Week 2 - Information Processing Approach

Information Processing Approach 

Brain uses the input (environment) to produce the output (response) 

Information Processing: How children percieve, analyse, use and remember information to solve problems and why they might fail. 

• Information Stores: Locations where information is stored, such as sensory memory, short-term memory, long-term memory, semantic memory, etc 

• Cognitive Processes: Processes that transfer memory within memory stores including perception, coding, recording, chunking etc 

• Executive Cognition: The awareness within the individual of how information is processed, including own strengths and weaknesses. This is similar to metacognition (awareness and understanding of one's own thought processes.)

Information Processing Limitations  

• Encoding limitations – eg children who are given a mathematical problem will not be able to take in all the information and process/encode it properly. May not know symbol meaning.  

• Computational limitations – Might not have the appropriate strategies to apply the information 

• Retrieval limitations – Having the knowledge of strategies but being unable to retrieve them from long-term memory correctly. EG mixing up addition and multiplication.  

• Storage limitations - Receive the correct strategy from long-term memory but their working memory store is not developed enough to keep hold of the information.  

• Workspace limitations – If working capacity has been reached, they may not be able to calculate more complex equations which require them to process two things at once. 

Applying Brainerd’s Processing Limitations (1983) 

• Children around 4/5 are shown ten tokens, each one has a picture on them, they are placed in a bag. 7 of them have a rabbit. 3 of them have a horse. 

• The children were asked what they thought the picture would be if the experimenter was to randomly pull out one token This was repeated four times. 

• Logically – the best way to be correct is to say ‘rabbit’ each time as there are more rabbits than there are horses. 

• But the children did not apply this logic – they would say horse or…