Assignment: Mental Database
Assignment: Mental Database
Apartment complex in New York City. This rich set of past experiences and acquired knowledge forms a mental database that helps a child interpret new messages.
Fifth, the child will typically evaluate the message in some way. The simplest evaluation pertains to liking or not liking the message. Children as young as 2 years of age already show preferences for certain types of TV programs, such as those featuring puppets and young characters (Lemish, 1987; Rideout & Hamel, 2006). One mother described her preschool daughter’s attachment to a televised purple dinosaur in the following way: “She played the Barney tape every single hour that she was awake the entire weekend. And if we tried to turn it off, she’d be screaming, yelling, crying” (Alexander, Miller, & Hengst, 2001, p. 383). As children grow older, they become increasingly sophisticated and critical of media messages (Potter, 2010). Not only are they capable of evaluating the content, but they also begin to appreciate the forms, economic structure, and institutional constraints that characterize different media (Dorr, 1980). An adolescent, for example, may reject all mainstream American television programming because of its inherent commercialism.
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Given this set of tasks, we can expect that children will process media messages in different ways across development. We now describe some of the major shifts in cognitive processing that occur during the transition from early to middle childhood and during the transition from late childhood to adolescence. By no means is this list exhaustive; instead, it reflects some of the skills that are most relevant to interacting with the media (for further reading, see Dorr, 1980; Flavell et al., 2002; Wilson & Drogos, 2009). We will end this chapter with a topic receiving a great deal of interest these days: How do infants and toddlers interact with the media?
Two caveats need to be noted here. First, most of the changes highlighted below occur gradually rather than abruptly during development (Flavell et al., 2002). Piaget (1950, 1952) argued that younger children’s thinking is qualitatively different from that of older children, such that their cognitive systems progress through distinct stages (i.e., sensorimotor, approximately 0–2 years of age; preoperational, 2–7 years; concrete operational, 7–11 years; formal operational, 11 years and older). However, research indicates that cognitive performance can be uneven across different types of tasks and that children exhibit varied skill levels even within a particular domain (Siegler, 2005). Thus, it is widely believed that development is far less stagelike or abrupt than Piaget’s theory would have us believe.
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
Assignment: Mental Database
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
