Adolescencia

Adolescence

Steinberg, Laurence, “Cognitive transitions”, en Adolescence, Fifth Edition, Boston, McGraw-Hill College, 1999, pp. 58-62.

Changes in cognition, or thinking, represent the second in a set of three fundamental changes that occur during adolescence –the others being the biological changes of puberty and the transition of the adolescent into newsocial roles. Like developments in the other two domains, the cognitive transitions of adolescence have far-reaching implications for the young person’s psychological development and social relations. Indeed, the expansion of thought during adolescence represents as significant an event and as important an influence on the adolescent’s development and behavior as puberty.

CHANGES IN COGNITIONMost people would agree that adolescents are “smarter” than children. Not only do teenagers know more than children –after all, the longer we live, the more opportunities we have to acquire new information– but adolescents actually think in ways that are more advanced, more efficient, and generally more effective. This can be seen in five chief ways (Keating, 1990):

1. Adolescents becomebetter able than children to think about what is possible, instead of limiting their thought to what is real.
2. Adolescents become better able to think about abstract things.
3. Adolescents begin thinking more often about the process of thinking itself.
4. Adolescents’ thinking tends to become multidimensional, rather than being limited to a single issue.
5. Adolescents are more likely thanchildren to see things as relative, rather than as absolute.

Let’s look at each of these advantages –and some of their implications– in greater detail.

Thinking About Possibilities

An adolescent’s thinking is less bound to concrete events than is that of a child. Children’s thinking is oriented to the here and now –that is, to things and events that they can observe directly. But adolescentsare able to consider what they observe against a backdrop of what is possible. Put another way, for the child, what is possible is what is real; for the adolescent, what is real is but one subset of what is possible. Children, for example, do not wonder the way adolescents often do, about the ways in which their personalities might change in the future or the ways in which their lives might beaffected by different career choices. For the young child, you are who you are. But for the adolescent, who you are is just one possibility of who you could be.

This does not mean that the child is incapable of imagination or fantasy. Even young children have vivid and creative imaginations. Nor does it mean that children are unable to conceive of things being different from the way they observethem to be. Rather, the advantage that adolescents enjoy over children when it comes to thinking about possibilities is that adolescents are able to move easily between the specific and the abstract, to generate alternative possibilities and explanations systematically, and to compare what they actually observe with what they believe is possible.

We can illustrate this development by looking atthe following problem. How would you approach it?

Imagine four poker chips, one red, one blue, one yellow, and one green. Make as many different combinations of chips, of any number, as you can. Use the notations R, B, Y, and G to record your answers. (Adapted from Elkind, Barocas, and Rosenthal, 1968)

How did you tackle this problem? Did you need to use real poker chips to solve theproblem? Probably not. In all likelihood, you used some sort of system, beginning perhaps with the case of zero chips (don’t worry, a lot of people forget this one) and then proceeding on to one-chip combinations (R, B, Y, G), two-chip combinations (RB, RY, RG, BY, BG, YG), three-chip combinations (RBY, RBG, RYG, BYG), and finally the single four-chip combination (RBYG). More important, you...