With these qualifications in mind, Flavell and colleagues (1993) affirm Piaget’s “trends” in terms of contrasts between the older child and the younger child.  In contrast to younger children, pre-adolescents can base cognitive judgments on inferences rather than just on appearances.  Pre-adolescents can decenter or disburse their attention to multiple task elements, while younger children tend to focus or center their attention on one task element.  Younger children focus on a particular, concrete state of a problem, whereas older children can think in terms of differing states and the transformations between them.  In addition, the pre-adolescent’s thinking is more reversible in grasping how a given state of affairs might be undone through inversion.

            But Flavell goes beyond Piaget by summarizing findings of recent research that point to five additional changes in cognitive development.  These changes differentiate pre-adolescents and adolescents, on the one hand, and younger children on the other:

1.      An increase in domain-specific knowledge (expertise).

2.      Greater information-processing capacity.

3.      Advances in metacognition (“cognition about cognition”).

4.      A sense of the game of thinking.

5.      Improvement in existing competencies.

            While younger children may display these trends in their scientific concepts, these five changes are characteristic of older children and adolescents.  The significance of this is that expertise may develop in one domain, but not another.  Thus, in the various domains of the middle-school age child’s life, for example, there might be a marked increase in expertise in math-science academic work, but relative immaturity in social cognition and reasoning related to self appraisal or emotional coping.  Functional capacities, across various domains of one adolescent’s life may be very uneven.

There are implications here for understanding the emotional strain that appears to be so characteristic of adolescence.  Instead of imagining the developmental strain consisting of a transition from one global stage to another (as Piaget imagined), we could see it as the strain inherent to possessing dramatically uneven levels of expertise across domains.  For example, the twelve-year-old boy who looks older and possesses greater than average expertise in abstract problem-solving may be expected by his parents (and himself) to perform with comparable expertise in domains of emotional coping and interpersonal communication (“You ought to know better!”).  This same boy who receives high grades in science at school may not possess the domain-specific expertise to deal with challenges associated with his parents being away from home for long hours due to a long commute.  Conceptually, he can grasp the expectations of his parents expressed in a “lecture” about not  fighting with his siblings after school, but his lack of expertise in this domain prevents him from decentering off the one task at hand (i.e., getting even with his brother) in order to see the larger picture (e.g., justice delayed until a parent returns home).