Information Processing and Cognitive Development

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter characterizes information processing as a general framework for understanding human cognitive growth that has had enormous impact on the study of cognition and over the past decade it has been adopted by a growing number of developmental psychologists. Journals and books contain numerous articles about the development of information-processing skills in children, in sharp contrast to the recent past when such topics were only rarely mentioned. It is emphasized that information processing, as a general perspective, has considerable potential for developmental work, and some relevant characteristics and implications of information processing is described. Information processing was not influential in developmental psychology until the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this period two essentially independent events brought information processing to the forefront of developmental research. First, psychologists studying the development of attention and memory based their work, in part, on information-processing models derived from experimental psychology. Second, several psychologists from the information-processing became interested in Piaget's description of children's understanding of concepts like transitivity and class inclusion. These psychologists proposed radically different interpretations of the phenomena, and their research sometimes produced findings that were hard to reconcile with Piaget's account of development.