August 2013, Volume 34 / Issue 8

Adolescent Phychosocial, Social, and Cognitive Development (Renata Arrignton Sanders)

There are three main areas wherein cognitive development happens in an adolescent. First is
that adolescents develop more advance reasoning skills, which include the ability to explore a full range
of possibilities in a situation, to think hypothetically, and to use a logical thought process. Second area of
cognitive development is they develop the ability to think abstractly. They can imagine things not seen
or experienced. It allows the adolescents to have the capacity to love, and think about spirituality. And
lastly, adolescents think about thinking or meta-cognition. It develops the capacity to think about what
they are feeling and how others perceive them.

Children’s Thinking:
Cognitive Development and Individual Differences (David F. Bjorklund, Kayla B. Causey) 2017
Cognitive developmentalists conceptualize a way of how thought changes from infancy to
adulthood. Here are the six truths of cognitive development:
1. cognitive development proceeds as a result of the dynamic and reciprocal transaction of internal and
external factors:
2. cognitive deveoplmetn is constructed within a social context.
3. cognitive development involves both stability and plasticity over time;
4. cognitive development involves changes in the way information is represented;
5. children develop increasing intentional control over their behavior and cognition; and
6. cognitive development involves changes in bot domain-general and domain-specific abilities.

Based on cognitive developmentalists, children represent their world differently and that these
differences are central to age differences in thinking. Just like how adults use a variety of strategies to
describe knowledge. Based on (authors of books), that from being an infant, children have a lot of ways
of portraying information, while their capacity to describe people, objects, and events rise in
sophistication over infancy and childhood. Research and theory relative to these and other issues
affiliated to differences in representation are central to the study of cognitive development.

Theories that assume cognitive development of a child’s thinking is affected by a single set of
factors, with these factors affecting all sides of cognition. In contrary to domain-general abilities, records
of cognitive development are theories that assume development expand as the result of changes in
domain-specific abilities. Theoretically speaking, it modulate a certain degree in brain functions,
revealing that certain regions of the brain are allocated on performing a set of cognitive tasks. Knowing
a child’s ability doesn’t describe his or her level of cognitive ability for other aspects. It is because
different cognitive domains are controlled by different mind or functions. And so, domain-specific
theories said that different areas of the brain affect different sides off cognition and doesn’t affect the
other areas of the brain.