6: Cognitive Changes during Adolescence

Learning Objectives

• Describe the cognitive changes that occur during adolescence
• Explain Piaget’s stage theory as it applies to adolescents
• Describe social cognition as it applies to adolescent thinking and behavior
• Explain Vygotsky’s theory
• Describe the various aspects of the information processing approach and how it applies to adolescents
• Differentiate the three theories of intelligence

Adolescence is a time of rapid cognitive development. Biological changes in brain structure and connectivity in the brain interact with increased experience, knowledge, and changing social demands to produce rapid cognitive growth. These changes generally begin at puberty or shortly thereafter, and some skills continue to develop as an adolescent ages. Development of executive functions, or cognitive skills that enable the control and coordination of thoughts and behavior, are generally associated with the prefrontal cortex area of the brain. The thoughts, ideas, and concepts developed during this period of life greatly influence one’s future life and play a major role in character and personality formation.

There are two primary perspectives on adolescent thinking: constructivist and information-processing. The constructivist perspective, based on the work of Piaget, takes a quantitative, stage-theory approach. This view hypothesizes that adolescents’ cognitive improvement is relatively sudden and drastic. The information-processing perspective derives from the study of artificial intelligence and explains cognitive development in terms of the growth of specific components of the overall process of thinking, such as attention, memory, processing speed, and metacognition.

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