Understanding Adolescent Thinking & Decision Making: A Developmental View, Study notes of Developmental Psychology

Download Understanding Adolescent Thinking & Decision Making: A Developmental View and more Study notes Developmental Psychology in PDF only on Docsity! Chapter 5 Cognitive Development: Improvements in Thinking, Reasoning, and Decision Making  This multimedia product and its contents are protected under copyright law. The following are prohibited by law: any public performance or display, including transmission of any image over a network; preparation of any derivative work, including the extraction, in whole or part, of any images; any rental, lease or lending of the program. Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development  Sensorimotor Stage: birth – 2  Preoperational Stage: 2 – 7  Concrete Operational Stage: 7 – 11 or 12  Formal Operational Stage: 11/12 & older  The differences among the four stages have to do primarily with (1) what one can think about, (2) how flexible one’s thinking is, and (3) how correctly one can use logic. Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. Concrete Operational Stage  Greater capacity for logical reasoning, at concrete level  Hierarchical classifications  Class inclusion relationship  Transitive inference  Conservation Figure 5.1 Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. Four important mental operations:  Reversibility: All actions, even mental actions, have an opposite  Identity or nullifiability: the object is unchanged  Associativity: same outcome can result from different combinations or clusterings or actions.  Combinativity: Classes can always be combined to form larger, broader categories Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. The Pendulum Problem Figure 5.2 Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. Summary of Formal Operational Stage (cont.) (1) Introspection (thinking about thought) (2) Abstract thinking (going beyond the real to the possible) (3) Combinatorial thinking (being able to consider all important facts and ideas) (4) Logical reasoning (the ability to form correct conclusions using induction and deduction) (5) Hypothetical reasoning (formulating hypotheses and examining the evidence for them, considering numerous variables) Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. CHARACTERISTICS OF CONCRETE OPERATIONAL AND FORMAL OPERATIONAL THOUGHT Figure 5.3 Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. Effects of Adolescent Thought on Personality and Behavior  Idealism: what it might be like  Hypocrisy: pretending to be what they are not  Pseudostupidity: approaching problems at much too complex a level and failing  Egocentrism:  imaginary audience  personal fable  Introspection Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. Information Processing  Information processing approach: study how individuals perceive, attend to, retrieve, and manipulate information.  Current research differs from Piaget:  Focused on a micro-level analysis  Change is more gradual and continuous  A belief that knowledge and skills are domain specific  Emphasizes the progressive steps, actions, and operations that take place when the adolescent receives, perceives, remembers, thinks about, and utilizes information Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. Steps in Information Processing Figure 5.5 Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved Steps in Memory Processing Figure 5.6 Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. Decision Making  Ross (1981) proposed mastering five skills:  (1) Identifying alternate courses of action  (2) Identifying appropriate criteria for considering alternatives  (3) Assessing alternatives by criteria  (4) Summarizing information about alternatives  (5) Evaluating the outcome of the decision making process Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved Barriers to Good Decision Making  Heuristics: rules of thumb  Overestimate  Rely upon intuitive rather than analytic reasoning.  Researchers advocate a dual process theory of decision making (Reyna & Rivers, 2008) Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved Epistemological Understanding  Boyes and Chandler (1992) four-level scheme of epistemic development:  Level 1: age of 6 or 7  Children are naive realists  Level 2: middle childhood  defensive realists  Level 3: adolescents  dogmatists or skeptics Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved The Cerebral Lobes Figure 5.7 Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved Brain Development During Adolescence  Cerebrum: connected by the corpus callosum.  Each hemisphere is divided into four lobes  parietal lobe: spatial reasoning  frontal lobe: planning & impulse control  temporal lobe: language and nonverbal communication  occipital lobe: vision  First three continue to develop into adolescence Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved Brain Development (cont.)  Inside the temporal lobe:  Hippocampus: involved with learning, memory, and motivation  The amygdala interprets incoming sensory information and causes us to respond in primal, emotional ways to that information Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved Intelligence Tests  Measure primarily componential, linguistic, and logical/mathematical intelligence  Stanford-Binet  Wechsler Scales  Score may change greatly between early childhood and adolescence; by adolescence they’re usually stable Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved SUBTESTS OF THE WECHSLER ADULT INTELLIGENCE SCALE (WAIS-III) Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved Factors Influencing Results  Actual intelligence  Test anxiety  Motivation  Sociocultural factors/bias  Dynamic testing Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved