A Clinician's Guide to Normal Cognitive Development in Childhood

1. INTRODUCTION

The introduction will highlight the importance, for the practitioner, of understanding normal cognitive development in children. The domains covered in subsequent chapters will be briefly described, and guidelines for "how to use this book" will be given.

2. THEORY OF MIND

This section will discuss the development of children’s ability to distinguish between their own ‘minds’ and those of others. Between the ages of 3 and 7, enormous gains are made in children’s ability to understand that the perspectives of other people can differ from their own. At the younger end of this age range, children do not necessarily appreciate that their personal likes, dislikes, beliefs, fears, and dreams are not shared by all. Gradually, they learn that appearance and reality are not always perfectly coincident, and they learn about the concept of false belief – that one can believe something that is in fact not true. They also develop the ability to manipulate appearance/reality distinctions and the beliefs of others in order to willfully deceive.

1. Perspective taking
2. Appearance vs. reality
3. False beliefs & the development of deception

3. MEMORY

This section of the book will describe development within the different memory domains (e.g., short term memory capacity, procedural memories, autobiographical memory), focusing primarily on development between the ages of 4 and 10. Special focus will be given to the nature of memories and their reliability. Memories are formed visually, behaviorally and verbally. Multiple sources of information are often combined, without direct awareness, in the creation of a ‘single’ memory. Children are not able to engage in accurate source attribution (e.g., do they actually remember an event? Or have they created a memory from a story told by a parent?). Gaps in memories are ‘filled in’ with information from more general schemas and scripts. The memories of young children are particularly plastic, and thus subject to unconscious revision.

1. Different kinds of memory
2. Remembering

4. LANGUAGE

This section of the book will give a brief overview of the development of language skills between the ages of 2 and 12. The development of receptive skills, or the ability to understand the language of others, precedes a child’s ability to evidence the same language in their own speech. Between infancy and early adolescence, there is substantial development in the comprehension and production of complex syntactic structures, negative statements, interrogative structures, referential constructions (similes, metaphors, analogies), abstract vocabulary, and the social pragmatics of conversation. Talking to, or asking questions of, a child of a particular age is most fruitful when the co-speaker has an understanding of the expressive and receptive limits.

1. Expressive and receptive skills
2. Communicating about internal states
3. Interviewing

5. REASONING

Asking a child to consider an idea, choose between options, or make any sort of judgment, calls upon the child’s reasoning skills. Reasoning can be divided into a number of sub-domains, ranging from very basic reasoning about cause and effect relationships to reasoning about highly sophisticated and abstract concepts such as morality. Even though the reasoning of adults is in many instances not rational, understanding the unique reasoning processes evidenced by children between the ages of 2 and 10 is especially important for anyone who needs to engage a child in an active collaboration about information, ideas or problems. Inferences about causal connections are sensitive to other components such as time and contiguity. Inductive and deductive reasoning skills do not develop in parallel, and are initially limited in some interesting ways. Moral reasoning develops very gradually from a purely concrete pragmatic system to one of abstract concepts.

1. Inductive and Deductive reasoning
2. Causal reasoning
3. Moral reasoning

6. EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONING

This section builds upon the more basic level cognitive processes of the previous sections. Assuming one can communicate effectively with a child who can engage in the processing of information and who can remember ideas, one can then consider the planning skills that a child might bring to bear on a particular problem or goal. Research indicates that children can formulate advance plans as early as age 5. The organization of plans, however, may not mirror those evidenced by adults. Additionally, the ability to plan effectively is not initially a domain-general skill. The other cognitive resources demanded by a task affect the child’s ability to plan. Devising a plan is only step one in a successful series. The planner must be able to execute the plan, monitor said execution in medias res, and evaluate the outcome upon completion.

1. Planning skills

7. CONCLUDING CHAPTER

In our conclusion, we will draw upon examples from each of the sections to illustrate why an understanding of normal cognitive development is of key clinical importance. We will summarize the array of mysterious mind-quirks of the perfectly normal child that might block, confuse or otherwise subvert clinical intakes, interviews and interventions.

Biography

Elisabeth Hollister Sandberg, PhD, is a member of the Psychology Department faculty at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts.

Becky L. Spritz, PhD, is a member of the Psychology Department faculty at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island.

"Cognitive development is a rich and burgeoning field with much to offer the practicing clinician. But how to master the diverse field in an economical way? This book is the answer." - Nora Newcombe, PhD, Professor of Psychology and James H. Glackin Distinguished Faculty Fellow, Temple University, Pennsylvania

"This book marries developmental science with clinical practice. It's a great resource for anyone who works with children, including teachers, clinicians, childcare providers, and parents. Children's behavior can seem mysterious and idiosyncratic. This book puts it all in perspective by explaining the typical course of cognitive and socio-emotional development, and relating these changes to clinical situations. This is an invaluable guide for communicating with children and interpreting their behavior." - Kelly Mix, PhD, Associate Professor of Educational Psychology, Michigan State University, College of Education