Cognitive Development

Neo-Piagetian Perspectives

Sergio Morra, Camilla Gobbo, Zopito Marini, Ronald Sheese

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135629731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Psicología educativa

Tying together almost four decades of neo-Piagetian research, Cognitive Development provides a unique critical analysis and a comparison of concepts across neo-Piagetian theories. Like Piaget, neo-Piagetian theorists take a constructivist approach to cognitive development, are broad in scope, and assume that cognitive development is divided into stages with qualitative differences. Unlike Piaget, however, they define the increasing complexity of the stages in accordance with the child's information processing system, rather than in terms of logical properties. This volume illustrates these characteristics and evidences the exciting possibilities for neo-Piagetian research to build connections both with other theoretical approaches such as dynamic systems and with other fields such as brain science.

The opening chapter provides a historical orientation, including a critical distinction between the "logical" and the "dialectical" Piaget. In subsequent chapters the major theories and experimental findings are reviewed, including Pascual-Leone's Theory of Constructive Operators, Halford's structuralist theory, Fischer's dynamic systems approach to skills, Case's theory of Central Conceptual Structures, Siegler's microgenetic approach, and the proposals of Mounoud and Karmiloff-Smith, as well as the work of others, including Demetriou and de Ribaupierre. The interrelation of emotional and cognitive development is discussed extensively, as is relevant non neo-Piagetian research on information processing. The application of neo-Piagetian research to a variety of topics including children's problem solving, psychometrics, and education is highlighted. The book concludes with the authors' views on possibilities for an integrated neo-Piagetian approach to cognitive development.

Chapter 1

From Piaget to the Neo-Piagetians

Still “Neo-”?

Taking up this book a potential reader might think skeptically: “Why neo-?” It was the early 1970s when the first neo-Piagetian theories were published as a new integration of Piagetian concepts with ideas originating from Human Information Processing and other classical psychological frameworks. “That was indeed new some 30 years ago,” our skeptical reader might object, “but is there anything in neo-Piagetian theories that is still new and current?”

Let us start from what could well be the conclusion of this book and answer: Yes, neo-Piagetian research has not only anticipated issues that have recently become hot, but has also continued, over the decades, to produce results and models that can usefully inform the current debates. Indeed, developmentalists and cognitive researchers of any theoretical leaning should pay closer attention to neo-Piagetian models—this book is aimed precisely to assist such focusing of attention.

Our first chapter is devoted primarily to history, that is, to the origin of the neo-Piagetian approach. However, in this first section we wish to briefly indicate—merely as examples—some of the current, lively debated proposals in developmental psychology to which neo-Piagetian approaches are relevant. These proposals raise theoretical and epistemological issues that are very similar to those raised by the neo-Piagetian approaches; and, thus, a dialogue between the two should be very fruitful. We shall mention, in turn: (a) microdevelopment; (b) discontinuity and nonlinear models of development; (c) connectionist modeling and issues of representational change; (d) working memory capacity, intelligence, and cognitive development; (e) inhibition and executive control. Though brief, we intend to convey here the idea that neo-Piagetian authors have much to say about these widely debated topics—and about many other theoretical and applied topics as well. This section, in other words, seeks to persuade the initially skeptical reader to go beyond a browse through the first pages and to pay deep attention to the rest of the book. It is in the following chapters, of course, that more substantive theoretical arguments and support from empirical research are presented.

Microdevelopment refers to the process of change in cognition or ability on a short-time scale; it is an approach focused on the construction of abilities, rather than on their stabilized state (Granott & Parziale, 2002a, 2002b). Some researchers within the Piagetian tradition (Inhelder, Sinclair, & Bovet, 1974; Karmiloff-Smith & Inhelder, 1974/1975) considered the benefits of this approach back in the 1970s; in recent years, it has become a basic instrument to study detailed developmental changes and reorganizations (see Siegler, 2006). Because the approach itself is methodological rather than theoretical, it can yield new theoretical insights, but it also needs to draw on existing theory. A clear theoretical language is necessary to describe the initial ability patterns and the differences between the cognitive structures that underlie the initial responses and the subsequent ones. It is also necessary to explain how microdevelopment fits in and interacts with longterm development, which, in turn, needs a theory of cognitive development that is systematic enough to account for cognitive change on different time scales. Neo-Piagetian theories are excellent candidates for that job, and actually, have already offered theoretical insights into microdevelopmental research (e.g., Fischer & Immordino-Yang, 2002; Granott, Fischer, & Parziale, 2002; Siegler, 1996b, 2006; see also chap. 5 in this book).

Discontinuity is a theoretical problem that includes the vexed question of stages in development, but it is broader than that. Developmental discontinuities may be global, such as Piagetian stages, or local, such as a rule shift in a specific task (e.g., Siegler, 1981). Sometimes, sophisticated nonlinear mathematical models have been proposed to account for developmental discontinuities; for instance, van der Maas and Molenaar (1992) have suggested use of the nonlinear models of catastrophe theory; and, indeed, Jansen and van der Maas (2001) offered an excellent account, based on the cusp catastrophe, of rule transition in the “balance scale problem.” However, such models of discontinuity are often only descriptive. They provide a clear mathematical formulation of the relations between independent variables and observed behaviors, but they need to be complemented by psychologically explanatory accounts, that is, by theoretical insights on what the independent variables stand for in the child’s mind and why they would account for the observed behaviors in the mathematically described way. Neo-Piagetian research has given considerable attention to issues of developmental discontinuity, both to explain those aspects of Piagetian stages that still retain some descriptive validity, and to model change in specific tasks (see especially chaps. 2 through 6 in this book). Therefore, we argue, there can be only benefit in dialogue between researchers who use nonlinear models, such as the catastrophe or the dynamic systems approaches, and the neo-Piagetians; the former provide new insight on the form of transitions and changes, and the latter provide theoretically grounded insights on the psychological mechanisms that underlie such transitions and changes.

Connectionist models have become increasingly popular in psychology, although there has been debate on which aspects of cognition do or do not lend themselves well to connectionist modeling (e.g., Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988; Page, 2000), and strong arguments for connectionist modeling of cognitive development have been put forward by Elman et al. (1996) and Thomas and Karmiloff-Smith (2002). Connectionist models are composed of units or nodes, each of which has a variable degree of activation, and connections among units; also the strength of connections can change over time. One of the reasons why connectionist models are considered useful is that they include nonlinear relations among the model’s parts, which, in turn, may account for nonlinearity and discontinuity in behavioral change. However, cognitive development might not be explained well just by changes that are internal to a given connectionist architecture (e.g., changes in the strength of its connections). The overall architecture itself may change, and it has been argued that, for a developing system, it may be convenient to “start small,” learn simple concepts and rules, and then grow to have a larger architecture or processing capacity, which, in turn, can use the already-learned simple rules in order to learn more complex concepts (Elman, 1993). What is the nature of such changes in the architecture of the system and its processing capacity? Does it have anything to do with the developmental changes in working memory capacity (or similar constructs) that have been posited by neo-Piagetian theories? Probably yes, and at least one approach has systematically related connectionist modeling of representational change to a neo-Piagetian account of processing capacity (Halford, Wilson, & Phillips, 1998; see also chaps. 3 and 7).

Working memory capacity (that is, the capacity to hold various pieces of information simultaneously and to use them for further processing) is a critical feature of several models of human cognition, and it is widely recognized that it affects performance on many tasks. It has also been claimed that individual differences in working memory capacity account well for differences in measures of fluid intelligence (Engle, Tuholski, Laughlin, & Conway, 1999; Kyllonen, 2002). If so, working memory development should be highly relevant to the development of cognitive abilities in children—as neo-Piagetian authors have long been claiming (e.g., Case, 1995; Case & Okamoto, 1996; Halford, 1993a; Pascual-Leone & Johnson, 2005; see chaps. 2, 3, and 6). Cognitive researchers are now shifting to a theoretical paradigm that views working memory as the subset of long-term memory that is in the focus of attention at a given moment (Cowan, 2001, 2005; Engle, Kane, & Tuholski, 1999). This recent shift, if anything, makes more evident the need for students of cognitive development to use the abundant neo-Piagetian literature on working memory development, which is closely related to the attentional approach to working memory. Furthermore, there is an ongoing debate on the relationship among intelligence, working memory capacity, and speed of processing (Conway, Cowan, Bunting, Therriault, & Minkoff, 2002) as well as on the role of processing speed in cognitive development (e.g., Kail, 2000). Neo-Piagetian contributions are available on the speed/capacity issue (e.g., Demetriou, Christou, Spanoudis, & Platsidou, 2002; Halford, Maybery, O’Hare, & Grant, 1994) and more will presumably appear in the next years.

Inhibition and executive control, as psychological constructs, are complementary to those of activation and capacity; activating representations and focusing attention on them or, vice versa, withdrawing attention from them can be considered opposite functions. Executive processes are often understood as the ones involved in selecting, planning, organizing and monitoring action or thought (Lehto, Juujärvi, Kooistra, & Pulkkinen, 2003; Shallice & Burgess, 1993).¹ Zelazo and his colleagues have proposed a theory of executive function development, called Cognitive Complexity and Control (CCC) theory, according to which there is an age-related increase in the hierarchical complexity of the rules that children can use. A child who has performed a task following one set of rules could shift to other rules, conflicting with the previous ones, only if able to combine them into a (more complex) superordinate rule (Zelazo, Müller, Frye, & Marcovitch, 2003a, 2003b).² Others emphasize, instead, the role of other aspects of executive function, for example, the ability to inhibit a prepotent response tendency that, if not inhibited, would prevent children from using their knowledge (e.g., Kirkham, Cruess, & Diamond, 2003; Southgate, Gomez, & Meints, 2005) or from taking into account the task instructions in deceiving tasks (Hughes, 1998; Russell, Mauthner, & Tidswell, 1991). Kirkham et al. (2003) give the name “attentional inertia” to children’s (and also adults’) difficulty to disengage attention from previously attended task features. Although there is debate on the nature of the processes involved in executive control, there is agreement (e.g., Diamond, 2002; Kirkham & Diamond, 2003; Lehto et al., 2003; Zelazo et al., 2003b) that the development of executive function involves development of both memory activation and inhibitory functions. We wish to note, too, that several types of inhibition have to be distinguished: (a) the mutual inhibition between competing schemes or representations, also called lateral inhibition, or “contention scheduling” by Norman and Shallice (1986); (b) automatic inhibition of representations of previously attended information that does not conflict with the current task requirements; (c) effortful selective inhibition of representations of currently salient information that conflicts with the task requirements; (d) effortful inhibition of previously active rules or procedural knowledge, which seems to be involved in paradigms that require children or adults to overcome attentional “inertia” (Allport & Wylie, 2000; Kirkham et al., 2003); and (e) response-withholding, such as in the stop-signal paradigm (e.g., Logan & Irwin, 2000). Valuable insights on the nature of inhibitory functions, and on the relationship between speed of processing, activation, and different forms of inhibition, have been provided by neo-Piagetian authors (e.g., Johnson, Im-Bolter, & Pascual-Leone, 2003). It is also important when analyzing children’s performance on cognitive tasks to clarify the interaction between working memory or activation capacity on one side, and inhibition or selective attention on the other; on these matters, see chapters 2 and 9 in particular.

We have outlined some theoretically salient topics on which debate is currently lively and pointed to how neo-Piagetian research has been contributing ideas and results relevant to the issues involved. It would have been equally possible for us to focus on content domains (such as problem solving, language development, or the relationship between cognitive and emotional development), specific age ranges, or fields of applied research, and to argue that neo-Piagetian research continues to offer valuable contributions in those areas. Classical Piagetian theory, no doubt, also still has something to say. Even though several of its major claims have been superseded (as we argue in the following sections), reflection on Piaget’s work keeps stimulating worthy efforts and useful clarifications (e.g., Amin & Valsiner, 2004; Beilin, 1992a; Desrochers, 2003; Niaz, 1998; Shayer, 2003). Nevertheless, one could hardly say—in Lakatos’ (1970) terms—that the classical Piagetian research program is still progressive (see also Roth, Slone, & Dar, 2000). We hope to have persuaded the reader that neo-Piagetian research, however, with its history of some decades is still today quite a progressive program.

Two Piagets

A book on neo-Piagetian research must certainly take Piaget as its point of departure, at the very least in order to clarify connections to his work by neo-Piagetians as well as their distinction from it. For this purpose we partition Piaget’s work, distinguishing the logical Piaget from the dialectical Piaget. By “the logical Piaget,” we mean his view of cognitive development as a sequence of stages defined in terms of logical competence; the “dialectical Piaget,” instead, is concerned with developmental processes that generate new cognitive structures. This separation is partly arbitrary; the works of Piaget that present dialectical models of child development always express cognitive abilities in terms of logic. And vice versa, those texts that model the child’s logical competence always display an implicit dialectical conception of development. By splitting Piaget in two, obviously we simplify and schematize. However, the rhetorical advantage of this strategy is to underline our argument that although the logical Piaget was super-seded some time ago, the dialectical Piaget has great currency and remains fundamental to neo-Piagetian theory.

Piaget’s research in the 1920s, presented in five volumes,³ explored the child’s representation of the world, of natural phenomena and of mechanical causation; the development of moral judgment and of verbal reasoning; and the relationship between language development and cognitive development. In these first works, Piaget was not yet formulating models of children’s thought, but he was informally describing its characteristics in terms of “egocentrism” (inability to consider points of view different from one’s own in the present moment), “transduction” (proceeding not from the general to the particular or vice versa, but from one particular to another, often on the basis of similarity), and insensitivity to contradictions along with vicious circles.

The first studies used verbal questions and responses almost exclusively. Although aware of the insufficiency of a verbal approach to cognition, only in the 1930s did Piaget study preverbal forms of intelligence in research on the first 2 years of life. The three volumes that present these studies describe in functional terms, with little formalization, the relations that the child progressively establishes with the world. The main theoretical constructs (discussed in subsequent chapters) introduced by Piaget in this period were scheme, coordination of schemes, assimilation, accommodation, and organization of the individual’s mind as a totality. But in this same decade, for the first time, Piaget (1937/1959) introduced a formalization, based on the algebraic concept of group, to describe the development of the conception of space.

Piaget as Theorist of Logical Competence

The period from the 1940s to the 1960s was Piaget’s most productive stage. He returned systematically to reasoning in childhood and preadolescence without limiting himself to verbal interviews, but also asking children to manipulate a variety of materials. In this period, he developed formal models of child cognition based on abilities of a logical nature. Consideration of such models is beyond the scope of this book; see instead Piaget (1952/1957, 1972), Inhelder and Piaget (1955/1958), Flavell (1963), Sheppard (1978). In particular, regarding preschoolers’ logical abilities in the preoperational period (the “constituent functions”), the reader should consult Piaget, Grize, Szeminska, and Vinh Bang (1968/1977). To clarify what one means by a logical model of child cognition, we limit ourselves here to describing a single example.

Piaget and Szeminska (1941/1952) studied the development of the concept of number by means of a series of techniques. The best known of these consists of arranging two groups of objects in front of a child in parallel rows, in a manner such that their numerical equality is clear; then, one of the two rows is rearranged and the child’s awareness of the persistence of the numerical equality is assessed. Examples of other techniques adopted include asking the child to reproduce an arrangement of objects exactly; to order a series of dolls and a series of sticks and then choose the stick corresponding to each doll; or to say whether, among two sets of clearly visible objects, there are more objects in a set arranged as 4+4 or in another arranged as 7+1. Different techniques, such as those just discussed, serve to explore different aspects of the concept of numbers (e.g., one-to-one correspondence, cardinality, ordinality, etc.). According to Piaget and Szeminska’s data, the ability to count the number of objects in each arrangement did not play a crucial role in the solution of these problems, whereas the development of logical abilities was essential, as clarified in the following section. The latter were absent in the youngest children who responded on the basis of perceptual cues, such as the length of the row or the proximity of the objects to one another. Children in a subse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. From Piaget to the Neo-Piagetians
• 2. The Theory of J.Pascual-Leone
• 3. Structuralist Approaches to Developmental Stages
• 4. Problem Solving in Children
• 5. The Cyclical Nature of Skill Development
• 6. Structures and Processes in Case’s Theory of Development
• 7. Cognitive Development as Change in Representations
• 8. Cognitive Development and Emotional Development
• 9. Applications
• 10. In Conclusion
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index