Methods of Task Analysis in Cognitive Development

We formulate a general method of developmental task analysis with three initial restrictions: It is relative to (1) a stipulated situation and task, and (2) a chosen task-solution strategy; and (3) it presupposes a more or less explicit dynamic model of the "psychological " organism, with cognitive resources that the subject uses to construct the task and the implemented strategy. In achieving a complete task analysis, we recognize three complementary methods (or "moments") that are cumulative--- the last one yielding organismic-process models. We introduce a novel working-memory paradigm, the mental attention memory (MAM) task, constituted by three subtasks: MAM-Simple (an easy, facilitating, working memory task), MAM-Telephone (a somewhat misleading task that measures mental attention), and MAM-Stroop (a difficult misleading task that highlights inhibitory processes that can restrict working memory to a child's age-dependent measure of mental attention). Detailed process models of these subtasks illustrate methods and their complementarity. We summarize supporting data and suggest quantitative structural ways to assess these models, without using empirical parameter estimations. Methods of task analysis