How do cognitive changes contribute to decision-making during adolescence? How does cognition contribute to risky behavior?
Adolescence is a period of transitions: biological, psychological, social, and economical. During adolescence, individuals become interested in sex and biologically capable of having children. They become wiser, more sophisticated, and better able to make their own decisions. They become more self-aware, more independent, and more concerned about what the future holds. Over time, they are permitted to work, get married, drive and vote. (Steinberg, 2020).
Also, during adolescence, the brain is remodeled through systematic pruning and myelination in particular brain regions. For example, one part of the brain that is pruned dramatically in adolescence is the prefrontal cortex, the brain region most important for sophisticated thinking abilities, such as planning, thinking ahead, weighing risks and rewards, and controlling impulses. (Steinberg, 2020). As a result, better connectivity between different parts of the cortex allows thinking faster and better. In addition, better connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system, an area of the brain involved in processing emotions, social information, and reward and punishment, improves our ability to regulate our emotions and coordinates our thoughts and feelings.
According to a behavioral decision theory, all behaviors, including risky ones, can be analyzed as the outcome of a process involving 5 steps:
1. Identifying alternative choices,
2. identifying the consequences that might follow from each selection,
3. evaluating the costs and benefits of each possible outcome,
4. assessing the likelihood of each viable product, and
5. combining all this information according to some decision rule. (Steinberg, 2020).
From this perspective, the chapter explains that it is essential to ask adolescents to use different processes than adults in identifying, estimating, and evaluating behavioral options and their consequences. If risky decisions result from faulty information processing- in attention or memory, for example- it will be wise to train adolescents in these basic cognitive abilities as a means of lessening their risky behaviors. Some of the rick activities adolescence get into are smoking, unprotected sex, and drinking and driving. The most common approach to reducing adolescent risk-taking is through classroom-based education programs designated to each adolescent about the danger of the previously specified activities.
