Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

 INFORMATION-PROCESSING APPROACHES: 
CHARTING CHILDREN’S MENTAL PROGRAMS 
If cognitive development does not proceed as a series of stages as Piaget suggested, 
what does underlie the enormous growth in children’s cognitive abilities that even 
the most untutored eye can observe? To many developmental psychologists, changes 
in  information processing,  the way in which people take in, use, and store informa-
tion, account for cognitive development (Lacerda, von Hofsten, & Heimann, 2001; 
Cashon & Cohen, 2004; Munakata, 2006).
According to this approach, quantitative changes occur in children’s ability to 
organize and manipulate information. From this perspective, children become 
increasingly adept at information processing, much as a computer program may 
become more sophisticated as a programmer modifi es it on the basis of experience. 
Information-processing approaches consider the kinds of “mental programs” that 
children invoke when approaching problems. 
Several signifi cant changes occur in children’s information-processing capabili-
ties. For one thing, speed of processing increases with age as some abilities become 
more automatic. The speed at which children can scan, recognize, and compare stim-
uli increases with age. As they grow older, children can pay attention to stimuli 
longer and discriminate between different stimuli more readily, and they are less 
easily distracted (Myerson et al., 2003; Van den Wildenberg & Van der Molen, 2004). 
Memory also improves dramatically with age. Preschoolers can hold only two 
or three chunks of information in short-term memory, 5-year-olds can hold four, and 
7-year-olds can hold fi ve. (Adults are able to keep seven, plus or minus two, chunks 
in short-term memory.) The size of the chunks also grows with age, as does the 
sophistication and organization of knowledge stored in memory (see Figure 11). Still, 
memory capabilities are impressive at a very early age: Even before they can speak, 
infants can remember for months events in which they actively participated (Cowan 
et al., 2003; Bayliss et al., 2005a). 
Finally improvement in information processing relates to advances in  metacognition, 
an awareness and understanding of one’s own cognitive processes. Metacognition 
involves the planning, monitoring, and revising of cognitive strategies. Younger chil-
dren, who lack an awareness of their own cognitive processes, often do not realize 
their incapabilities. Thus, when they misunderstand others, they may fail to recognize