author Index
• Subject Index