Cognitive Development in Adolescence
Because executive control processes become more
sophisticated, teens think at a higher level
Shifts in teen thinking:
• Able to think about possibilities, not just what
is…
• Able to think about abstract things
• Able to think about the process of thinking itself
• Multidimensional in nature
• Able to see things as relative, not absolute
What are possible outcomes of these shifts?
• Reality does not limit teen speculation
• Teens can generate alternatives & reason
accordingly
• It enables scientific experimentation in a
deliberate way
• Better able to argue as they can envision your
possible arguments
• They need to question others’ reasoning since
they can evaluate logic unlimited by adult
restrictions/ rules
Deductive vs. Inductive Reasoning
• Deductive: one draws logical conclusions from
a set of givens
– All hockey players wear mouth guards
– Kim is a hockey player
– Does Kim wear a mouth guard?
• Inductive: drawing an inference from
information one has
– All hockey players wear mouth guards
– Kim is wearing a mouth guard
– Is Kim a hockey player?
Inhibiting a prepotent response
• Teens have the ability to limit a potentially
wrong response when they are acting
automatically
• This requires a certain maturity of the brain
• It also requires considering your past experience
with the problem, the amount of information
given, & the likelihood of a judgment being
wrong with the information
• Preteens rarely use deductive reasoning
Hypothetical thinking
• Hypothetical thinking: if-then reasoning allows
you to speculate on what might happen next
– It also allows us to reason with abstract
concepts never experienced
– It also allows us to postulate from a position
we don’t hold: devil’s advocate
– It allows us to take & understand another’s
viewpoint- perspective-taking
• One reason teens get better at winning
arguments with parents- they can
imagine a logic that fits with parents
concerns in order to get what they want
Abstract thinking allows teens to understand
abstract logic:
• Puns, proverbs, metaphors, analogies
• Social & moral issues
• Government roles in individual lives
• Social cognition
Metacognition
• Aids developing learning strategies- enhances
memory, reading, writing, test taking
• Enhances introspection- self-consciousness, selfjudgment, identity development
Adolescent Egocentrism
• Imaginary audience
– the belief everyone is watching me, feeling
‘on stage’, total self-focus
– Self-consciousness peaks around 15; is more
intense for girls
• Personal fable
– Feeling one’s experiences are unique
– Enhances self esteem/ self importance
– Can be dangerous as it contributes to
reckless risk-taking
• Even adults engage in risk-taking
however based on the personal fablecontinued smoking, unsafe sex in the
face of knowledge of risk
Thinking in multiple dimensions
• Better understanding of probability
• More complex understanding of self and others
• Sarcasm understood as teen combines what is
said with body language, facial expressions,
tone, double entendres
• Accounts for popularity of Mad
magazine, The Simpsons, South Park
Adolescent relativism
• Children are absolutists
– See things in black & white
• Teens are relativists
– Parents may not appreciate the way their
teens question everything
– Teens may question to the point of extreme
skepticism:
• Don’t trust anyone over the age of 30
Piaget believed that teens organize incoming
information into categories.
• Schema- a concept that organizes information/
new experiences
• Equilibration-in the face of new information we
feel uncomfortable, & we are motivated to learn
and develop a new status quo. We do it in two
ways:
– Assimilation-broadens the schema
– Accommodation-changes or adds another
schema
Piaget’s theory is based on biology & experience
• He believed that reasoning levels shift as the
brain develops, dependent on quality of life
experience
• Formal operations thinking uses propositional
logic:
– If A is true or B is true, then C is true
– This allows one to think about alternatives
to what is, about what is not observable or
present- abstracts
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
• Sensorimotor- Birth to 2 years
• Preoperational- 2 – 7 years
• Concrete operational- 7 – 11 years
– Conservation
– Classification
• Formal operational- puberty into adulthood
– Hypothetical-deductive reasoning
Piaget stressed that children construct knowledge.
Even though teens can use formal logic, they don’t
demonstrate it all the time
• Formal thinking relates to attachment- securely
attached teens display more formal thinking
• It can be trained using creative teaching methods
The Competence-Performance Distinction
• What a teen can do & what she does do may be
very different
• Deductive reasoning use increases as the
problem relates more personally to the teen
Information Processing Theory
Five areas of cognitive improvement during
adolescence:
• Attention
– Selective vs. divided attention
• Working memory
– Working vs. long-term
• Processing speed
– Speed increases until late adolescence
• Organization
– More planful in solving problems as well as
flexible in
using different
strategies (mnemonics, note cards)
• Metacognition
– Reading others more effectively
– Imagining what others think about oneself
– Monitoring one’s learning process
– Judging costs & benefits of various solutions
So what is actually changing in the teen’s brain?
• fMRI, PET, diffusion tensor imaging can display
activity in the brain in response to tasks
• The brain is being remodeled in adolescence:
– Synaptic pruning
– Myelination
Synaptic pruning occurs in different parts of the
brain at different ages
Prefrontal cortex
• Important for planning, thinking ahead, weighing
risks & rewards, impulse control
• Pruning improves processing
• Myelination allows for more efficient
processing
• As it ends, new learning is more difficult
(language)
• Process not complete until mid-20s
Regions of prefrontal cortex (maturing into the
20s)
• Dorsolateral pc- planning & impulse control
• Ventromedial pc- instinctual decision makingtied to limbic system
• Orbitofrontal cortex- assesses risks & rewards
Changes in the limbic system
• Changes make people more emotional, more
affected by stress, less responsive to rewards
(more likely to feel bored)
• So greater need for novelty leads to drug use,
risk-taking, likelihood of depression & acting out
• Leads to greater processing of social
information, response to peer pressure
– The combination of all brain changes leads
teens to casually experiment with risks
Teens think they know how to assess risk due to
enhanced logical reasoning
Psychometric theory- Individual Differences
• Intelligence consists of verbal ability, problemsolving skills, ability to adapt and learn from life
experiences.
• IQ tests were developed in France by Binet to
identify special-needs children for education.
• The Stanford-Binet, the Wechsler Intelligence
Scale for Children; the Wechsler Adult
Intelligence Scale
• The intelligence quotient is produced by dividing
mental age by chronological age and multiplying
by 100. 100 is the average as normed by these
tests.
The Bell Curve
Sternberg’s Triarchic theory states that intelligence
comes in 3 forms:
Componential or Analytical- gaining & processing
information
Experiential or Creative- using information in
novel ways
Contextual or Practical- street smarts
Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences
IQ test performance in adolescence
• IQ scores are stable over adolescence
• Mental abilities do improve, become more
efficient & plateau in late adolescence
• SAT testing- measures likelihood of academic
performance in college
– Reasonable predictor but other things matter
– Less accurate for girls on math section
– Male advantage on spatial reasoning (most
other gender differences have disappeared)
Culture-fair testing
• Differences in background affect test
performance
• Performance-based tests are less biased
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory
Knowledge is collaborative
Zone of Proximal Development
Scaffolding
Cognitive apprenticeship
Tutoring
Cooperative learning
Reciprocal teaching
Changes in Social Cognition
• Social Cognition- thinking about people, about
social relationships, about social institutions
– Impression formation-how we form
judgments
– Social perspective taking- how people
assess the thoughts of others
– Morality & social conventions- concepts of
justice, social norms
What changes?
• Impression formation– Greater differentiation, complexity
– Less egocentric, greater awareness of others’
differing viewpoints
– More abstract, tied to attitudes
– Greater accuracy of inference about others’
feelings, motives
– Better organized impressions
• Creates an implicit personality theory which
allows for deeper relationships
Implicit Personality Theory
• This is the layman’s concept of personality.
Adolescents are likely to look past surface traits
to discover deeper causes of behavior. They
integrate past information about someone with
current behavior to understand the whole person
in context of his/her environment.
Social Perspective Taking
• The ability to view events from the perspective
of others, even if they disagree
• Mutual role taking- watching events from a 3rd
party perspective & understanding how one
person’s actions can influence others
• Leads to better communication as one person can
put himself in the shoes of the other
Social conventions
• Social norms that guide behavior
• Teens question absolutes, understand that moral
standards are subjective
• Social norms derive from a group’s common
perspective on
What contributes to heightened risk-taking?
• Risk-taking has to do with health issues- driving
drunk or without a seat belt, taking drugs,
unprotected sex
• Behavioral decision theory is a rational process
in which people figure costs vs. benefits of
possible behaviors:
– Identify the choices
– Identify the possible consequence of each
choice
– Assess cost & benefit of each choice
– Combine all information according to a
decision rule
So risky decisions are the result of faulty
information processing- attention, memory,
metacognition or organization
Even risky decisions can be seen as rational when
we understand how a person evaluates
consequences
Teens tend to overestimate the reward of an
outcome and underestimate the risk of a behavior
Context affects risk-taking
• So as teens are unsupervised and exposed to
more peer influence, they are more likely to
engage in more risk taking- delinquency,
drinking
• To reduce these outcomes, it may help to
convince them the rewards are not as great as
they think, rather than stressing the risks are
larger then they think.
What can schools do?
• Engage students, using higher levels of critical
thinking
• Most high school classes simply expect teens to
master rote memory & regurgitation while they
are at the height of their abilities to consider all
the aspects of a problem