Information Processing Blog Post 1

- During the reading I had a question regarding what causes these different kinds of learnign disabilities. I am majoring in elementary and special ed and to me it is very interesting how one's mind can be configured that it can't correctly retain information, or mix up letters and words. The intellectual disease dislexia is very interesting to me and I want to learn more about what causes it and how teachers are suppose to work with students that have this disorder.

- The information processing theory is a cognitive development theory based on how children develop and retain information in their brain. There are three main steps that the process goes through so that children can store infomration in their memory. Learning in this process is defined as information that the children recieves, rather then responding to a stimuli. When a child learns something it goes through sensory memory, working memory, and then is stored in the long term memory. After these three stages occur then the mind can hold on to the material that they recieve, in their long term memory, and use it to learn. As children grow their brain and memory grow with them, which is different then Piaget's theory because she theorizes that development occurs in stages. Because the information process theory has a great deal to do with how the brain saves and interprets information there can be many implications that occur during the process. As I stated before there are many learning dissabilities that are caused due to disruptions in the process of neurodevelpmental. Children with learning and behavior problems can have learning disabilities. As the brain inputs the information received there could be impliations during each step. For example during the working memory stage there has been some disorders, such as dislexia, autism, and down syndrome, that can effect this stage of the information processing theory. Also, some children have short term memory loss which effects learning during the working memory stage. Because of these disorders teaching implications can occur because teachers have to change their teaching methods, so that these students with learnign disabilities can learn information a different way that suits their needs.

- This model shown below is the information processing model. There are four main boxes that are hown here, input, sensory memory, working memory, and then long term memory. The input is the first step that happens. This is when a person is introduced to new information and they are first taking it in. The information then is transported into the sensory memory. The sensory memory is when visual and verbal information is taken in. There is a high capacity of what information can be taken in, but since there is so much a lot of the information has a very short life, a few miliseconds. This is why there is a box that says loss underneat sensory memory. Since there is so much sensory information that we are exposed to we only pay attention to the significiant information is what we recognize and is trasnported onto the working memory. The working memory is different then sensory memory because the information that is taken is much more limited and stays there for a longer duration. The working memory is referred to as the short term memory. Durig this stage rehearsal chuncking and rehearsal is done to remeber information that is being stored to go in and out of the long term memory. Stuff that is not used in the long term memory is usually forgotten, because it's not important to be retained. Lastly, the information in the working memory is transported into the long term memory. In long term memory information this spot is reserved for experiences and knowledge that happened at one time in ones life prior to the immediate past of the near present. The information from the short term memory that will be used is encoded and retrieved into the long term memory so that the brain can have it saved for the longest amount of time. This information in the long term memory is the held onto to use for future events, so this is how one learns and uses his past experiences to learn new things.