The Mind's Staircase

Exploring the Conceptual Underpinnings of Children's Thought and Knowledge

Robbie Case, Robbie Case, Robbie Case

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134744732
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The shortcomings of Piaget's theory of intellectual development are well-known. Less clear is what sort of theory should be devised to replace it. This volume describes the current "main contenders," including neo-Piagetian, neo-connectionist, neo-innatist and sociocultural models. Its contributors conclude that none of these models are adequate because each one implies a view of the human mind which is either too general, too particular, or too modular. A collaborative program of research -- seven years in the making -- is then described, which gives support to a newly emerging synthesis of these various positions.

I

Introduction

In the present section, three contemporary views of intellectual development are presented, and placed in historical context. Each one of these views constitutes a different response to the same historical dilemma, namely, the one that was created when Piaget’s theory of intellectual development was confronted with massive evidence of exceptions to the monolithic pattern of development he had hypothesized. Notwithstanding the similarity in their origins, the three theories nonetheless differ in a number of fundamental respects, particularly with regard to the stance they take on the degree of generality that should be imputed to the human cognitive system and the process by which this system develops. After a detailed presentation of the theory out of which the present project evolved, we show that—notwithstanding its other attractive features—the theory does not do full justice to the most recent data on the modularity of the human mind and its development. The conclusion is that the theory’s assumptions must somehow be altered or expanded if a satisfactory position on this issue is to be reached. A research strategy for working toward such an objective is then proposed, and its relationship to subsequent sections of the volume explicated.

1

General and Specific Views of the Mind, Its Structure and Its Development

Robbie Case

Stanford University

With the emergence of cognitive science, a new form has been given to an old question. In its original form, the question was whether differences in intellectual capability were best thought of as stemming from differences in a single, underlying intellectual factor, or whether they were better thought of as stemming from the differential development of a number of more discrete mental faculties. In its modern form, the question has been phrased in more technical terms: Is the mind better thought of as a general, all-purpose computing device, whose particular forte is general problem solving? Or is it better thought of as a modular device, each of whose modules has evolved to serve a unique biological function that it performs in its own unique and specialized way?

As in the past, advocates can be found for each position. There are those who see the mind’s power as stemming from its modularity (Fodor, 1982; Gardner, 1983), and those who see its power as residing in its more general problem-solving capabilities (Newell & Simon, 1972). In recent years, there has been an acknowledgement that the truth very probably lies in between (Cecci, 1989; Sternberg, 1989). As yet, however, the conceptual apparatus for explicating this position has not been fully developed.

There does appear to be considerable agreement that the mind has conceptual or computational capabilities that are general, as well as those that are specific. There also appears to be considerable agreement that each sort of capability is vital in our daily lives, and that each is shaped by a variety of external and internal forces. Exactly how these different types of capability interact, however, has not as yet been specified. Nor has much thought been given to the way in which they might combine to influence the overall course of our intellectual growth, or how they might be impacted by the twin forces of maturation and enculturation.

This monograph is an attempt to lay the groundwork for answering some of these questions. Although the various chapters have different authors, the common theme that unites them is the interaction between system-wide and modular capabilities in shaping children’s mastery of the concepts and skills that are their cultural heritage. Since this issue is by its nature developmental, I begin with a brief history of recent attempts to conceptualize children’s general and specific capabilities in the field of intellectual development.

Piaget’s Theory of Intellectual Development

Without question, the notion of a “generalized intellectual competence” found its strongest expression in the writings of Jean Piaget. In keeping with his roots in the rationalist tradition, Piaget viewed the child as a young intellectual, constructing ever more powerful theories of the world as a result of applying a set of logical tools of increasing generality and power. Beginning with his wartime lectures, and continuing for the next 15 or 20 years, Piaget attempted to specify the nature of these general tools, the process by which they are acquired, and the knowledge of the world to which they give rise.

The tools in question were construed as logico-mathematical operations that were universal in nature, and remained invariant across considerable differences in the content to which they were applied. It was by actively applying these operations, according to Piaget, that children were able to make sense of their world. Thus, their understanding at any point in time was a reflection—not just of the external properties of the world itself, or their experience with it—but of the properties of the operations that they had applied in order to make sense of this experience.

Certain very basic and discrete cognitive operations were acknowledged to be present from birth. Even these pre-wired and relatively reflexive operations, however, were not seen as remaining independent for very long. Rather, with experience, they were seen as gradually becoming differentiated and coordinated into systems of increasing complexity and coherence. Piaget believed that, at several points in development, these systems became particularly stable, and acquired a number of organizational properties that could be described via symbolic logic (commutativity, associativity, reversibility, etc.). One of these points was at the age of about 2 years, after the development of children’s earliest sensory and motor capabilities was complete. Another was at the age of 7 to 10 years, after the emergence and development of a higher-order set of operations that were “representational” in nature. The third point was at the end of adolescence, after the emergence and development of a class of representations that were more abstract or “formal.”

Because Piaget saw these stable systems as playing a fundamental role in shaping children’s views of the world around them, he divided children’s cognitive development into four general stages, defined as a function of the attainment (or non-attainment) of the thought that these systems permitted. He termed the four stages the sensorimotor stage (0 to 2 years), the pre-operational stage (2 to 7 years), the concrete operational stage (7 to 10 years) and the formal operational stage (11 to adulthood). With development divided into these four general stages, he went on to address the question of how children make the transition from one of these stages to the next. The answer he proposed was that children’s active reflection on the products of their current mental activity plays a key role in the stage-transition process, as does their attempt to deal with the inherent contradictions that this reflection reveals.

In summary, while Piaget acknowledged that reality could be parsed into various domains (his own favorites being the Kantian ones of space, time, causality, etc.), he nevertheless saw children’s understanding in each of these domains as being determined, to a major extent, not just by their domain specific experience, but by the general set of operations that they brought to their experience, and the general set of auto-regulative processes by which these operations were assembled into stable systems or groups.

Responses to Piaget’s Theory

One of the most important features of Piaget’s theory was that it focused investigators’ attention on the active role of the individual in the construction of his or her own knowledge. Another was that it stressed the general organization of knowledge during an historical epoch in which human knowledge was more often viewed in an extremely atomistic fashion. Perhaps the most important feature of Piaget’s theory with regard to the topic of the present volume, however, was that it led to the discovery of a wide range of empirical phenomena for which it also provided a coherent and parsimonious explanation. Among the data that were explained by the theory were the following: (a) A great many sequences of intellectual development appear to be universal, both within and across cultures; (b) children are unable to solve a wide variety of logical problems, no matter how “rationally oriented” or “logical” their culture, until a remarkably late age; (c) training children to solve these problems is a very difficult endeavor, when it is possible at all; and (d) a wide variety of these problems appear to be solved spontaneously (i.e., without training) during middle childhood.

In spite of its broad explanatory power, Piaget’s theory had a number of shortcomings, which became apparent as it was examined from the perspective of other theoretical systems. Some of these problems were largely rational in nature, such as the inherent difficulty of explaining how a cognitive system could be open to cultural innovation when it is only equipped with a universal and closed set of logico-mathematical operations (Keating, 1980). Another was the difficulty of accounting for human cognition that was not logical or mathematical, when the underlying theory asserted that logico-mathematical structures were paramount (Broughton, 1984). Yet another difficulty was the lack of correspondence between the form in which Piaget’s structures were articulated (i.e., symbolic logic) and the form in which they were represented in children’s minds: It seemed that Piaget’s theory was better equipped for representing the structure in the mind of logicians than the structure in the minds of young children. The fourth, and perhaps most serious, problem was that the theory provided little or no explanation for exceptions to the general pattern of development. In this regard, the following data were particularly problematic:

1. Cross-Task Correlations. For Piagetian measures that were passed at the same age, it was often the case the intertask correlations were low or insignificant. Why this should be the case, if the underlying factor postulated to account for all of them was the acquisition of a single underlying structure, was not apparent (Pascual-Leone, 1969; Pinard & Laurendeau, 1969).

2. Decalages. Although certain Piagetian measures were passed at the same age, it was more often the case that different measures of the same underlying construct were passed at very different ages. When conservation of weight was used as the assessment tool, for example, children appeared to have reached the stage of concrete operations by the age of 8 or 9 years. By contrast, when conservation of number was used, they appeared to reach that stage by age 5 or 6 (Piaget & Inhelder, 1974). Why the acquisition of one general underlying structure should lead to this sort of asynchronous pattern of cross-task performance was not clear (Pinard & Laurendeau, 1969; Fischer, 1980; DiRibeaupierre & Rieben, 1985).

3. Instruction. According to Piaget’s theory, one would expect that purely external manipulations—especially manipulations of a didactic sort—would not have much impact on children’s performance on tests that assessed the presence or absence of an underlying logico-mathematical structure. To the extent that instruction did have any impact, though, one would also expect a broad pattern of transfer to structurally similar tasks in other domains. In fact, the pattern was the reverse: Quite a number of training studies produced significant gains in children’s performance on measures such as conservation, as a result of instruction that was strongly didactic in nature (Gelman, 1969; Beilin, 1971a). Although children showed broad transfer to other variants of these same problems, however, they almost never showed transfer to tests of different concepts that were supposed to be structurally equivalent (e.g., classification or seriation).

4. Development in Other Cultures. A fourth set of data came from cross-cultural investigations. Here the anomaly was that, in many cultures, success did not appear to be achieved on Piagetian tests of formal operations even in adulthood (Dasen, 1972). Because the achievement of formal operations was supposed to be universal, this was difficult to explain. Piaget’s position in this matter was that the measurement devices were at fault (Piaget, 1972): Were measures developed that were better suited for use in other cultures, and that contained content with which the culture was thoroughly familiar, the logico-mathematical structures of formal thought would be found to be truly universal.

The Rise of Task-Specific Theories and the Beginnings of “Cognitive Science”

As data like those just cited began to accumulate, many investigators in North America, especially those with roots in the empiricist tradition, began to reject Piaget’s notion of general logical structures (Brainerd, 1978; Flavell, 1963, 1982; Gelman, 1969, 1972) and turned their attention to three lines of research that they felt Piaget had neglected. The first was the investigation of intellectual competence in early childhood (Gelman, 1972; Meltzoff, 1981; Shatz & Gelman, 1973); the second was the investigation of children’s linguistic competence (Bates, 1976; A. L. Brown, 1973; C. Chomsky, 1970; E. Clark, 1973; Gentner, 1975; Slobin, 1973); and the third was the investigation of children’s social cognition (Damon, 1977; Flavell, Bolkin, Fry, Wright, & Jarvis, 1968; Selman, 1980; Turiel, 1975). At the same time that investigators were branching out into these new substantive fields, they began pursuing new theoretical directions as well. On the one hand, they became interested in Chomskian linguistics; on the other, they became interested in the newly emerging discipline of information science (Newell, Shaw, & Simon, 1958). These two strands of thought ultimately merged into the discipline that became known as “cognitive science.” However, during the 1970s they remained at least relatively distinct, and led to different sorts of theoretical renewal.

As Klahr (1988) has pointed out, the number of investigators who developed detailed “information processing” models of children’s cognition during this period was quite small. However, a substantial number of investigators began to adopt the general metaphor on which information processing theory was based. That is to say, they began to accept the utility of thinking of the mind as a device for processing information from a variety of modalities, encoding it symbolically in some sort of working buffer, accessing additional relevant information from long-term memory, and executing series of transformations on the resultant content. One consequence of this trend was that investigators began to study developmental change...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: The Role of Central Conceptual Structures in the Development of Children’s Logico—Mathematical Thought
• Part III: The Role of Central Conceptual Structures in the Development of Children’s Social and Emotional Thought
• Part IV: The Role of Central Conceptual Structures in the Development of Chilren’s Spatial Thought
• Part V: Cross-Domain Synchrony and Asynchrony in the Acquisition of Different Central Conceptual Structures
• Part VI: Conclusion
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index