Adolescent Cognition

Adolescent Cognition: Thinking in a New Key Throughout history, adolescents changed their styles and their location in which they associate. It went from wearing penny loafers and hanging outside of drug stores to wearing athletic sneakers and hanging around the malls. Adolescents follow the reasoning of Aristotle: all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, and therefore Socrates is mortal. The first age of reasoning was focused on concrete operational thinking. Concrete operational thinking enabled children to understand and cooperate with rules. The previous age of reasoning is the formal reasoning stage. Formal reasoning is concerned more with the form of thinking instead of content. By the age of 12 or 13, adolescents are thinking at a higher level. Adolescents tend to use abstractions, propositions, ideals, thinking of thinking, and combinatorial reasoning. An abstraction is the use of symbols or the understanding of symbols by the adolescent. For example, a child was asked to evaluate a sentence and give the meaning of that statement. The sentence giving was "you shouldn't change horses in midstream." The child was not able to giving the correct explanation for this sentence. The same child was asked the same question as an adolescent, and she got the answer correct. This example requires the understanding of abstractions. This statement means don't change your leader or your position when part-way through a campaign or a project. If they did not answer in such a way, they have not yet experienced formal reasoning. Adolescents often use propositions which is a form of if then thinking. Propositions allow the adolescent to deal with the possibilities of a situation. Adolescents think about what might be instead of what is. When they use propositions, it might make the adolescents seem argumentative. Propositions often include statement such as, "If I do not go to school, then I will not be bullied." Also, adolescents may use ideals to try to validate their role in society. Ideals entertain the possibility of no war, no poverty, and the world is a perfect and safe place. Adolescents will fail to distinguish between what the can imagine and what is actually reality. Ideals, or the imagination, make each generation believe they can make the world a better place. Adolescents will often look at their friend's parents as the ideal parents. They will see these parents as superior and start to criticize their own parents. They will also use ideals in relation with the opposite sex. They will tend to think a member of the opposite sex is perfect and better than any other person. Another strategy adolescents will use is that they start to think about thinking. Young people start to reflect on the own belief by using words