PSYC 215 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Jean Piaget, Third Eye, Imaginary Audience
Structure and process 10/13/2016 8:29:00 PM
Structure and Process
• Piaget’s theory
• Vygotsky’s sociocultural view
• Information processing approach
o Memory
• Jean Piaget
o Born in 1896 in Switzerland
o Interested in fossils and seashells
o 1st publication at age 10 on albino sparrow
o published other articles on mollusks
o offered curator position at museum in Geneva
o Ph.D. in zoology at 21
o Went to Paris to study psychology and philosophy
o Studied under Simon-intelligence tests
o Thought children’s wrong answers were more interesting than
their correct answers
o Led to interest in genetic epistemology
o Died in 1980
o The birth of his child, started his studies on infants
▪ Did a lot of studies on his own children and created
ideas from them and then did the studies on other
children
• Components of intellect
o Contents
o Structures
▪ Change with development
▪ 4 stages (must go through each stage and there is no
regression)
• sensorimotor (birth- 2 years)
o link sensory experiences with their motor experiences
o develop schemes- organized patterns of behavior that reflect
a particular way of interacting with the environment.
o 6 substages:
▪ exercising reflexes (birth-1 month)
▪ primary circular reactions (1-4 months)
behavior is focused on infant’s body
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behavior is repeated over and over
▪ secondary circular reactions (4-8 months)
focus of behavior is on external world
behavior is repeated over ad over
▪ coordinating secondary circular reactions (8-12 months)
using schemes to achieve ends
combine different schemes
▪ tertiary circular reactions (12-18 months)
concerned with novelty
deliberate trial and error
repeated over and over
▪ inventing new means by mental combination (18-24
months)
mental representation
▪ object permanence- knowledge that objects still exist
when out of sight
o preoperational (2-7 years)
▪ have mental representations
▪ animism- attribute lifelike qualities to inanimate objects
▪ egocentrism- difficult to see world from another’s point
of view
▪ cannot conserve
centration
cannot reverse mental operations
▪ phenomenism- inability to distinguish between the way
things look with the way things are
o concrete operational (7-11 years)
▪ less egocentric
▪ decentered thought
▪ can reverse mental operations
▪ limitations
thought is limited to the concrete
not methodical
o formal operational (11 years onward)
▪ abstract thinking
▪ use hypothetico-deductive reasoning
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▪ consider several different explanations for a
phenomenon systematically
▪ metacognition- ability to think about your own thinking
▪ attack problems in systematic way
▪ Third eye problem: if you had a third eye, where would
you put it?
▪ Pendulum problem: what effects how quickly the
pendulum swings? Given different weights and a
pendulum
▪ Red and blue bead problem
▪ Implications of formal thought
May help individuals gain sense of identity, think
in more complex ways about moral issues and
understand others
More independent thinking, imagine alternatives
to present realities
Adolescent egocentrism (Elkind, 1976)
• Heightened self-consciousness
• Imaginary audience
• Personal fable
Evaluation of Piaget
• Positive
o Findings were replicated
o General theory
o Recognized infant intelligence
o Developed methods for studying development
• Negative
o Concept of change is vague
o Some hint of children being in between stages
o Underestimated the abilities of children in the 1st three stages
o Overestimated the abilities of adolescents and adults
o Didn’t take culture and education into account
• So why is Piaget important?
o Transformed child psychology/development
o Really helped shape the field
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