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Why DO teens do THAT? Raging hormones? Prefrontal cortex fully developed? Thrill Seeking? New research from The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania has released a report explaining Why Teens Take Risks: It's Not a Deficit in Brain Development:
The authors propose an alternative model that emphasizes the role that risk taking and the experience gained by it play in adolescent development. This model explains much of the apparent increase in risk taking by adolescents as "an adaptive need to gain the experience required to assume adult roles and behaviors." That experience eventually changes the way people think about risk, making it more "gist-like" or thematic and making them more risk averse.
"Recent meta-analyses suggest that the way individuals think about risks and rewards changes as they mature, and current accounts of brain development must take these newer ideas into account to explain adolescent risk taking," said co-author Valerie Reyna, Ph.D., director of the Human Neuroscience Institute at Cornell University.
Romer[1] added, "The reason teens are doing all of this exploring and novelty seeking is to build experience so that they can do a better job in making the difficult and risky decisions in later life – decisions like 'Should I take this job?' or 'Should I marry this person?' There's no doubt that this period of development is a challenge for parents, but that's doesn't mean that the adolescent brain is somehow deficient or lacking in control."
[1] Daniel Romer, Ph.D
Daniel Romer, Valerie F. Reyna, Theodore D. Satterthwaite. Beyond stereotypes of adolescent risk taking: Placing the adolescent brain in developmental context. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 2017; 27: 19 DOI: 10.1016/j.dcn.2017.07.007 (Javascript required).
Alternate Link: Science.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 28 2017, @08:03PM
I challenge you to find any vision-heavy species whose vision is *worse* than ours in every single metric.
I never made any such claim. Lots of species have vision that's better in some metric than ours. I don't think any has vision better in *every* metric. That's the whole nature of a trade-off.
Are you not an engineer?
That should be easy if ours is truly "the best" in any meaningful form, right?
I never said humans have "the best" vision, only that it's the best for our particular niche. Many other animals have "the best" vision for their own niche. Octopi have great vision in many ways. But they don't live on land, and we don't live on the ocean floor, (and we don't have boneless bodies either) so their vision isn't suitable for us, nor vice-versa.
And by that standard ours vision is... okay. Maybe even pretty good.
And which species exactly has superior vision?