The store model suggests that several aspects of the cognitive system improve with age. What are these aspects, and what improvements do they undergo?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Short-term and working-memory spans increase steadily with age—on working-memory tasks, from two to about four to five items from early childhood to early adulthood. Still, individual differences are evident at all ages, and they are of particular concern because working-memory capacity predicts intelligence test scores and academic achievement in diverse subjects in middle childhood and adolescence. Developmental increases in working-memory capacity in part reflect gains in processing speed. Efficient processing releases working-memory resources to support storage of information. The faster children can repeat to-be-learned information either out loud or silently to themselves, the larger their memory spans. Increased processing speed enables older children and adults to scan information more quickly, to transform it more rapidly, and therefore to hold more information in working memory at once. Efficient cognitive processing influences academic achievement indirectly—by augmenting working-memory resources and, thus, supporting many complex cognitive activities.
The central executive is the overall supervisor of the cognitive system, managing its activities to ensure that we attain our goals. Early childhood is a vital time for laying the foundations of executive function: Preschoolers make strides in focusing attention, inhibiting inappropriate responses, and thinking flexibly—developments that parallel rapid synapse formation followed by synaptic pruning in the prefrontal cortex. During the school years—a time of continued synaptic pruning and maturing of the prefrontal cortex—executive function undergoes its most energetic period of development. Children handle increasingly difficult tasks that require the integration of working memory, inhibition, planning, flexible use of strategies, and self-monitoring and self-correction of behavior. And executive function improves further in adolescence, when the prefrontal cortex attains an adult level of synapses.