Jean Piaget and the child psychologist

Vonèche, Jacques; Vidal, Fernando

doi:10.1007/bf00484890

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Thereby it is open to the objection that it names rather than explains how this advance takes place (Vonèche & Vidal, 1985). Either this objection returns with regard to interactivism; or, if it doesn't, the distinction between success and understanding has been collapsed with massive implications for research on infancy.…”

Section: Success and Understandingmentioning

confidence: 94%

Internality of mental representation

Smith

2003

C&E

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Interactivism is a distinctive position about the human mind according to which mental representation is internally related to its content. This position is incompatible with the dominant model of mental representation as an external relation in psychology and cognitive science. My paper is in two parts. One is a review of the negative argument [why mental representation cannot be external] and positive argument [how mental representation actually is internal] under interactivism. The second part is a critical commentary which setsout twenty questions dealing with: belief-desire psychology; intentionality; action causality and transitivity; internality; success and understanding; normativity; environment. These questions are intended to clarify particular routes under the general direction set for psychological theory by the positive argument for interactivism. In my view, the negative argument is compelling, but although the positive argument is plausible, it merits further clarification.

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Section: Success and Understandingmentioning

confidence: 94%

Internality of mental representation

Smith

2003

C&E

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“…It is relatively easy to grasp the necessary precursor behaviors that the child could employ even through random play and experimentation with the types of material in question that would lead to the discovery of reversibility. It is the transition from reversibility in action to reversibility of thought that many find elusive (Voneche & Vidal, , as cited in Smith, , p. 42). How exactly does it happen?…”

Section: The Development Of Discrete Set Understandingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Development of Size Sequencing Skills: An Empirical and Computational Analysis

McGonigle-Chalmers

Kusel

2019

Monographs Society Res Child

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We explore a long‐observed phenomenon in children's cognitive development known as size seriation. It is not until children are around 7 years of age that they spontaneously use a strict ascending or descending order of magnitude to organize sets of objects differing in size. Incomplete and inaccurate ordering shown by younger children has been thought to be related to their incomplete grasp of the mathematical concept of a unit. Piaget first brought attention to children's difficulties in solving ordering and size‐matching tests, but his tasks and explanations have been progressively neglected due to major theoretical shifts in scholarship on developmental cognition. A cogent alternative to his account has never emerged, leaving size seriation and related abilities as an unexplained case of discontinuity in mental growth. In this monograph, we use a new training methodology, together with computational modeling of the data to offer a new explanation of size seriation development and the emergence of related skills. We describe a connected set of touchscreen tasks that measure the abilities of 5‐ and 7‐year‐old children to (a) learn a linear size sequence of five or seven items and (b) identify unique (unit) values within those same sets, such as second biggest and middle‐sized. Older children required little or no training to succeed in the sequencing tasks, whereas younger children evinced trial‐and‐error performance. Marked age differences were found on ordinal identification tasks using matching‐to‐sample and other methods. Confirming Piaget's findings, these tasks generated learning data with which to develop a computational model of the change. Using variables to represent working and long‐term memory (WM and LTM), the computational model represents the information processing of the younger child in terms of a perception‐action feedback loop, resulting in a heuristic for achieving a correct sequence. To explain why older children do not require training on the size task, it was hypothesized that an increase in WM to a certain threshold level provides the information‐processing capacity to allow the participant to start to detect a minimum interval between each item in the selection. The probabilistic heuristic is thus thought to be replaced during a transitional stage by a serial algorithm that guarantees success. The minimum interval discovery has the effect of controlling search for the next item in a principled monotonic direction. Through a minor additional processing step, this algorithm permits relatively easy identification of ordinal values. The model was tested by simulating the perceptual learning and action selection processes thought to be taking place during trial‐and‐error sequencing. Error distributions were generated across each item in the sequence and these were found to correspond to the error patterns shown by 5‐year‐olds. The algorithm that is thought to emerge from successful learning was also tested. It simulated high levels of success on seriation and also on ordinal identif...

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“…Piaget was not trained as a pediatrician, nor did not view himself as a child psychologist; rather, as a genetic epistemologist interested primarily in the conceptual development of scientific knowledge [cf. Vonèche and Vidal, ; p. 137], not children. Nonetheless, his theory of child development—the central themes of which are that children's cognitive abilities are innate, emerge at specific ages, appear in four major, distinct, sequentially invariant stages—is similar to the notions of children's growth and development among pediatricians of that period.…”

Section: The Basis For Theory Of Mindmentioning

confidence: 99%

Autism and epistemology IV: Does autism need a theory of mind?

Fisch

2013

American J of Med Genetics Pt A

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In their article, "Does the autistic child have a 'theory of mind'?," Baron-Cohen et al. [1985] proposed a novel paradigm to explain social impairment in children diagnosed as autistic (AD). Much research has been undertaken since their article went to print. The purpose of this commentary is to gauge whether Theory of Mind (ToM)-or lack thereof-is a valid model for explaining abnormal social behavior in children with AD. ToM is defined as "the ability to impute mental states to oneself and to others" and "the ability to make inferences about what other people believe to be the case." The source for their model was provided by an article published earlier by Premack and Woodruff, "Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?" Later research in chimpanzees did not support a ToM in primates. From the outset, ToM as a neurocognitive model of autism has had many shortcomings-methodological, logical, and empirical. Other ToM assumptions, for example, its universality in all children in all cultures and socioeconomic conditions, are not supported by data. The age at which a ToM emerges, or events that presage a ToM, are too often not corroborated. Recent studies of mirror neurons, their location and interconnections in brain, their relationship to social behavior and language, and the effect of lesions there on speech, language and social behavior, strongly suggests that a neurobiological as opposed to neurocognitive model of autism is a more parsimonious explanation for the social and behavioral phenotypes observed in autism.

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Jean Piaget and the child psychologist

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Internality of mental representation

Internality of mental representation

The Development of Size Sequencing Skills: An Empirical and Computational Analysis

Autism and epistemology IV: Does autism need a theory of mind?

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