Lifespan Development. Tara L. Kuther

This helps to create learning environments that stimulate children to complete more challenging tasks on their own (Wass & Golding, 2014). Through guided play, teachers can develop play environments and settings with materials that encourage exploration and guide children with comments, encouraging them to explore, question, or extend their interests (Bodrova & Leong, 2018).

      Evaluating Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

      Although relatively unknown until recent decades, Vygotsky’s ideas about the sociocultural nature of cognitive development have influenced prominent theories of development, such as Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). They have been applied in educational settings, supporting the use of assisted discovery, guiding children’s learning, and cooperative learning with peers.

      Similar to Piaget, Vygotsky’s theory has been criticized for a lack of precision. The mechanisms or processes underlying the social transmission of thought are not described (Göncü & Gauvain, 2012). Moreover, constructs such as the zone of proximal development are not easily testable (Wertsch, 1998). In addition, underlying cognitive capacities, such as attention and memory, are not addressed. It is understandable, however, that Vygotsky’s theory is incomplete, as he died of tuberculosis at the age of 37. We can only speculate about how his ideas might have evolved over a longer lifetime. Nevertheless, Vygotsky provided a new framework for understanding development as a process of transmitting culturally valued tools that influence how we look at the world, think, and approach problems.

      Thinking in Context 7.2

      1 Contrast Vygotsky and Piaget’s theories of cognitive development.

      2 Do you think that young children can be taught to respond correctly to conservation problems? Why or why not? Should they?

      3 What cultural tools have you adopted? How have interactions with others influenced your cognitive development?

      4 How might Vygotsky’s ideas be applied to children’s learning at home and in the classroom? Give some examples.

      Information Processing in Early Childhood

      From an information processing perspective, cognitive development entails developing mental strategies to guide one’s thinking and use one’s cognitive resources more effectively. In early childhood, children become more efficient at attending, encoding and retrieving memories, and problem solving.

      Attention

      Early childhood is accompanied by dramatic improvements in attention, particularly sustained attention, the ability to remain focused on a stimulus for an extended period of time (Rueda, 2013). Young children often struggle with selective attention. Selective attention refers to the ability to systematically deploy one’s attention, focusing on relevant information and ignoring distractors. Young children do not search thoroughly when asked to compare detailed pictures and explain what’s missing from one. They have trouble focusing on one stimulus and switching their attention to compare it with other stimuli (Hanania & Smith, 2010). For example, young children who sort cards according to one dimension such as color may later be unable to successfully switch to different sorting criteria (Honomichl & Zhe, 2011). Young children’s selective attention at age 2.5 predicts working memory and response inhibition at age 3 (Veer, Luyten, Mulder, van Tuijl, & Sleegers, 2017).

      Working Memory and Executive Function

      Young children simply get better at thinking. Recall from Chapter 5 that working memory is where all thinking or information processing takes place. Working memory consists of a short-term store (short-term memory), a processor, and a control mechanism known as the central executive, responsible for executive function (Baddeley, 2016; Miyake & Friedman, 2012). Children get better at holding information in working memory, manipulating it, inhibiting irrelevant stimuli, and planning, which allows them to set and achieve goals (Carlson, Zelazo, & Faja, 2013).

      Short-term memory is commonly assessed by a memory span task in which individuals are asked to recall a series of unrelated items (such as numbers) presented at a rate of about 1 per second. The greatest lifetime improvements on memory span tasks occur in early childhood. In a classic study, 2- to 3-year-old children could recall about two digits, increasing to about five items at age 7, but only increasing another two digits, to seven, by early adulthood (Bjorklund & Myers, 2015).

      As their short-term memory increases, young children are able to manipulate more information in working memory and become better at planning, considering the steps needed to complete a particular act and carrying them out to achieve a goal (Rueda, 2013). Preschoolers can create and abide by a plan to complete tasks that are familiar and not too complex, such as systematically searching for a lost object in a yard (Wellman, Somerville, & Haake, 1979). But they have difficulty with more complex tasks. Young children have difficulty deciding where to begin and how to proceed to complete a task in an orderly way (Ristic & Enns, 2015). When they plan, young children often skip important steps. One reason why young children get better at attention, memory, and cognitive tasks is because they get better at inhibiting impulses to engage in task-irrelevant actions and can keep focused on a task.

      Long-Term Memory

      Young children’s memory for events and information acquired during events, episodic memory, expands rapidly (Roediger & Marsh, 2003; Tulving, 2002). For example, a researcher might study episodic memory by asking a child, “Where did you go on vacation?” or “Remember the pictures I showed you yesterday?” Most laboratory studies of memory examine episodic memory, including memory for specific information, for scripts, and for personal experiences.

      Memory for Information

      Shana turns over one card and exclaims, “I’ve seen this one before. I know where it is!” She quickly selects its duplicate by turning over a second card from an array of cards. Shana recognizes a card she has seen before and recalls its location. Children’s memory for specific information, such as the location of items, lists of words or numbers, and directions, can be studied using tasks that examine recognition memory and recall memory. Recognition memory, the ability to recognize a stimulus one has encountered before, is nearly perfect in 4- and 5-year-old children, but they are much less proficient in recall memory, the ability to generate a memory of a stimulus encountered before without seeing it again (Myers & Perlmutter, 2014).

      Why do young children perform so poorly in recall tasks? Young children are not very effective at using memory strategies, cognitive activities that make us more likely to remember. For example, rehearsal, repeating items over and over, is a strategy that older children and adults use to recall lists of stimuli. Children do not spontaneously and reliably apply rehearsal until after the first grade (Bjorklund & Myers, 2015). Preschool-age children can be taught strategies, but they generally do not transfer their learning and apply it to new tasks (Titz & Karbach, 2014). This utilization deficiency seems to occur because of their limited working memories and difficulty inhibiting irrelevant stimuli. They cannot apply the strategy at the same time as they have to retain both the material to be learned and the strategy to be used. Instead, new information competes with the information the child is attempting to recall (Aslan & Bäuml, 2010). Overall, advances in executive function, working memory, and attention predict strategy use (Stone, Blumberg, Blair, & Cancelli, 2016).

      However, young children do not always show more poor performance relative to adults. In one study, parents read a novel rhyming verse and a word list as their 4-year-old children’s bedtime story on 10 consecutive days. When asked to recall the verse, the 4-year-old children outperformed their parents and a set of young adults who also listened to the verse (Király, Takács, Kaldy, & Blaser, 2017). The children and adults did not differ in the ability to recall the gist of the verse. Unlike