Lecture 10 - Cognitive Development in Adolescents

adolescence

• start puberty until adulthood

What improves in adolescence?

• brain development

• training → many skills

ambiguous figure

• a figure that can be perceived in two (or more) different ways.

selective attention

• the ability to allocate attentional resources and to focus on (a) specific topic(s).

speed of processing

• the time it takes for the brain to either receive or output information, or the speed with which a mental calculation can be carried out.

white matter

• myelinated axons that carry information from one neuron to another.

encoding switch hypothesis

• different information about faces is represented in memory by children at different ages. It is suggested that young children rely on information about individual features (e.g. eyes, nose, mouth) in recognising faces, whereas older children and adults use information about the configuration of the features.

featural processing

• a tendency to process the separate features of the face, as opposed to perceiving the relationship between the parts.

configural processing

• processing that pays particular attention to the overall spatial layout of individual features.

percentile

• location of an individual’s development or achievement along a percentage scale.

correlation coefficients

• a statistical measure ranging from +1.00 to −1.00 that indicates the strength, as well as the direction, of the relationship between two variables.

fluid intelligence

• person’s ability to think and reason abstractly as measured by culture-free reasoning tasks, e.g. task to measure ability to see relations among objects or patterns in series of items → increased mental speed and working memory

crystallised intelligence

• the store of information, skills and strategies acquired through education and prior experience

neo-cortex

• in evolutionary terms, the most recently developed area of the cerebral cortex.

deductive reasoning

• the outcome of a specific example is calculated from a general principle, that is, deductive reasoning involves drawing specific conclusions from general premises.

inductive reasoning

• creating a general principle or conclusion from specific examples, that is, drawing a general conclusion from specific premises.

syllogism

• comprises two statements (called premises) and a conclusion that is derived from these previous statements.

analogical reasoning

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

second-order analogy

• an analogy that requires the use of crystallised intelligence. In order to make the connections, one must be able to derive a relationship that is not inherent within the analogy.

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 a problem.

intrapropositional thinking

• the thought of the child in Piaget’s concrete operations stage of development, which includes concrete content rather than abstract symbols.

hypothetico-deductive reasoning

• the ability to develop theories in an attempt to explain certain phenomena, generate hypotheses based on these theories, and systematically devise tests to confirm or refute these hypotheses.

combinatory thought

• taking more than one factor into consideration.

domain-specific knowledge

• that can only be applied to specific situations that fall within the same domain.

intuitive scientists

• the idea that we are all capable of constructing commonsense theories to explain how the world works, and are able to conduct ‘experiments’ to test them.