I need me summary of psychological artilce - Essay Example

From Childhood to Adulthood The Maturation of Cognitive Processes Order No. 263152 No. of pages: 2 Premium 6530 Cognition and mentalabilities forms an indelible part in the growth and development of any individual and as such needs a lot of care and attention in order to guide these processes in the right direction. Mental abilities, including problem solving and reasoning abilities continue to develop during adolescence (Anderson, Anderson, & Gartner, 2001; Siegler, 1978). Therefore, to investigate how and when these cognitive processes develop and mature and to check if they are dependent or interdependent on each other a cross sectional study is undertaken.

IntroductionThe specific areas related to the child’s proper growth and development included making an assessment of the core cognitive processes to see how mature or immature they were in late childhood, including processing speed (Hale, 1990), voluntary response suppression (Diamond & Goldman-Rakic, 1989; Fischer, Biscaldi, & Gezeck, 1997), and working memory (Zald & Iacono, 1998) Therefore the problem areas to be tested would be speed processing, inhibition towards voluntary response as well as the child’s working memory.

MethodThere are many different traditional psychological testing methods, but the one that is most suited to assesses and evaluate the maturation of all these cognitive processes is the method of testing making uses of oculomotor tasks, which allows for testing across a wide range of age groups. The instructions for this method are simple and can be understood by children of all ages. Further the tasks in this method involve encoding responses in visual, auditory, motor, speech and psychological processes.

Finally, oculomotor tasks are especially well suited for informing us about the brain basis of development because these tasks have been used to characterize the neural basis of cognition in single-cell studies of nonhuman primates (Barbas, 2000; Funahashi, Chafee, & Goldman-Rakic, 1993;)ResultsResults for the maturation of response suppression errors indicated that a changepoint occurred at 14 years of age. For the ODR task, the changepoint occurred at 19 years of age. The results for other variables included the response latency which were significantly correlated across all the tasks.

In the antisaccade task, visual and memory guided responses correlated with the prosaccade rates. Hence, various results show that though the development of inhibition in response is somewhat primarily independent of the speed processing development, yet where maturation is concerned, working memory does contribute significantly, demonstrating that voluntary/cognitive control of behavior continues to develop and make progress right through adolescence.DiscussionBy taking into consideration and measuring age – related changes pertaining to the speed process, voluntary response suppression and working memory, the transition towards a more matured cognitive control with relation to behavior was determined.

ReferencesAnderson, P., Anderson, V., & Gartner, A. F. (2001). Assessment and development of organizational ability: The Rey Complex Figure Organizational Strategy Score (RCF – OSS). Clinical Neuropsychologist, 15, 81 – 94.Barbas, H. (2000). Connections underlying the synthesis of cognition, memory, and emotion in primate prefrontal cortices. Brain Research Bulletin, 52, 319 – 330.Diamond, A., & Goldman-Rakic, P. S. (1989). Comparison of human infants and rhesus monkeys on Piaget’s AB task: Evidence for dependence on dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Experimental Brain Research, 74, 24 – 40.Fischer, B., Biscaldi, M., & Gezeck, S. (1997). On the development of voluntary and reflexive components in human saccade generation. Brain Research, 754, 285 – 297.Funahashi, S., Chafee, M. V., & Goldman-Rakic, P. S. (1993). Prefrontal neuronal activity in rhesus monkeys performing a delayed anti-saccade task. Nature, 365(6448), 753 – 756.Goldman-Rakic, P. S. (1988). Topography of cognition: Parallel distributed networks in primate association cortex.

Annual Review of Neuroscience, 11, 137 – 156.Siegler, R. S. (1978). The origins of scientific reasoning. In R. S. Siegler (Ed.), Children’s thinking: What develops? (pp. 104 – 149). Hillsdale, NJ: ErlbaumZald, D. H., & Iacono, W. G. (1998). The development of spatial working memory abilities. Developmental Neuropsychology, 14, 563 – 578.