Planning for the future and developing a personalized identity are conceived of as important developmental tasks that adolescents and emerging adults are confronted with on the pathway to adulthood. The present study set out to examine whether both tasks develop in tandem by using a short-term longitudinal dataset consisting of 371 college…

Discusses hierarchical complexity of tasks as a way of conceptualizing information in terms of the power required to complete a task, and its implications for developmental psychology and information science. Provides an analytic solution to the definition of developmental stages and allows for the possibility within the science of scaling the…

The hierarchical structure of the formal operational period of Piaget's theory of cognitive development was explored through the application of ordering theoretical methods to a set of data that systematically utilized the various formal operational schemes. Results suggested a common structure underlying task performance. (Author/BH)