The information processing theory approach to the study of cognitive development

Cognitive development

Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of brain development and cognitive psychology compared to an adult's point of...

 evolved out of the American experimental tradition in psychology

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

. Developmental psychologists who adopt the information-processing perspective account for mental development in terms of maturational changes in basic components of a child’s mind. The theory is based on the idea that humans process the information they receive, rather than merely responding to stimuli. This perspective equates the mind to a computer, which is responsible for analyzing information from the environment. According to the standard information-processing model for mental development, the mind’s machinery includes attention mechanisms for bringing information in, working memory for actively manipulating information, and long term memory for passively holding information so that it can be used in the future. This theory addresses how as children grow, their brains likewise mature, leading to advances in their ability to process and respond to the information they received through their senses. The theory emphasizes a continuous pattern of development, in contrast with Cognitive Developmental theorists such as Jean Piaget that thought development occurred in stages.

Emergence

Beginning in the 1950s, a major change occurred in the field of Psychology that has come to be known as the Cognitive Revolution. The cognitive revolution took form as what is now known as “Cognitive Psychology”. This field of psychology had freed itself from the behaviorist views that were dominant in the 1950s. It wanted to look at the “interior” mental processes, rather than the observable “exterior” views that behaviorism held. This revolution had a huge impact on theory and research in the field of psychology, as well as many other disciplines, such as human-computer interaction, human factors and ergonomics. Overall, information-processing models helped reestablish internal thought processes as a legitimate area of scientific research.

A central metaphor that was adopted by cognitivists at this time was the computer, which served to provide these researchers important clues and directions in understanding the human brain and how it processes information. Many psychologists and researchers believe that the Information Processing Theory was influenced by computers, in that the human mind is similar to a computer. However, today the metaphor of mind as computer has faded. The analogy has many strengths, in that humans have different memory stores and information is transferred from one store to another, however it does little to actually explain how the process works and has thus diminished in popularity.

Human as Computer

Within this model, humans are routinely compared to computers. This comparison is used as a means of better understanding the way information is processed and stored in the human mind. Therefore, when analyzing what actually develops within this model, the more specific comparison is between the human brain and computers. Computers were introduced to the study of development and provided a new way of studying intelligence (Lachman, 1979) and “added further legitimacy to the scientific study of the mind” (Goodwin, 2005, p. 411). In the model below, you can see the direct comparison between human processing and computer processing. Within this model, information is taken in (or input). Information is encoded to give meaning and compared with stored information. If a person is working on a task, this is where the working memory is enacted. An example of that for a computer is the CPU. In both cases, information is encoded, given meaning, and combined with previously stored information to enact the task. The latter step is where the information is stored where it can later be retrieved when needed. For computers, this would be akin to saving information on a hard drive, where you would then upload the saved data when working on a future task (using your working memory as in step 2).

Cognitive Processes

Cognitive processes include perception

Perception

Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...

, recognition, imagining, remembering, thinking, judging, reasoning, problem solving

Problem solving

Problem solving is a mental process and is part of the larger problem process that includes problem finding and problem shaping. Consideredthe most complex of all intellectual functions, problem solving has been defined as higher-order cognitive process that requires the modulation and control of...

, conceptualizing, planning and more terms and applications. These cognitive processes can emerge from human language, thought, imagery and symbols.

Out of all of these specific cognitive processes, many cognitive psychologists study language-acquisition

Language acquisition

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocal as with...

, altered states of mind and consciousness, visual perception, auditory perception, short-term memory

Short-term memory

Short-term memory is the capacity for holding a small amount of information in mind in an active, readily available state for a short period of time. The duration of short-term memory is believed to be in the order of seconds. A commonly cited capacity is 7 ± 2 elements...

, long-term memory

Long-term memory

Long-term memory is memory in which associations among items are stored, as part of the theory of a dual-store memory model. According to the theory, long term memory differs structurally and functionally from working memory or short-term memory, which ostensibly stores items for only around 20–30...

, storage, retrieval, perceptions of thought and much more.

The Four Pillars of the Information Processing Model

There are four fundamental assumptions – or four pillars – of the information processing approach. These pillars underlay and support this approach, as well as many other cognitive models.

• Thinking: The process of thinking includes the activities of perception of external stimuli, encoding the same and storing the data so perceived and encoded in one's mental recesses.

• Analysis of Stimuli: This is the process by which the encoded stimuli are altered to suit the brain's cognition and interpretation process to enable decision making. There are four distinct sub-processes that form a favourable alliance to make the brain arrive at a conclusion regarding the encoded stimuli it has received and kept stored. These four sub-processes are encoding, strategization, generalization and automatization.

• Situational Modification: This is the process by which an individual uses his experience, which is nothing other than a collection of stored memories, to handle a similar situation in future. In case of certain differences in both situations, the individual modifies the decisions they took during their previous experience to come up with solutions for the somewhat different problem.

• Obstacle Evaluation: This step maintains that besides the subject's individual development level, the nature of the obstacle or problem should also be taken into consideration while evaluating the subject's intellectual, problem solving and cognitive acumen. Sometimes, unnecessary and misleading information can confuse the subject and he / she may show signs of confusion while dealing with a situation which is similar to one he / she was exposed to before, which he / she was able to handle successfully.

Structure of the information-processing system

The standard information-processing model has three major components: sensory register, short-term memory (working memory), and long-term memory.

Sensory Register

Еаch sеnsory systеm hаs its own sensory store, which receives and holds, аlthough very briefly, all the externаl аnd internal stimuli. The sensоry stоres hоld оntо the sensory information long enough so that unconscious рrоcesses may орerate оn these traces tо determine whether the inрut shоuld be brought intо the wоrking memory, оr discаrded.

Short-Term/Working Memory

Working memory is believed to be the center of conscious thought, analogous to the “central processing unit” of a computer, where information from long-term memory and the environment is combined to help solve problems. However, the working memory has a small capacity so that it is not able to attend to much information at a time, thereby limiting the abilities of humans to solve problems.
The information processing perspective proposes that as children grow until about 15 years old, their working memory capacity for verbal/visual information also steadily increases, as demonstrated by improved performance on fluid intelligence tests. Many proponents of the information processing system correlate this increased working-memory capacity with increased speed of processing, the speed at which a person can fluently carry out relatively elementary information-processing tasks. It is believed that the physical maturation of the brain that occurs throughout childhood may cause faster processing speeds. This faster processing speed permits faster mental movement from one item of information to another, which improves one’s ability to keep track of a number of different items in working memory at once.

Long-Term Memory

Long-term memory is the stored representation of all that a person knows. The items stored in long-term memory lie dormant until they are called back into the working memory and thus put to use.

Long-term memory consists of explicit and implicit long-term memory systems. Children exhibit implicit long-term memory – memories that affect behavior, but with which we are unable to report, such as procedural memories – beginning in early infancy on. There also exist two categories of explicit memory: semantic and episodic memory. Children exhibit the ability to form semantic memories as quickly as when they learn words, which possibly aids the development of vocabulary. In contrast, episodic memories develop relatively slowly, appearing at about 3 years of age when children are able to answer questions reliably about past experiences.

Many psychologists believe that the ability to form episodic memories increases gradually throughout childhood due to continued maturation of the brain, particularly in the prefrontal lobes. Proponents of the information processing theory make sense of the development of memory systems, from implicit → semantic → episodic, in terms of childhood developmental needs.

Intelligence as Processing

Before information processing theory, psychologists had trouble operationally defining intelligence. One psychologist even ventured to define intelligence as, "What intelligence tests measure." Information processing defines intelligence as processing. In this way, intelligence can be researched with a more definitive purpose. If the better processor is the smarter human, then getting at what makes people better processors from a psychological level all the way to a biochemical level will help humans understand intelligence much better.

View of humanity


Information Processing Theory views humans as information processing systems, with memory systems sometimes referred to as cognitive architecture (Miller, 2011). A computer metaphor is often applied to human cognitive systems, wherein information (a stimulus) is inputted (sensed) and the brain then performs processes such as comparing the information to previously stored information (schemas), transforming information (encoding), or storing information in long-term memory.

Nature versus nurture

This theory views humans as being like machines, actively inputting, retrieving, processing and storing information.
Context, social content, and social influences on processing are generally ignored in favor of a focus on internal systemic processes (Miller, 2011). Nature provides the hardware, or the neurological processing system likely predisposed to economical and efficient processing, as well as being pre-tuned to attend to specific stimuli.
The “Nurture” component presents as the environment which provides the stimuli to be inputted and processed by the system

Quantitative versus qualitative

Information processing theory combines elements of both quantitative and qualitative development. Qualitative development occurs through the emergence of new strategies for information storage and retrieval, developing representational abilities (such as the utilization of language to represent concepts), or obtaining problem-solving rules (Miller, 2011). Increases in the knowledge base or the ability to remember more items in working memory are examples of quantitative changes, as well as increases in the strength of connected cognitive associations (Miller, 2011). The qualitative and quantitative components often interact together to develop new and more efficient strategies within the processing system.
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Social Influences‍‍

One's culture greatly influences how one remembers bits of information by how the culture emphasizes various elements, emotions, or even events (Shaki & Gravers, 2011). As the text discusses, children can manage and handle more information at once due to increased capacity, and “because new information can be packaged into preexisting categories and structures” (Miller, 2011, p. 290). The knowledge gained, however, is not obtained without interaction with the child’s external environment (Miller, 2011, p. 290). Attitudes and beliefs about gender, race, sex roles, etc. greatly influence how a child processes and recalls information (Miller, 2011, p. 290). Beck (1975) suggests that as we develop we learn how to process external stimuli, and these messages are processed, interpreted and incorporated into one’s internal schemas. For example, children in a school setting who are taught that men and women occupy certain gender-stereotypic jobs are thus more likely to process information through such a “filter" (Best, 1983). The text points out that children may even reconstruct images later to fit with their schema of a particular occupation (Miller, 2011, p. 290). This relates to the construction of scripts, which are assumptions or expectations about what is supposed to happen in a particular situation. They can greatly influence how a child remembers events and may potentially lead to assumptions about people, events, etc. (Miller, 2011, p. 287-288).

Scripts—beliefs and expectations about what should happen. While scripts are helpful in making the information-processing system more efficient, they can hinder the recall of specific information and enhance the generalizations made about people, events, etc. Language is an integral part of one's culture that can greatly influence the information-processing system.
Language, the nature of a task's instruction, and the type of task can all greatly impact the processing of information (Shaki & Gravers, 2011). Furthermore, individualistic versus collectivistic cultures can have different outlooks on human development as well as the proper formation and development of an individual, which therefore influences motivations and actions toward goals (Hamamura et al, 2009).

Current Areas of Research

Information Processing Theory is currently being utilized in the study of computer or ‍‍artificial‍‍ intelligence. This‍‍ theory‍‍ has also been applied to systems beyond the individual, including families and business organizations. For example, Ariel (1987) applied Information Processing Theory to family systems, with sensing, attending, and encoding stimuli occurring either within individuals within the system or as the family system itself. Unlike traditional systems theory, where the family system tends to maintain stasis and resists incoming stimuli which would violate the system's rules, the Information Processing family develops individual and mutual schemas which inflcuence what and ‍‍how ‍‍information is attended to and processed. Dysfunctions can occur both on the individual level as well as within the family system itself, creating more targets for therapeutic change.
Rogers, Miller, and Judge (1999) utilized Information Processing Theory to describe business organizational behavior, as well as to present a model describing how effective and innefective business strategies are developed. In their study, components of organizations that "sense" market information are identified as well as how organizations attend to this information; which gatekeepers determine what information is relevant/important for the organization, how this is organized into the existing culture (organizational schemas), and whether or not the organization has effective or ineffective processes for their long-term strategy.
Criticisms‍‍ =
Models based upon Information Processing Theory takes a somewhat simplistic view of cognitve processing, with information processing being viewed as a largely linear process. This model does not take into account simultaneous or parallel processing. Another example where the linear model, which suggest rehearsal is required to encode information in long term memory, is likely faulty occurs in cases of trauma, where information can be encoded automatically and without rehearsal due to a single exposure to traumatic stimuli. ‍‍The metaphor of the computer is off-putting to many, who dislike comparing human beings to machines. Additionally, no current computer program can truly simulate the full range of human cognition.‍‍

Computer constructed models that are based upon this theory are highly complex and again cannot take into account all nuances of human thought despite their complexity. Information ProcessingTheory does not account for fundamental developmental changes, or changes to the "hardware" of the brain. For example, how do humans gain the ability to utilize representational thought utilizing language? How do people develop "formal operations" thinking, such as abstract logical or social thinking when they previously thought in "concrete" ‍‍terms?‍‍

There is an excessive focus on internal cognitive processes, with little attention being paid to environmental influences or the nature of the external stimuli the individual is exposed to. Additioanlly, the impact of emotions or behaviors on cognitive processing or interpretation is not sufficiently included in this model. For example, the information processing model does not consider how an individual can process a stimuli differently if they are angry versus if they are in a calm state.
The information processing model is described as being universal, with little attention being paid to individual differences or cultural differences.