Chapter 16- Cognitive Development in
Adolescence
Aspects of Cognitive Maturation
Piaget’s stage of Formal Operations
Formal operations:
o What Piaget called the highest level of cognitive development that adolescents
enter
o Is when they develop the capacity for abstract thinking
o Usually around the age of 11
o Gives them new, more flexible way of manipulating information
o Thought at this stage has a flexibility not possible in the stage of concrete
operations
o The ability to think abstractly has emotional implications too, they can now
captivate and understand an abstract, as well as feel it emotionally as well
Hypothetical-Deductive Reasoning
To understand the difference that formal reasoning makes, let‟s follow the progress of a
typical child in dealing with a classic Piagetian problem, the pendulum problem
To see more of Piaget‟s tasks for assessing the achievement of formal
operations, see page 429, figure 16-1
The child is shown the pendulum – an object hanging from a string
He is shown how she can change any of 4 factors:
o The length of the string
o The weight of the object
o The height from which the object is released
o The amount of force he may use to push the object
He is asked to figure out which factor, or which combination of factors determines how
fast the pendulum swings
o Child at 7 years old (preoperational stage)
Unable to formulate a plan for attacking the problem
Tries one thing after another in a hit-or-miss manner
o Child at 10 years (concrete operations)
He discovers that varying lengths of the string and the weight of the object
affects the speed of the swing
However, because he varies both factors at the same time, he cannot tell
which is critical or whether both are
o Child at 15 years (formal operations)
He goes at the problem systemically
He designs an experiment to test all the possible hypotheses, varying one
factor at a time He is now able to determine that only one factor – the length of the string
– determines how fast the pendulum swings
He is now capable of hypothetical-deductive reasoning
The ability to develop a hypothesis and design an experiment to
test it
What brings the shift to formal reasoning?
o Piaget attributed it to a combination of brain maturation and expanding
environmental opportunities
Evaluating Piaget’s theory
It is debatable at what age the ability to think abstractly occurs
Piaget overestimated some older children‟s abilities
o Some late adolescents and adults seem incapable of abstract thought
Piaget, also does pays little attention to individual differences, to variations in a child‟s
performance of difference kinds of task, or to social and cultural influences
Piaget‟s concept of formal operations as the highest point of mature thought may be too
narrow
o Neo-Piagetian research suggest that adolescent thought processes are more
flexible and varied
o The type of thinking young people use is closely tied to what they are thinking
about, as well as to the context of a problem and the kinds of information and
thought a culture considers important
Piaget‟s theory foes not adequately consider such cognitive advances as gains in
information-processing capacity, accumulation of knowledge and expertise in specific
fields, and the role of metacognition, the awareness and monitoring of one‟s own mental
processes and strategies
Elkind: Immature Characteristics of Adolescent Thought
According to psychologist David Elkind immature adolescent thought patterns stems
from their inexperienced ventures into formal operational thought
o This new way of thinking, which fundamentally transform the way they look at
themselves and their world, is as unfamiliar to them as their reshaped bodies, and
they sometimes feel just as awkward in its use
The immaturity of thinking manifests itself in a least six characteristics ways, according
to Elkind:
1. Idealism and criticalness:
o As adolescents envision an ideal world, they realize how far the real
world, for which they hold adults responsible, falls short. They feel
that they know better than adults on how to run the world
2. Argumentativeness:
o Adolescents are constantly looking for opportunities to try out their
newfound formal reasoning abilities
3. Indecisiveness:
o Adolescents can keep many alternatives in mind at the same time, yet
may lack effective strategies for choosing among them
4. Apparent hypocrisy: o Young adolescents often do not recognize the difference between
expressing an ideal, such as conversing energy, and making the
sacrifices necessary to live up to it, such as driving less often
5. Self-consciousness:
o Adolescents can think about thinking – their own and other people.
o However, in their preoccupation with their mental state, adolescents
often assume that everyone else is thinking about the same thing they
are thinking about: themselves
o Imaginary audience: an observer who exists only in an adolescent’s
mind and is as concerned with the adolescent’s thoughts and actions
as the adolescents is
6. Specialness and invulnerability:
o Personal fable: used to denote a belief by adolescents that they
special, that their experience is unique, and that they are not subject to
the rules that govern the rest of the world
o This special form of egocentrism underlies much risky, self-
destructive behaviour
The concepts of the imaginary audience and the personal fable have been widely
accepted, but their validity as distinct earmarks of adolescence has little dependent
research support
Language Development
Children‟s use of language reflects their level of cognitive development
With the advent of formal thought, adolescents can define and discuss such abstractions
as „love‟, „justice‟ and „freedom‟
They more frequently use the such terms as „however‟, „otherwise‟, „anyway‟,
„therefore‟, „really‟ and „probably‟ to express logical relations between clauses or
sentences
They take pleasure in using irony, puns and metaphors
Adolescents also become more skilled in social perspective-taking, the ability to
understand another person‟s point of view and level of knowledge and to tailor their own
speech accordingly
Conscious of their audience, adolescents speak a different language with peers and with
adults
o Teenage slang is part of the process of developing an independent identity
separate from parents and the adult world
Changes in Information Processing in Adolescence
This reflects the maturation of the brain‟s frontal lobes and may help explain the
cognitive advances Piaget described
Researchers have identifies 2 broad categories of measureable change in information
processing: structural change and functional change
Structural Change
In adolescence may include:
o Growth of information-processing capacity o An increase in the amount of knowledge stored in long-term memory
Information stored in the long-term memory can be:
Declarative knowledge: (“knowing that…”) consists of all the
factual knowledge a person has acquired
Procedural knowledge: (“knowing how to…”) consists of all the
skills a person has acquired. Ex. being able to ride a bike
Conceptual knowledge: (“knowing why”) is an understanding of,
for example, why an algebraic equation remains true if the same
amount is added or subtracted from both sides
o The expansion of working memory enables older adolescents to deal with
complex problems or decisions involving multiple pieces of information
Functional Change
Processes for obtaining, handling, and retaining information are functional aspects of
cognition
Among these are learning, remembering and reasoning, all of which improve during
adolescence
The most important functional changes are:
o A continued increase in processing speed
o Further development of executive function, which includes such skills as selective
attention, decision making, inhibitory control of impulsive response, and
management of working memory
Moral Development
Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Reasoning
Kohlberg’s Levels and Stages
Lawrence Kohlberg described three levels of moral reasoning each divided into two
stages (refer to page 453, table 16-1 for more information on the stages)
o Level I: Pre-conventional morality:
People act under external controls. They obey rules to avoid punishment
or reap rewards, or act out of self-interest
Typical of children‟s age 4-10
Stage 1: Orientation toward punishment and obedience
Stage 2: Instrumental purpose and exchange
o Level II: Conventional morality: (or morality of conventional role conformity)
People have internalized the standards of authority figures
They are concerned about being „good‟, pleasing others and maintaining
social order
Typical of 10-13 years, many never move beyond it, even in adulthood
Stage 3: Maintaining mutual relations, approval of others, the
golden rule
Stage 4: Social concern and conscience
o Transitional level (between Level II and III) When people no longer feel bound by society‟s moral standards but have
not yet developed rationally derived principles of justice
They base their moral decisions on personal feelings
o Level III: Post-Conventional morality:
People recognize conflicts between moral standards and make their own
judgment on the basis of principles of right, fairness and justice
Typical of early adolescence, or not until young adulthood, or never
Stage 5: Morality of contract, of individual rights, and of
democratically accepted law
Stage 6: Morality of universal ethical principles
It is the reasoning underlying a person‟s response to a moral dilemma, not the answer
itself, that indicates the stage of moral development
Later, he proposed a seventh „cosmic‟ stage, in which people consider the effect of their
actions not only on other people but on the universe as a whole
Evaluating Kohlberg’s Theory
Instead of viewing morality solely as the attainment of control over self-gratifying
impulses, investigators now study how children and adults base moral judgement on their
growing understanding of the social world, thanks to Kohlberg
One reason the ages attached to Kohlberg‟s levels are so variable is that people who have
achieved a high level of cognitive development do not always reach a comparably high
level of moral development
A certain level of cognitive development is miscarry but not suffic
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