Describe the strengths and weaknesses of the information-processing perspective

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Information-processing researchers are not satisfied with general concepts, such as assimilation and accommodation, to describe how children think. Instead, they want to know exactly what individuals of different ages do when faced with a task or problem. Most information-processing researchers assume that we hold information in three parts of the mental system for processing: the sensory register, the short-term memory store, and the long-term memory store. The information-processing perspective underscores the continuity of human thinking from infancy into adult life. Infants and toddlers think in ways that are remarkably similar to adults' thinking, though their mental processing is far from proficient. And their capacity to recall events and to categorize stimuli attests to their ability to mentally represent their experiences. Information-processing research has contributed greatly to our view of infants and toddlers as sophisticated cognitive beings. But its central strength—analyzing cognition into its components, such as perception, attention, memory, and categorization—is also its greatest drawback: It has had difficulty putting these components back together into a broad, comprehensive theory.