Developmental psychology
Chapter 16
Cognitive development in adolescence

Perception and attention

Perception

Perception is one of the cognitive abilities that develop earliest in life.
Children’s perception becomes increasingly flexible.
Ambiguous figures.
Increased flexibility of thought in adolescence allows alternations between the different perspecitves to be easily accomplished in ambiguous figures.
Adolescents can identify both components and wholes.

Selective attention

Development is evident in the adolescent’s superior ability to allocate attentional resources.
Selective attention.

Speed of processing

the time it takes for the brain to either receive or output information.
It develops rapidly during childhood and continues to develop during the adolescent years so that older adolescents show faster speed of processing compared to younger adolescents.
This development is at least partially driven by the maturation of white matter in the brain.

Memory

By early adulthood memory can be quite remarkable.
There is a rapid development in face processing abilities during childhood and adolescence, with adult-level recognition reached by about 16 years of age.

Is there a qualitative change in face processing between childhood and adolescence?
Proposal
Encoding switch hypothesis: different information abut faces is represented in memory by children at different ages. Young children rely on information about individual features, whereas older children and adults use information bout the configuration of the features.

Face processing emphasizing features is referred to as featural processing.
Face processing emphasizing configuration is configural processing.

Children younger than 10 years of age make identifications largely on the basis of parahernalia items such as hat or glasses.
Younger children’s failure in recognizing the right person may be because they encoded non-essential information for determining identity.

Even face-processing abilities during adolescence are still developing considering their less than adult like levels in face recognition memory.

There is a drop in performance on face recognition tasks occuring at about 11 years of age.
This appears to be influenced by factors such as children’s level of familiarity with the type of face stimuli used and the difficulty of the recognition task.
Hormonal influence?

Short-term memory

Short-term memory increases steadily throughout childhood and into adolescence.
Possible explanations:

• As children grown the capacity of short-term memory increases as a result of neurological changes
• Older children have a greater familiarity and experience with words and numbers as a result of additional years of schooling.

There is more sophisticated working memory among older adolescents relative to younger adolescents.

Long-term memory

Its absolute capacity does not appear to change much.

Memory strategies

Developmental differences between adolescents and younger children are evident in the types of strategies used in order to remember information.
This reflects adolescents’ increased knowledge about ways to enhance their memory.

• Elaboration.
• Organization

More sophisticated strategy use for remembering information increases throughout childhood.
Effective use of strategies to increase memory may especially proliferate in adolescence.

Intelligence

Rapid development

There are three important characteristics of adolescents’ general intellectual ability.

• Adolescent’s performance on the subscales of the WISC suggests that their general intellectual abilities are significantly advanced compared to children younger than 10 yeas of age. These abilities continue to develop rapidly during the entire adolescent period and are at least partially driven by age-related improvements in speed of processing.
• There are differences in the speed at which adolescents’ intellectual abilities develop.

Stability of development

A particular adolescent’s IQ score is relatively stable and does not change greatly as age increases.
IQ scores are calculated on base of age norms.
Percentile: location of an individual’s development or achievement along a percentage scale.
18-year olds were very similar to their own IQ scores in adolescence. But there is a poor correlation between IQ scores of 18 years and those obtained much earlier.
It might be that children’s general intellectual abilities are more unstable at younger ages than in later years.

Fluid and crystallized intelligence

Typical intelligence tests fail to differentiate between the two types of intelligence and, as a result, IQ scores appear to be stable over time during and after adolescence.

• Fluid intelligence improves throughout childhood and adolescence
• Crystallized intelligence increases rapidly beginning in late adolescence.

This might be related in changes in the nervous system.

Intergenerational IQ gains: We’re brighter now

Flynn effect.

Genetic factors cannot account for the massive change in IQ scores on such as small timescale.
The effect must be due to certain environmental factors.

Reasoning

Deductive and inductive reasoning

Syllogism: comprises two statements (permisses) and a conclusion that is derived from these previous statements.

Universal and particular quantifiers

Developmentally, Piaget held that true deductive and inductive reasoning could not be carried out until the stage formal operations.
But,
It is true that reasoning improves with age, but it is not the case that adolescents reason reliably. Nor do adults.
Performance varied considerably depending on the form of the premises and conclusion.

Deductive reasoning

Even as adults we often have difficulty distinguishing valid form invalid conclusions in cases of deductive reasoning.

Reason:
The abstract form.

Deductive reasoning was easier than inductive reasoning. By the end of elementary school certain aspects of deductive and inductive reasoning are understood in an abstract sense. It is increasingly understood that what is important is the logical form of the problem and not the content.

Analogical reasoning

Resolving a problem by comparing it to a similar problem that has been solved previously.

Even quite simple analogies are typically beyond the grasp of very young children.
By age 9 to 10 such simple analogies are understood. Analogical reasoning undergoes rapid development after this time.

Three qualitatively distinct stages:

• Age 9 to 10, analogies with familiar elements and very clear relations among elements can be solved.
• 12 years, relations among elements that are not obvious can be considered, but this is possible primarily in the case that the elements themselves are concrete rather than abstract entities.
• 13 to 14 years, analogies wherein both the entities comprising the analogy and the relationship between the entities are abstract can be understood.

Second-oder analogies: analogies that require the use of crystallized intelligence. In oder to make the connections, one must be able to derive a relationship that is not inherent within the analogy.

The progression is from a very concrete understanding of analogies limited to very familiar content to a much more flexible and abstract understanding.

Formal operational thinking

The term formal operational thinking is used by Piaget to refer to the unique way of thinking in adolescence.
Major feature: reversibility.

Abstract thought

Piaget believed that adolescents are fundamentally different thinkers from concrete operational children.

• They think abstractly and use operations that are extracted from a number of concrete operations.

These operations are abstract, general and content-free.

Interpropositional thinking: where the individual is able to relate one or more parts of a proposition to another part to arrive at a solution to the problem.

Intrapropositonal thinking: the thought of the child in concrete operations, includes concrete content rather than abstract symbols.

Realms of possibility

Piaget theorized that concrete and formal operational children conceptualize the relationship between reality and possibility differently.
Adolescents treat reality as only one of many possibilities.

The adolescent as an apprentice scientist

According to Piaget, adolescents are apprentice scientists who can come up with theories in an attempt to explain certain phenomena, generate hypotheses based on these theories, and systematically devise tests to confirm or refute these hypotheses.
Hypothetico-deductive reasoning.

Scientific problems

According to Piaget, adolescent’s unique way of thinking is manifested in how they solve complex problems.

Controversies about Piaget’s theory and research regarding formal operational thought

Do all adolescents reach this stage?

There is failure duplicating findings. Piaget seemed to have over-estimated adolescent’s formal operational thinking.
Researchers now agree that formal operational thinking continues to develop will into adulthood and many adults may never reach this level of thinking.
Adolescents formal operations appears to develop gradually.

The role of experience

Cultural experience plays a important role in the development of formal operational thinking.
And scholar experience.

Cross-generational gains

There is a huge impact of environmental factors on cognitive development.
At equal age, today’s adolescents exhibited a higher level of cognitive development than the adolescents of 20 or 30 years ago.
Gains where the greatest for combinatory thought (taking more than one factor into consideration).
There is a large correlation between participants IQ scores and their scores on cognitive tasks.

Beyond Piaget’s theory

Adolescents as rule-based problem-solvers

Information processing approach.
Adolescents thinking is a process of obtaining information form the environment, storing information in the short-term and long-term memory systems, and using various rules and strategies to manipulate information. The goal is to derive new information and to guide actions.

Children and adolescents may not think using general-purpose formal operations that can be applied to problems across various domains.
Thinking is rule-based, and these rules are domain-specific.

Adolescents as intuitive scientists

Children and adolescents are viewed as intuitive scientists.
Cognitive development is domain specific.
Views children as naive theorists, not as rule users.

Three common flaws in children’s and adolescents’ use of theories

• They tend to fail to separate theory and evidence.
• They tend to select evidence consistent with their theory instead of modifying or abandoning a theory in the face of mounting counter-evidence.
• They need a plausible alternative theory in order to accept counter-evidence to their existing theory.

General characteristics of adolescent thinking

Five major characteristics:

1. Adolescents thinking emphasizes the world of possibility
2. In adolescence the ability to carry out systematic hypothesis testing and scientific reasoning emerges
3. Adolescents can think about the future by planning ahead
4. Adolescents are capable of introspecting about their own thought process (metacognition).
5. The content of adolescent thinking is expanded to include social, moral and political issues, not only issues concerning the external world, but also personal issues.

Different from adults:

• More riskier and exploratory behaviors

Adolescence is a time of continued improvement in planned, goal directed behaviors.