INFORMATION PROCESSING APPROCH

This approch analyze how individuals manipulates information, monitor it, and create strategies for handling it. Affective information processing involves attention, memory and thinking, one after other in sequential order.

These process may overlap, but always goes in left to right sequence.

Information Processing Approch Applied to development-

According to seigler, three mechanism works together to create changes in children’s cognitive skills-

1.    Encoding-  process by which information gets into memory. Changes in children’s cognitive skills depend on increased skill at encoding relevant information and ignoring irrelevant information.

2.    Automaticity- ability to process information with little or no effort.practice allows children to encode increasing amount of information automatically. Eg- learning to read. This automaticity increases speed as they can encode more at a given time.

3.    Strategy Construction- creation of new procedures for processing information. Ie, a strategy that makes information processing more effective.

Sieglar argues that childrens information processing is charecterized by self modification- ie, Child learns to use what they have learned in previous circumstances to adapt their response to new situation. This happens due to presence of metacognition in child. Ie, cognition about cognition.

Speed of processing information-

          Increases drastically over childhood years. Can be due to biological maturation or due to experience. Speed declines at middle adulthood and slowdown continues as late adulthood progress. But the strategies aew used to compensate slowdown in processing.