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Piaget on Childhood

On the 100th anniversary of his birth, Piaget's ideas remain central to current understanding of development during childhood. The magnitude of this achievement is evident when one contrasts his current role with that of other great psychologists of his generation. No contemporary experimental or cognitive psychology textbook would devote an entire chapter t o the contributions of Hull, Guthrie, Tolman, Skinner, Kohler, or Thurstone. Nor would any contemporary developmental psychology textbook devote a whole chapter to the ideas and findings of such luminaries as Sears, Vygotsky, Goodenough, or Gesell. Yet almost every developmental textbook devotes a chapter to Piaget's ideas and the research they engendered. The reason is simple: It is impossible t o understand the field of developmental psychology without understanding Piaget's ideas and findings. Piaget so transformed thinking about childhood and development that, as Miller (1993) noted, it is difficult to fathom how or why we ever thought about them differently. The questions we ask, the tasks we study, and the methods we use all reflect our frequently unconscious assimilation of Piaget's approach. One way in which the field of cognitive development has followed Piaget's lead is in emphasizing questions of philosophical interest, such as how children come t o understand epistemologically central concepts (e.g.. causality, classification, morality, time, space, mind), how they solve Quine's (1960) riddle of induction, and what their basic ontological categories are. The familiarity of these questions makes them seem the natural ones t o ask. Despite their importance, however, it was not inevitable that they would be emphasized. Current research on adult cognitive psychology and research before 1965 on children's learning illustrate two alternative routes that might have been taken. Contemporary adult cognitive psychology focuses on the nature of the cognitive architecture and the operation of real-time cognitive processes. Research conducted before 1965 on children's learning highlighted questions concerning the way in which processes such as discrimination and generalization shape children's learning. Thus, part of Piaget's enduring impact has been his role in shaping the types of questions that are seen as central for understanding cognitive development. Piaget's influence also has been felt in the types of tasks that are most widely studied by researchers interested in children's thinking. These tasks are designed to elicit high-level cognition: problem solving, reasoning, and understanding of complex concepts. In contrast, in adult cognitive psychology, tasks designed to reveal the workings of attentional, perceptual, and basic learning and memory processes are given far more attention. Once more, it is easy t o imagine research on cognitive development having followed this lead or proceeding in another di-