PSYB20H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 15: Personal Fable, Imaginary Audience, Critical Thinking
18 Dec 2016
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Chapter 15 – Cognitive Development in Adolescence
1) Cognitive Development
a) Piaget’s Stages of Formal Operations
• Formal operations: Final stage of cognitive development characterized by the ability to think
abstractly.
- Develops around age 11.
- Can now understand historical time and extraterrestrial space.
- Can use symbols (ex: X in calculus variables) and allegory (Life of Pi) and appreciate metaphors.
- Can link past to present to future.
• Hypothetical-deductive reasoning: Ability believed to accompany the stage of formal operations,
which develops, considers, and tests hypotheses.
- Considering relationships and testing them systematically.
• Example of Hypothetical-Deductive Reasoning (The Pendulum Problem):
- Question: Which factor determines how fast it swings? Length of string, weight of object, height
from which object is released, and amount of force used to push object.
- At age 7 -> preoperational stage -> Random method/hit or miss.
- At age 10 -> concrete operations -> Discover that varying length of string and weight affect
movement of pendulum, but unsure of what factor is more critical.
- At age 15 -> Formal operations -> Tests all factors, while holding the other ones constant to
determine that length of string determines how fast pendulum swings.
• Some other Formal Operations Reasoning Tasks
- Motion in horizontal plane = predict where balls stop.
- Balance beam = what factors affect whether scale will balance?
- Shadows = produce 2 shadows of same size using 2 different sized rings.
• What causes shift to formal reasoning? Brain maturation and environment. Both are needed!
• Evaluating Piaget’s Theory:
- Many late adolescents and adults—perhaps one-third to one-half—seem incapable of abstract
thought as Piaget defined it.
- Paid little attention to individual differences, to variations in the same child's performance on
different kinds of tasks, or to social and cultural influences.
- Does 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.
b) Immature Characteristics of Adolescent Thought
• Behaviour stems from adolescents’ inexperienced ventures into formal operation thought.
• Manifests itself in at least 6 characteristic ways:
- Idealism and criticalness: Envision an ideal world and are critical of parents and authority
figures around them.
- Argumentativeness: Try and test out reasoning abilities.
- Indecisiveness: Struggle between main decision and other alternatives.
- Apparent hypocrisy: Don’t recognize the difference between “talking the talk” and “walking
the walk”.
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- Self-consciousness: Can think about thinking, but assume that other people are thinking about
the same thing they’re thinking about. Imaginary audience is a conceptualized “observer” who
is as concerned with the young person’s thoughts and behaviour as he or she is. Can persist into
adulthood to a lesser degree.
- Specialness and invulnerability: Personal fable: One is special, unique, and not subject to the
rules that govern the rest of the world. Can lead to risky behaviours that can persist into
adulthood.
c) Language Development
• Vocabulary grows as reading becomes more adult-like.
- By 16 to 18, person knows about 80,000 words.
• Become more conscious of words as symbols that can have multiple meanings.
• Take pleasure in using irony, puns, and metaphors.
• Become more skilled in social-perspective taking.
- Ability to tailor speech to another person’s knowledge level and point of view.
• Vocabulary may differ by gender, ethnicity, age, geographical region, neighbourhood, and type of
school (Eckert, 2003) and varies from one clique to another.
• Teenage slang becomes common.
d) Changes in Information Processing in Adolescence
• Information is stored in long-term memory.
• Researchers have identified two broad categories of measurable change in information processing:
structural change and functional change.
• Progress in cognitive processing varies greatly among individual adolescents.
• Structural Change: Structural changes in adolescence may include growth of information-processing
capacity and an increase in the amount of knowledge stored in long-term memory.
- Declarative knowledge: Acquired factual knowledge stored in LTM.
- Procedural knowledge: Acquired skills stored in LTM.
- Conceptual knowledge: Acquired interpretative understandings stored in LTM.
• Functional change: Process for obtaining, handling, and retaining information -> learning,
remembering, and reasoning.
- Important functional changes are:
o Continued increase in processing speed -> as selective attention, decision making,
inhibitory control of impulsive responses, and management of working memory.
o Further development in executive function.
o Older adolescents make poorer real-world decisions than younger adolescents do.
e) Visuospatial Skills
• Allows us to visually perceive objects and the spatial relationships among objects.
• Assessed by measuring the ability of the participant to assess line orientation.
• The child is shown an array of arrows around a target and is asked to say which arrows points to the
center of the target.
f) Response Inhibition
• Inhibition gives one the ability to suppress irrelevant stimuli or behavioural impulses to enable goal-
directed behaviour.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Chapter 15 cognitive development in adolescence: cognitive development, piaget"s stages of formal operations, formal operations: final stage of cognitive development characterized by the ability to think abstractly. Can now understand historical time and extraterrestrial space. Can use symbols (ex: x in calculus variables) and allegory (life of pi) and appreciate metaphors. Can link past to present to future: hypothetical-deductive reasoning: ability believed to accompany the stage of formal operations, which develops, considers, and tests hypotheses. Considering relationships and testing them systematically: example of hypothetical-deductive reasoning (the pendulum problem): Length of string, weight of object, height from which object is released, and amount of force used to push object. At age 7 -> preoperational stage -> random method/hit or miss. At age 10 -> concrete operations -> discover that varying length of string and weight affect movement of pendulum, but unsure of what factor is more critical.
