Losing but Learning

The process of learning for a child has many steps to it and many factors. One thing that is embedded in my head after all that we have learned about child development refers back to the way infants scan faces; the process of sub-cortical information developing into cortical information due to suppression. This is simply an example of what I’m trying to get across, which is the point that children have to use different types of perceptual and intellectual narrowing and inhibitory controls to be able to reach adult cognitive levels.
An example of the importance of suppressing a variable to get a better understanding of the whole picture would be Deloache’s study concerning symbolic development and dual representations. Deloache refined one of her experiments by prohibiting her subjects from physically touching or playing with the model, her reason being “that playing with and manipulating the model would make it more salient as an object hence would make dual representation more difficult to achieve.” (Deloache, 111) She “reasoned that denying children access to the model would decrease its salience as an object, hence making it easier for them to achieve dual representation.” (Deloach, 111) This goes with the idea of suppressing one aspect of cognition to help increase the chances of a child’ s ability to look beyond the surface. The study done by Markman on the topic of the mutual exclusivity assumption displays the difficulty children have accepting that one item can be two different things because of their assumption that a particular item cannot be called something else. In this case children had to suppress their prior knowledge and be open to the idea that particular things had more than one title (e.g. a dog can also be called a pet) Another example that was shown in class is the process of developing a means ends analysis, which is the ability to form subgoals that temporarily take you further from your goal in order to ultimately get closer to it (inhibitory control). This would relate to solving a rubik’s cube and having to take two steps backwards to reach the final product.
Real life examples of things in our daily lives that are lost or refined to adults compared with children are the abilities to play with no worries, to imagine and to pretend. These are some things that are ultimately suppressed because of our social environment and as children grow older they mature and lose some of their childlike characteristics. Ultimately children have to suppress and refine some of their characteristics and the way they perceive the world to make the transition into adulthood. Whether it be done through social learning or the process of coming to a better understanding of their surroundings and what it entails.