Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [235]
As opposed to admiration like Kagan’s, for several decades there has been a rising tide of revision and modification of Piaget’s ideas and findings; thousands of neo-, post-, and anti-Piagetian papers have been published or delivered at seminars. While much of this work has value, most of it is small stuff compared with the work of the giant himself. Isaac Newton once said, with false modesty, “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”; the swarm of psychologists who have been correcting and revising Piaget’s theory could say in all truth that they see farther than he because they stand on his shoulders.
Cognitive Development
In the 1920s, Piaget’s early publications launched the modern study of cognitive development in Europe and America. But in the United States interest soon waned; behaviorism was becoming supreme and its adherents saw little value in what they considered new wine in the old bottle of mentalism. However, in the 1960s, when cognitivism began to regain favor, Piaget was rediscovered, and intellectual development research in his mode became a booming field.
But the tidy outlines of Piaget’s theory became blurred as swarms of doctoral candidates and psychologists, performing hundreds of Piaget-inspired studies, produced findings that often modified and sometimes challenged various aspects of the original. In the course of the past four decades, the field of cognitive development, though still much influenced by Piaget, has become an overgrown and unweeded garden. Outside it, moreover, researchers in two relatively new and burgeoning fields, cultural psychology and evolutionary psychology, have been vigorously raising a crop of studies that broaden and modify developmental psychology in distinctly non-Piagetian ways. But we will defer looking into these two specialties until we have seen what has been happening in Piagetian-based studies, some of which are sure to enlighten, delight, and occasionally astonish the viewer. Here, with no pretense to completeness or even representativeness, is a small gathering of the flowers and fruits of several decades of this genre of research.
Memory: How is one to investigate the memory of an infant who cannot speak, or, in the case of a newborn, indicate recognition even by facial expressions or hand movements? Researchers have thought up ingenious approaches to the problem. In an experiment conducted in 1959, infants less than a month old were conditioned to turn their heads at a particular sound (they turned them in response to a touch on the cheek and were rewarded by a bottle); a day later they still turned their heads when they heard the sound.21 The method, used with infants of different ages, yielded data on the growth of memory.
With infants a few months old, the method most frequently used has been the observation of their eye movements. The baby lies on his back looking up; above him is a display area where the experimenter puts two large cards, each containing a design such as a circle, a bull’s-eye, or a sketch of a face. The researcher times how long the baby’s eyes are directed at one pattern or the other. Since infants look at a new image longer than at a familiar one, the method yields a direct indication of what the infant remembers having seen.
Another technique, used in a 1979 experiment, called for a mobile to be suspended over the crib of an infant; subjects ranged from two to four months. When the baby kicked his legs, the researcher made the mobile move, and the infant soon learned to kick in order to see it move. Then he did not see the mobile again for a week, but when he did, he immediately started kicking. However, if two weeks went by, he did not. Again, the growth of memory was precisely measured.22
Such memory (recognition) is different from the more actively employed memory involved in a baby’s looking for an object that he has seen being hidden from view. If a baby of eight or nine months has twice retrieved a toy from under