I am. Therefore, I think: explanations of cognitive development

Camping Magazine, July-August, 2003 by Christopher A. Thurber

Big Questions

About 300 years before Winnie-the-Pooh's impossible reply to Rabbit, French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes sat in his study in Holland and pondered the truth. He thought about dreams, consciousness, and his five senses. Suddenly he realized there was one, undeniable and absolute truth about the universe -- if he was thinking, he must exist. For Descartes, knowing our own mental states proves our existence. Or, as he put it, "I think, therefore I am."

Pooh's statement is silly, of course, because the mere fact that he heard, understood, and answered Rabbit proved that he had a brain. The contradiction between Pooh's statement and reality is what makes this passage -- and so much of Milne's work -- brilliant and funny. (The fact that stuffed animals are talking makes it that much funnier.)

If thinking proves our existence, then perhaps no question is more significant than: How do humans develop this ability? For some answers, we turn to four studies on our list of the twenty most revolutionary studies in child development.

From Clams to Kids

Swiss biologist Jean Piaget wrote his doctoral thesis on the classification of mollusks. How he went from that point to becoming the world's preeminent child psychologist is nothing short of incredible. After completing his Ph.D., he studied psychoanalysis at the University of Zurich and then landed a job in Paris standardizing intelligence tests for psychologist Alfred Binet. (Binet was an inventor of I.Q. tests.) Piaget found most of this work dull, but he was fascinated by children's incorrect answers to test questions.

Unlike Binet, Piaget came to believe that the key to understanding children's cognitive development was not which questions children got wrong, but how they got them wrong. Piaget realized that the way children think was not simply a lesser version of adult thinking. It was qualitatively different. When he died in 1980, at the age of eighty-four, Piaget bad written more than ninety books and five hundred articles on these differences.

Baby Biographer

All of Piaget's work was revolutionary because it transformed our thinking about cognitive development. One of his books -- The Origins of Intelligence in Children -- stands out as particularly influential. First published in 1936, it was most widely appreciated after 1952, when it was translated to English. The book contains exceptionally detailed observations of his three children -- Jacqueline, Lucienne, and Laurent -- from birth to about age two. Each set of observations is followed by Piaget's theoretical explanation for different behaviors. For example, Piaget writes:

"Observation 113 -- Jacqueline, (at 8 months; 16 days), looks at me while my lips imitate the mewing of a cat. She holds a little bell suspended from the hood of her bassinet.... In order to make me continue, she shakes the little bell she holds. I answer by meowing. As soon as I stop, she again shakes the little bell, and so forth. After a few moments I definitely stop my meowings. She shakes the bell two or three times more and, confronted by failure, she changes means." (p. 203)

Piaget explains little Jacqueline's behavior like this: From birth to about two years, children are in the "sensorimotor stage" of cognitive development. They understand the world through sensory and motor interactions with their environment. Many motor skills, such as reaching and grasping, are genetically programmed. With experience, children associate certain movements with certain outcomes. Jacqueline associated her ringing the bell with her father's meowing. She then adapted her behavior based on the effect it had on the environment. So long as her ringing the bell had the intended outcome, she continued. When the desired effect disappeared, she eventually stopped ringing the bell. The ability to make this kind of adaptation, said Piaget, is what intelligence is.

According to Piaget, intelligence grows as we add to and revise our ideas of how the world works. He called these dual processes "assimilation" and "accommodation." Each time that Jacqueline rings the bell and her father meows, she is assimilating. She's adding familiar information to an organized idea about how the world works. When her father stops meowing, this new information requires her to revise her idea about whether her ringing the bell always results in her father's meowing. She is accommodating.

Every day, we assimilate familiar information into our organized ideas about the world, and we accommodate fresh information by revising old ideas or creating new ones. Again, Piaget's work was revolutionary because he showed how children's organized ideas -- or "schemas" -- about how the world works were different from adults' ideas.

For example, compare your schema for objects to Jacqueline's schema for objects. Your schema includes mental representations. You understand that an object continues to exist even when you cannot see it. If you saw me put your issue of Camping Magazine under a blanket, you would know it still exists. You could picture it in your mind and you would naturally look for it under that blanket. Jacqueline probably would not. So, if her father hid her favorite toy under a blanket, she might look momentarily miffed, but she would not search for the toy. For a child that age, the toy isn't hidden. It's gone. Yet over time, said Piaget, Jacqueline's biological growth and experiences with the world would allow her to hold mental representations of objects in her mind, use deductive reasoning, see the world from another person's perspective, and think abstractly.