Lecture 3 Flashcards
Changes in cognition for adolescents
- Adolescents are able to think what is possible
- Adolescents can think about abstract things
- Adolescents are able to think about the process of thinking (metacognition)
- Adolescents’ thinkin is more often multidimensional
- Adolescents are more likely to see things as relative
Counterfactually thinking
Creating possible alternative scenarios fo what has been
Deductive reasoning
Concluding the special from the general (dogs have ears, a teckel is a dog, teckels have ears)
Hypothetical thinking
Thinking about what can possibly happen in a situation
Metacognition
Thinking about the process of thinking itself, leads to introspection and self-consciousness
Introspection may lead to
Adolescent egocentrism, which has two distinct problems: imaginary audience and personal fable
Imaginary audience
Thinking everyone always looks at your behaviour
Personal fable
Believing your experiences are unique and are therefore not subject to the rules, this can lead to better self-esteem and self-importance, but also to risky behaviour
Piagetian perspective
Cognitive development proceeds through fixed stages.
Piagetian stages
- Sensorimotor (0-2) - motor development and cognitive development
- Preoperational (2-7) - able to represent the world symbolically, how the child sees the world is the truth
- Concrete operational (7-11) - systematic thinking, more advanced
- Formal operational (11-15) - abstract thinking, deductive reasoning, metacognition, relativity
Information processsing perspective
Cognitive development is not set in stages but is happening in 4 domains: attention, memory, processing speed, organization
Selective attention
Focusing on one thing while tuning out the rest
Divided attention
Paying attention to two different things at the same time
Memory
Working memory and long-term memory
Autobiographical memory
The recall of personally meaningful past events
Reminiscence bump
Experiences from adolescence are recalled more, this is because the brain is chemically primed to encode these memories more deeply.
fMRI
Tells us which areas of the brain are active during tasks
DTI
Tells us how different parts of the brain are connected
Structural MRI
Tells us what the brain looks like, volumes of different parts
Grey matter
Synapses in the brain
White matter
Myeline
Synaptic pruning
The elimination of unnessecary synapses, this will make the brain more efficient
Synaptic proliferation
The formation of synapses
Plasticity of the brain
The capacity of the brain to change in response to experience (first 3 years and in adolescence)
Developmental plasticity
The plasticity of the brain during the building of the brain
Adult plasticity
Relatively minor changes in the brain during adulthood in response to experience
Risk of malleability
The brain is heightened in sensitivity, and more vulnerable to damage from drugs, trauma and stress
The experience-expectant framework
The expectancy of experiences to maturate the brain.
Prefrontal cortex
Planning, weighing risks, inhibition and thinking ahead.
Limbic system
Middle part of the brain, important for processing emotional experiences, socal informaion and reward and punishment.
A further developed PFC leads to
Better responsive inhibition and executive functioning
Functional connectivity
Using multiple parts of the brain at once
The brain will become more sensitive for the neurotransmitters
Dopamine - regulates experience of rewards and serotonin - experience of different moods
Zone of proximal development
Learning is most efficient if the task is slightly more challenging than the abilities an individual has.
Scaffolding
When a student works with a teacher who has better understanding of the material
Social cognition
Thinking about other people, interpersonal relations. Topics: Theory of mind, social relationships, social conventions and conceptions of laws
Theory of mind
the ability to understand others have a beliefs, values and knowledge that may differ from your own
Mentalizing
Being able to understand someone else’s state of mind
Social conventions
Norms that govern everyday behaviour.
Behavioural decision theory
- Identifying choices
- Consequences of each choices
- Costs and benefits of the consequences
- Assessing the likelihood of the possible consequences
- Combining information to come to a decision
Behavioural autonomy
The capacity to make independent decisions and follow through with them
Go - No-go task
Measuring the imbalance between cognitive control and socia-emotional systems, dual systems theory
