Question

Differences between cognitive and physical adolescence

Answer 1

ADOLESCENCE: A DEVELOPMENTAL TRANSITION

• Adolescence, in modern industrial societies, is the transition from childhood to adulthood. It lasts from age 11 or 12 until the late teens or early twenties.
• Legal, sociological, and psychological definitions of entrance into adulthood vary.
• Adolescence is full of opportunities for physical, cognitive, and psychosocial growth, but also of risks to healthy development. Risky behavior patterns, such as drinking alcohol, drug abuse, sexual and gang activity, and use of firearms, tend to be established early in adolescence.

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• People in Piaget's stage of formal operations can engage in hypothetical-deductive reasoning. They can think in terms of possibilities, deal flexibly with problems, and test hypotheses.
• Brain maturation and environmental stimulation play important parts in attaining this stage. Schooling and culture also play a role.
• Not all people become capable of formal operations; and those who are capable do not always use it.
• Piaget's theory does not take into account accumulation of knowledge and expertise and the growth of metacognition. Piaget also paid little attention to individual differences, between-task variations, and the role of the situation.
• Vocabulary and other aspects of language development, especially those related to abstract thought, Adolescents enjoy wordplay and create their own "dialect."
• According to Elkind, immature thought patterns can result from adolescents' inexperience with formal thinking. These thought patterns include idealism and criticalness, argumentativeness, indecisiveness, apparent hypocrisy, self-consciousness, and an assumption of specialness and invulnerability. Research has cast doubt on the special prevalence of the latter two patterns during adolescence.g people experience no major problems.