Experimental Psychology Its Scope and Method: Volume VII

Intelligence

Pierre Oléron,Jean Piaget,Bärbel Inhelder,Pierre Gréco

• Editore: Psychology Press
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317630487
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Psychologie
• Categoria: Experimentelle Psychologie

First published in English in 1969, the book opens with a chapter by Pierre Oléron on intellectual activities. These fall into three groups: inductive activities (the apprehension of laws, relations and concepts), reasoning and problem solving. It describes typical methods and essential results obtained by relevant experiments.

There are two chapters by Jean Piaget and his collaborator Bärbel Inhelder. The first, on mental images, breaks new ground: it describes original experiments carried out by Piaget and associates with children of various ages. Piaget examines the relations between images and motor activity, imitation, drawing and operations. He also classifies images according to their degree of complexity and show why children have inadequate images of some processes. The second chapter is on intellectual operations and Piaget gives a summary of the main findings of a number of his earlier books, on the child's notions of conservation, classification, seriation, number, measurement, time, speed and chance.

In the last chapter, Pierre Gréco discusses learning and intellectual structures. He describes the work of psychologists with rats in mazes and formulating theories of animal learning. Gestalt psychology and various other interpretations are examined and Greco also pays attention to Piaget's view of 'structural learning' based on experience.

Chapter 22

Intellectual Activities¹

Pierre Oléron

1 Introduction

1 The psychologist and the question of intellectual activities

The standpoint adopted in this chapter is that of the psychology of behaviour. That is why the term ‘activités intellectuelles’ (intellectual activities) has been used in preference to ‘pensée’ (thought),—although contemporary authors writing in English commonly refer to thinking and thought (cf. Humphrey, 1951; Vinacke, 1952; Osgood, 1953; Johnson, 1955; Bruner, Goodnow, Austin, 1956; Bartlett, 1958; Harms, 1960). It is presumably possible to employ these terms without reference to a subjective standpoint—and that is indeed what most of the above authors have done—but in dealing with a subject of this kind it is desirable to avoid as far as possible all risk of ambiguity and misunderstanding.

Experimental research is concerned directly with behaviour, at least nowadays when there is no longer any attempt to base experiments on introspection, as Binet and the Würzburg school had done. This is a point in its favour and it deserves recognition. On the other hand, the work that has been published failed, on the whole, to organize itself around a general view of the facts under consideration. A frame was supplied by the Gestalttheorie and has been used to good purpose in research on problem solving (Köhler, 1917; Maier, 1930, 1931, 1933; Duncker, 1935; Wertheimer, 1945). Learning theories appear to find a natural extension in the study of intellectual processes, some of which are a form of learning (concept formation) or present characteristics with which the theories are concerned (generalization, discrimination), or depend on factors of which the role is widely studied in elementary learning (reinforcement, motivation). Information theory (or, more precisely, the concept of information which goes considerably beyond it) is mentioned in connection with research on concept formation or problem solving. Even theories about decision have contributed a terminology of which some authors have availed themselves (‘strategies’ in operations of classification (Bruner, Goodnow and Austin, 1956; cf. Piaget, 1957, vol. II, ch. 2), or else have supplied the material for the mathematical analysis of various problems (Kochen and Galanter, 1958),—not to mention the recent (and possibly fundamental) perspectives opened up by the performance of ‘electronic brains’, capable of reasoning logically and of proving theorems (Newell, Shaw and Simon, 1958, 1960; Gelernter and Rochester, 1958; Gelernter, 1960 …).

The experiments themselves do not present any great degree of coherence, and are not conspicuously better in this respect than everyday language in which expressions such as reasoning, judging, understanding, explaining, inventing, inducing, deducing, evaluating, abstracting and solving a problem … all refer to real acts which are not, however, assigned a position in relation to one another. Indeed, it is hard to believe that all these different words correspond to separate realities.

As any summary must refer to psychology in its present state and not to an ideal state of affairs, we have to accept this situation. We have, however, felt that it was possible to reduce the lack of coherence by devoting only a little space to theoretical notions. What matters, in the present state of things, is surely the psychologist’s ability to establish a correspondence between notions and objectively observable behaviour and to determine what are the conditions upon which he can show this behaviour to depend. This is the aspect upon which we have concentrated.

At the same time, it is not entirely impossible, without sacrificing any essential, to reach a standpoint from which a tentative organization begins to emerge.

2 Three key-concepts

This tentative organization could be as follows:

(A) TWO ESSENTIAL FEATURES OF INTELLIGENCE

Intellectual activities can, we feel, be characterized by two essential features (cf. Oléron, 1961 b).

In the first place, they are activities which operate by means of long circuits. This can be clearly seen by comparison with reflex actions. In the latter, a response is immediately evoked by a stimulus according to a mechanism which is at once ready for action. This is not so with the détour, a familiar notion to all who have studied intelligence. The détour is the long-circuit type of behaviour. Using a tool, a fortiori making one, both typical manifestations of intelligence, also belong to this type, by comparison with responses which involve only the organism itself (direct grasping, etc.).

In the second place, intellectual activities involve constructing and using schemata or models relating to the objects which the subject perceives and upon which he acts. The most elaborate of these models are the symbolic systems with which civilized man is constantly concerned. These include language, specialized languages such as mathematics, and various figurative plans and schemata. Nevertheless there are others, less socialized and less completely objectified (and therefore less accessible to the psychologist) upon which the subject may also rely in approaching a task or solving a problem.

There are close links between these two features of intelligence and it would be a misconception to try to make them correspond respectively to the two ‘forms of intelligence’ which are classically set against each other: ‘practical intelligence’ and ‘abstract (or symbolic) intelligence’. In actual fact, every response which brings into play any properties of objects which go beyond their immediate appearance can be considered to imply a model that is at least implicit, not necessarily conscious or expressible by the subject but liable, without fundamental change, to become so. As for models which can be completely objectified, they play a part only in so far as they are integrated to response schemata actually made use of by the subject and so do not remain external objects which may be contemplated but no more (it is only on this condition that language is effective, otherwise one has the classical case of the subject who can describe a situation but not respond to it adequately).

(B) THE NOTION OF SCHEMA

The two concepts referred to above are no more than the elements of an, as yet, external description and it is possible to go beyond this.

In the psychology of behaviour, only stimuli (or situations) and responses are considered admissible as factual data. However, what matters in psychological activities in general, and in intellectual activities in particular, are the connections which are established between given stimuli and given responses, so it is normal to use concepts which seek to express these by providing a convenient expression or, possibly, by suggesting a hypothesis concerning the underlying mechanisms. It is in this way that the concept of schema can profitably be used, as has already been done by several authors, from Kant to Burloud and to Piaget (in contexts which, however, are far from being identical).

The connections between stimuli and responses are flexible and multiform. This is particularly marked in the case of intellectual activities but it is also a general characteristic of psychical processes. A relatively wide range of stimuli can arouse an identical response (generality or generalization). An identical stimulus may evoke perfectly distinct responses according to the existing constellation of the stimuli—or to their sequence (abstraction, invention). (This characteristic can easily be linked to the existence of long circuits, which are naturally multiple, and to that of models, which introduce new and varied elements into the stimulus-response cycle.) This diversity does not mean anarchy; on the contrary, it presents regularities, for example we find that stimuli of a particular category all provoke the same response (stimuli of a given colour or shape) and the responses concerned belong to well defined categories (actions centred on a particular element of an experimental set-up, such as a bolt in the case of a practical problem, etc.). The notion of schema makes it possible to express this regularity, as a connection between a class of stimuli and a class of responses.

At the same time, in so far as a schema can be assimilated to a habit, it allows the intervention, not only of the plasticity just mentioned, but also of energizing (or dynamic) aspects by which it is possible to express the availability (or greater facility) of a particular response, the interactions (substitution, conflict, dominance) and the transformations which are determined at once by stimuli and responses and by other schemata belonging for instance to other systems (language as distinct from action proper). From this angle, the notion of schema leads us back to certain notions put forward by authors such as Hull (habit strength, habit-family hierarchy, convergent or divergent mechanisms), which are almost certainly valuable (cf. Maltzman, 1955).

3 Main types of intellectual activities

As mentioned above, intellectual activities are diverse, as suggested by the number of words used to designate them. One can try to find a guiding thread to present them—and first to represent them to oneself—by using the concepts mentioned above.

If we take first the basic situation in which the subject finds himself confronted by stimuli to which he must respond, not in a reflex or habitual manner, but in an intellectual way, several cases can arise. In one of these, the stimuli may present a regularity which is not immediately perceptible. The subject must then discover the regularity; in other words, he elaborates a response schema which is based on, and adapted to, the stimuli. It is correct to speak here of inductive processes. Another case, directly opposed to the first, is that in which the appropriate schema is immediately applied to the stimuli: the subject fits them into the frame which is already at his disposal. One should then speak of a process of subsumption, a term which has not been used by psychologists but which is logical.

It is probably somewhat academic to draw a radical distinction between these two types of process, since a schema is not constructed ex nihilo and the subject always approaches stimuli ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• CHAPTER 22 Pierre Oléron
• CHAPTER 23 Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder
• CHAPTER 24 Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder
• CHAPTER 25 Pierre Gréco
• Index