Developmental Brown Bag: Modeling Cognitive Variation in Adolescence and Young Adulthood: Understanding Domain-Specific Outcomes and Person-Specific Effects

Abstract:
Cognitive processes such as executive functioning normatively develop over adolescence and well into young adulthood, but some aspects of cognition show domain- and person-specific associations with behavior and wellbeing. In my presentation, I highlight this in two studies. The first study examines how constellations of cognitive skills (e.g., inhibition, planning, emotion regulation) are associated with key developmental domains, finding that unique cognitive profiles have functional significance for academics, mental health, and health behaviors in adolescence. The second study illustrates three different techniques for the analysis of intensive longitudinal data on verbal recall with the purpose of delineating links between daily cognitive and contextual processes. The results provide insight into how mean-based, within-person, and person-specific analyses handle intensive longitudinal data and how this leads to disparate inferences about daily processes. Together, these studies highlight how levels of analysis (e.g., domain specificity of outcomes) and analytic techniques (e.g., degree of person specificity) matter for understanding individual differences in cognition across the lifespan.