ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the concrete purpose of selecting and defining the main new cognitive skills in the transition from childhood to adolescence. It considers developmental changes in societal conceptualization, scientific knowledge, and identity construction from a cognitive perspective. Cognitive development refers to the successive levels of intellectual adaptation, from birth to adulthood. Logical coordination of these representations does not occur until a later period of development. This new coordination occurs between about 6 or 7 and 11 or 12 years of age and takes the form of concrete operations which are gradually elaborated across the various domains of intellectual functioning. Adolescent thinking, compared to the child one, is generally simply considered as “abstract” thinking. The various functional domains are often supposed to partly depend on a general cognitive developmental factor.
