Developmental Psychology Analysis of Mary Lennox in "The Secret Garden"

Developmental Psychology Analysis of Mary Lennox in "The Secret Garden"

Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

A radically different theory of cognition was advanced early in the twentieth century by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980), who emphasized the active role of the subject in the transformation of the object and posited a biological rather than a mechanistic model of cognition. Piaget wrote voluminously, and his experimental research has contributed greatly to our understanding of the nature of children's interactions with their environment. A biologist whose observations convinced him that organismic development is the result not only of maturation but of adaptation to the environment as well, Piaget extended this biological model to cognitive development (Olson, 1970). He envisioned cognition progressing through assimilation of or accommodation to the environment, with the subject achieving equilibrium with the environment through the interiorization of actions as stable cognitive operations. Piaget's “genetic epistemology” links cognitive development (the formation of stable and reversible cognitive structures) with progress toward the immutability of object characteristics, and hence, with criteria for the substantiation of knowledge.

In Piaget's theory, the internal formation of cognitive structures progresses through four major stages, beginning in infancy with sensorimotor activity and culminating in adolescence with the formation of formal logical operations. Development is maturational, and learning—which creates a construct rather than a copy of real-world phenomena—is contingent upon the existing level of development (Piaget, 1972). More recent cross-cultural research supports the existence of stagelike periods of cognitive development, although the attainment of the fourth and final stage is problematic in virtually all cultures studied. Further research points to extensions of cognitive ability beyond those characterizing Piagetian stages and suggests inadequacies in the Piagetian tasks themselves. Margaret Donaldson's Children's Minds (1978) presents a representational survey of some of this research. A study by R. Gelman (1972), for example, found that children between the ages of three and four years could distinguish between number and perceptual arrangement for a small number of objects. When confronted with the classical Piagetian tasks for conservation of number, however, which require children to notice that the number of objects in a line remains constant whether the objects are arranged close together or far apart, these same children could not discriminate the number of objects from their spatial configuration (Vygotsky, 1986).

Theories of cognitive development must be critiqued, however, not only with respect to their experimental confirmation, but also in relation to the more generalized philosophical and scientific frameworks within which they are defined. Here Piaget's theory has exhibited internal contradictions, especially with respect to his concept of equilibrium and its relation to general systems theory. Initially defining equilibrium—a concept central to the development of progressively higher cognitive structures—in terms applicable only to closed systems, Piaget was forced to revise his theory, but with somewhat less than satisfactory results (Olson, 1970). In the attainment of conservation of volume, for example, as a liquid is poured from one container into another that is taller and more ...