Thinking and intelligence in developmental psychology

Psychology

Thinking & Intelligence

How do we retrieve content into our awareness from long-term memory?

Information is retrieved from long-term memory by tracing through the network of interconnections to the place where it is stored. The more frequently a path is followed, the stronger that path becomes and the more readily available the information located along that path is available. After thinking our way back into the appropriate context and finding the general location in our memory, the interconnections become more readily available (Memory: How Do We Remember What We Know?, 1999).

In what ways was Lewis Termans intelligence test both similar and different from Afred Binets test for intelligence?

Benet's goal was to identify less able school children in order to aid them with the needed care that was required while Terman proposed using IQ tests to classify children and put them on the appropriate job-track. He believed IQ was inherited and was one of the strongest predictors of one's ultimate success in life. Alfred Binet felt that intelligence could not be defined as a single score, and to define a person's intellectual capacity as definitive on a single score was a big mistake. The test makers both managed to agree that Intelligence can in fact, be measured (Pratt, 2009).

3. What are some of the possible benefits and limitations for a person to know their IQ score?

In the case of adults there are some that believe that with an IQ trainer one can improve their IQ scores, so knowing them would be beneficial in order to improve them (Phyto, n.d.). In the case of children it is thought that identifying low IQ at an early age helps to get these children the help that they need as soon as possible. The limitations of knowing ones IQ would be that if the score is low it is possible that a person could get labeled and thus not reach their potential because of the way that the score affected them and the way the world perceives them.

4. Why cannot the issue of nature vs. nurture ever be resolved?

There are some scientists who believe that people behave as they do according to genetic predispositions or animal instincts. This is referred to as the nature theory of human behavior. Other scientists believe that people think and behave they way they do because they are taught to act in a certain ways. This is called the nurture theory of human behavior (Powell, 2009). Although there has been much research done on both sides of this debate there has never been a definite conclusion found that explains one theory over the other. As long as people are involved and each has their own opinion and interpretations this debate will never be settled.

5. Explain Atkinson and Shiffrins (1971) model of memory. Be sure that your discussion includes a clear explanation of all 4 categories of memory.

The Atkinson-Shiffrin model assumes that information is first processed by a range of sensory buffer stores. These stores then send information into Short-Term memory stores, which then send information into Long-Term memory stores. The believed that control process were performed in short-term memory which allowed information to be put into long-term memory and then recalled from it as well (Baddeley, 1997).

6. Suppose a two-year-old child believed every object a person can go into with a roof is called a house. One day the child refers to the family car as a house. The parent corrects him and says this is a car not a house. Based on Piaget's theory, what will this child have to do in order to correctly process this material and not make a similar error in the future?

According to Piaget the child would have to assimilate and accommodate the information in order to not make the same mistake in the future. Assimilation is the process by which a person takes material into their mind from the environment, which may mean changing the evidence of their senses to make it fit and accommodation is understanding the difference made to one's mind or concepts by the process of assimilation (Piaget, 2009).