Adolescent Psychology
Chapter 7 – New Approaches to Cognitive Development
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Informational-processing approach- study of how individuals perceive, attend,
retrieve, and manipulate information
Piaget – broad based overview of cognitive development, current researchers –
microlevel analysis of processes underlying grand changes  required b/c
mechanisms put forth by Piaget don’t account for intellectual differences
Current research support continual change theory rather than stages theory as
Piaget believed
Current researchers feel that skills are domain specific, Piaget thought you
acquired skill and them could apply it across the board
Piaget believed that abstract thinking was the pinnacle of development whereas
current researchers emphasize executive control (i.e. metacognition) – ability to
control & monitor own thinking and learning behaviour – greater efficiency leads
to greater success
Information Processing
 Series of logical steps:
stimulusselectioninterpretationmemoryinferencethinking
reasoningaction (note: there can be some reverse mov’t.)
 Stimuli – all incoming sensory input, sensory receptors well developed early in
life
 Selection – not all stimuli are focused on simultaneously, motivated by certain
stimuli (e.g. friend talking to you) and filter out other stimuli, this selectability
improves during adolescence, as does focusing on relevant vs. irrelevant info.
 Interpretation – based on past experience, affected by sufficient information and
accuracy of perception, adolescents may have risky behaviour b/c of
interpretational biases and from lack of experience, interpretation if consequence
of risky behaviour also increases likelihood of risky behaviour
 Memory -3 step process: sensory storage, short term storage, long term storage;
diminishing info is passed from storage to storage
o Information begins to decay almost immediately once perceived d/t/ other
incoming stimuli – remaining info goes to short term storage
o Limited capacity of short term storage therefore info needs to be rehearsed
and then sent to long term storage
o Long term storage is infinite, retrieving info is based on searching,
finding, and remembering (via recall or recognition) – maximum ability
during adolescence
o Sensory storage depends on the stimulus: visual - iconic memory, auditory
– echoic memory; ability to recall sensory storage doesn’t change much
from childhood through adolescence
o Short term memory info still being rehearsed, long term memory is how
deeply info has been processed NOT how long info has been held
o Secondary memory – info that has been processed beyond conscious level
o Short term memory ability continues to improve throughout adolescence
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o Adolescents take longer to retrieve info than adults d/t not using retrieval
cues
o Adolescents are more efficient at deep processing than adults
o Adolescents less likely than children to clutter memory with trivial details
Processing speed – how fast the brain perceives and utilizes information, young
adolescents generally slower than adults likely d/t process of myelination, myelin
allows for increased short term memory which allows better reasoning and
problem solving – called developmental cascade
Higher-order thought processes – retrieved info needs to be manipulated, 3 orders
of manipulation: inference, thinking, reasoning (all improve in adolescents)
o Inference – most basic, ability to develop new thought from old info,
better as we get older
o Thinking – conscious, deliberate coordination of info, adolescents use
negation rather than affirmation, and use elimination strategy (evidence to
disprove hypothesis) rather than confirmation strategy (evidence to prove
hypothesis), self serving bias – personal or emotional believes impact
thought; when see info more consistent with your opinion it enhances self
esteem
o Reasoning – occurs when thinking is constrained to lines you believe are
rationale and useful; based on prior experiences, reasoning by analogy,
deductions (increased in adolescence b/c of ability to suspend own
beliefs), induction (drawing general conclusions from a series of
examples), principles – abstract theoretical guidelines (more abstract than
rules, ability to come up with different results by applying same principle)
Problem solving – multistep process: problem finding (identify the problem),
evaluating the elements of the problem, generating a list of solutions and
evaluating them; adolescents seem to do this better in groups (may take longer but
get better result)
Role of knowledge – in order to manipulate facts you must know the facts, as we
get older more and more information becomes familiar to us and therefore get
smarter
Decision Making
 The process – decision makers must master 5 skills: identify alternative courses of
action, identify appropriate criteria for considering alternatives, assessing
alternatives by criteria, summarizing information about alternatives, evaluating
the outcome of the decision making process
 Experience with decision making makes one better at decision making
 Nice C’s of decision making: choices, comprehension, creativity, compromise,
consequentiality, correctness, credibility, consistency, commitment
Epistemological Understanding
 Thinking about knowledge
 Adolescents become to realize that truth is more subjective than objective – one
constructs view of truth rather than uncovers it
 4 levels – 1 through 4
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Level 1 – children (pre-operational), naïve realists, believe in universal truths,
difficulty distinguishing fact from opinion
Level 2 – concrete operational level children, defensive realists, still believe in
universal truths, now see that people can have different opinions based on same
info, see facts as universal truth and opinions as variable
Level 3 – formal operational adolescents, either dogmatist or skeptics, both camps
come from same point – truth is constructed and facts are open to interpretations,
skeptics take view that if all opinions are equally valid so therefore don’t need to
listen to anyone, react impulsively intuitively (emotionally) and indifferently;
dogmatists have firm beliefs and are intolerant of other beliefs; skeptics think
everyone that believes too deeply is foolish, dogmatists believe anyone that thinks
differently form them is misguided
Level 4 – postskeptical rationalism – absolute certainty of truth is not needed for
rational behaviour, do the best you can with the info available
Assessing cognition
 Psychometric approach – measurement of knowledge of thinking ability
 IQ test (intelligence quotient)
 Achievement tests – measure mastery of particular subject matter (e.g. geometry)
 Intelligence – no one clear definition but concepts include: innate capacity to
learn, think, reason, understand, and solve problems
 Triarchic Theory of Intelligence – 3 major groupings of intelligence:
o Componential intelligence – reading comprehension, vocabulary,
analogies, series, critical thinking – traditional concept of intelligence
o Experiential intelligence – compare, select, combine info to create new
insight or theories
o Contextual intelligence – adaptive behaviour in the real world, solve
practical problems
 Gardner’s intelligences – 7 original ones, then added naturalistic and to lesser
extent, existential and spiritual
Intelligence tests – pg 151