Higher cognition — the set of thinking skills people use to manipulate information and ideas in ways that lead to problem solving and new insights — is a critical foundation for individuals and our country to be competitive. During the teen years, the brain undergoes big changes; it won't look or function like an adult brain until well into the 20s. It is a period of tremendous change and tremendous potential.

The highly successful Workshop on Higher Cognition in Adolescents and Young Adults: Social, Behavioral, and Biological Influences on Learning was held September 28-30, 2008. The event enjoyed excellent attendance and widely perceived synergy and success in bringing together scholars from multiple disciplines and perspectives. It brought together 19 preeminent researchers representing the fields of neuroscience, economics, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, social psychology, education, human development, and measurement and psychometrics to address a critically understudied area in life course learning — higher order cognition. The workshop focused leading scientists on key problems that are ripe for groundbreaking discoveries and fostered the translation of research on the basic science of higher order cognition to solve pressing problems, especially the development of mathematical knowledge and reasoning skills essential for competitiveness in the 21st century.

In her book "The Adolescent Brain: Learning, Reasoning and Decision Making," Valerie Reyna, Cornell professor of psychology, encapsulates the cutting edge research and emerging themes that grew out of the workshop. The book highlights recent neuroscience discoveries about how the brain develops and their implications for real-world problems and how we teach young people and prepare them to make healthy life choices.

The Workshop on Higher Cognition in Adolescents and Young Adults was supported by the National Science Foundation under Award #0840111. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed on this website are those of the authors(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The Adolescent Brain

Teenage brains undergo big changes, and they won't look or function like adult brains until well into one's 20s. In the first book on the adolescent brain and development of higher cognition, Valerie Reyna helps highlight recent neuroscience discoveries about how the brain develops and their implications for real-world problems and how we teach young people and prepare them to make healthy life choices.

For "The Adolescent Brain: Learning, Reasoning, and Decision Making" (APA Books), Reyna brought together an interdisciplinary group of leading scientists to focus on brain development and higher cognition, which is necessary for students to learn math and science and make good decisions. Higher cognition is the set of thinking skills students use to manipulate information and ideas in ways that lead to problem solving and new insights.
 

"A major implication of the provocative research highlighted in this book is the contrast between adolescents' cognitive skills, which are at a lifetime peak, and their frequent inability to use this competence in everyday decision making," said Reyna, who co-edited the volume with Sandra Chapman, director of the Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas at Dallas; Michael Dougherty, professor of psychology at University of Maryland; and Jere Confrey, professor of mathematics education at North Carolina State University.

"But the evidence suggests that the way young people learn, reason and decide changes[during this period] and can be changed," said Reyna. "We must move education beyond rote learning to fostering the cognitive skills essential for academic achievement and economic well-being in our knowledge-based economy. Higher cognition is a foundation critical for individuals and our country to be competitive. This volume introduces a new framework for interdisciplinary collaboration among scientists in neuroscience, psychology and education."

"The Adolescent Brain" addresses the major changes in memory, learning and decision making experienced by adolescents as they mature, beginning with a review of the changes in brain anatomy and physiology based on extensive neuroimaging studies. The ensuing chapters examine the developing capacity of the adolescent brain, covering such topics as the underpinnings of intelligence and problem solving, strategies for training teen reasoning abilities, effectively teaching mathematical concepts, the effects of emotion on reasoning, and factors that promote teen engagement in health-related behaviors.

The book wraps up with a chapter by Reyna and Ph.D. student Christina Chick that integrates the behavioral and neuroscience evidence in a process model of adolescent risky decision making. Chick and Reyna explain, for example, how massive pruning of gray matter in late adolescence fits with the growth of adolescents' ability to connect the dots and understand the underlying meaning of situations. This gist thinking facilitates recognition of danger and protects against unhealthy risk-taking, they say.

The book is intended for researchers, students and professionals in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and psychology and for education policymakers and educators, especially in mathematics.

Reyna presented a talk on the "Adolescent Brain" March 1, 2012 at 4-5:30 p.m., 160 Mann Library on the Cornell Ithaca campus.

***See it on Reyna's Publications page

The presentations below were recorded from the Workshop on Higher Cognition in Adolescents and Young Adults and form the basis for many of the book chapters in The Adolescent Brain. Related papers by the authors are also available to conference participants (and others by request).

Mark Ashcraft - Upgrading to Math Cognition 2.0: Where We Need to Go

Roberto Cabeza - Neural Correlates of Recollection and Familiarity

Sandra Chapman - Strategic Memory and Reasoning in Teens

Jere Confrey - Learning Trajectories and Rational Number Reasoning

Nancy Dennis - The Neural Correlates of True and False Memory Retrieval

Michael Dougherty - Diagnosing Diagnostic Hypothesis Generation in Adolescents

Adriana Galvan - Risky Behavior in Adolescents: The Role of the Developing Brain

Keith Holyoak - Analogy, Comparative Intelligence, and Brain

Ken Koedinger - Interactive Support for Mathematical Reasoning and Metacognitive Judgments of Learning

David Laibson - Neuroeconomics: The Multiple Systems Hypothesis

Ken McRae - Studying Objects Concepts by Combining Feature Norms, Connectionist Networks, and Modality-specific Representations

Sandra Schneider - Context, Experience and Feelings: Proximal Drivers of Adolescent Reasoning and Decision Making

Dan Schwartz - Why Direct Instruction Earns a C- in Transfer

Vladimir Sloutsky - The Cost of Concreteness in Transfer of Mathematical Knowledge

Keith Stanovich - What Intelligence Tests Miss: Individual Differences in Reasoning Beyond IQ

Mark Steyvers - Extracting Semantic Themes with Topic Models

Patrick Thompson - Foundational Meanings in Support of Advanced Mathematical Thinking Among Adolescents

The Adolescent Brain: Learning, Reasoning and Decision Making

Preface - Valerie F. Reyna

Introduction - Valerie F. Reyna, Sandra B. Chapman, Michael R. Dougherty, and Jere Confrey

I. Foundations

1. Anatomic Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Developing Child and Adolescent Brain - Jay N. Giedd, Michael Stockman, Catherine Weddle, Maria Liverpool, Gregory L. Wallace, Nancy R. Lee, Francois Lalonde, and Rhoshel K. Lenroot

II. Memory, Meaning, and Representation

2. Semantic and Associative Relations in Adolescents and Young Adults: Examining a Tenuous Dichotomy - Ken McRae, Saman Khalkhali, and Mary Hare

3. Representation and Transfer of Abstract Mathematical Concepts in Adolescence and Young Adulthood - Jennifer A. Kaminski and Vladimir M. Sloutsky

4. A Value of Concrete Learning Materials in Adolescence - Kristen P. Blair and Daniel L. Schwartz

5. Higher-Order Strategic Gist-Reasoning in Adolescence - Sandra B. Chapman, Jacquelyn F. Gamino, and Raksha Anand

III. Learning, Reasoning, and Problem Solving

6. Better Measurement of Higher-Cognitive Processes through Learning Trajectories and Diagnostic Assessments in Mathematics: The Challenge in Adolescence - Jere Confrey

7. Adolescent Reasoning in Mathematical and Non-Mathematical Domains: Exploring the Paradox - Eric Knuth, Charles Kalish, Amy Ellis, Caroline Williams, and Mathew Felton

8. Training the Adolescent Brain: Neural Plasticity and the Acquisition of Cognitive Abilities - Sharona M. Atkins, Michael F. Bunting, Donald J. Bolger, and Michael R. Dougherty

9. Higher Cognition is Altered by Non-Cognitive Factors: How Affect Enhances and Disrupts Mathematics Performance in Adolescence and Young Adulthood - Mark H. Ashcraft and Nathan O. Rudig

IV. Judgment and Decision Making

10. Risky Behavior in Adolescents: The Role of the Developing Brain - Adriana Galvan

11. Affective Motivators and Experience in Adolescents’ Development of Health-Related Behavior Patterns - Sandra L. Schneider and Christine M. Caffray

12. Judgment and Decision Making in Adolescence: Separating Intelligence from Rationality - Keith Stanovich, Richard F. West, and Maggie E. Toplak

13. A Fuzzy-Trace Theory of Adolescent Risk Taking: Beyond Self-Control and Sensation Seeking - Christina Chick and Valerie F. Reyna

V. Epilogue

14. Paradoxes in the Adolescent Brain in Cognition, Emotion, and Rationality - Valerie F. Reyna