Adolescents’ Occupational and Educational Aspirations and Expectations: Links to High School Activities and Adult Educational Attainment

This longitudinal study explored adolescents’ future-oriented cognitions, current activities, and later educational attainment using data from 317 adolescents (55% female; mean age = 14.98 years, SD = 0.85) followed into early adulthood. Aspirations and expectations regarding work and education showed modest stability from year to year. Exploration of the reciprocal relations between these cognitions and adolescents’ activities supported both unidirectional and bidirectional effects, with different patterns emerging for aspirations and expectations. In multiple regression analyses, future-oriented cognitions predicted adult educational attainment; follow- up analyses indicated that the effect of adolescents’ expectations was partially mediated by participation in extracurricular activities. These results suggest a potentially important influence of adolescents’ future-oriented cognitions on their current behavior and future attainments.

Generalizing the dynamic field theory of spatial cognition across real and developmental time scales

Within cognitive neuroscience, computational models are designed to provide insights into the organization of behavior while adhering to neural principles. These models should provide sufficient specificity to generate novel predictions while maintaining the generality needed to capture behavior across tasks and/or time scales. This paper presents one such model, the Dynamic Field Theory (DFT) of spatial cognition, showing new simulations that provide a demonstration proof that the theory generalizes across developmental changes in performance in four tasks—the Piagetian A-not-B task, a sandbox version of the A-not-B task, a canonical spatial recall task, and a position discrimination task. Model simulations demonstrate that the DFT can accomplish both specificity—generating novel, testable predictions—and generality—spanning multiple tasks across development with a relatively simple developmental hypothesis. Critically, the DFT achieves generality across tasks and time scales with no modification to its basic structure and with a strong commitment to neural principles. The only change necessary to capture development in the model was an increase in the precision of the tuning of receptive fields as well as an increase in the precision of local excitatory interactions among neurons in the model. These small quantitative changes were sufficient to move the model through a set of quantitative and qualitative behavioral changes that span the age range from 8 months to 6 years and into adulthood. We conclude by considering how the DFT is positioned in the literature, the challenges on the horizon for our framework, and how a dynamic field approach can yield new insights into development from a computational cognitive neuroscience perspective.