《Lecture+5(耶鲁大学-心理学导论讲稿)》.pdfVIP

1 Introduction to Psychology Yale University Lecture 5 So, most of what we do these days - our methods, our theories, our ideas - are shaped, to some extent, by Piagets influence. And so, what I want to do is begin this class thats going to talk about cognitive development by talking about his ideas. His idea was that children are active thinkers; theyre trying to figure out the world. He often described them as little scientists. And incidentally, to know where hes coming from on this, he had a very dramatic and ambitious goal. He didnt start off because he was interested in children. He started off because he was interested in the emergence of knowledge in general. It was a discipline he described as genetic epistemology - the origins of knowledge. But he studied development of the individual child because he was convinced that this development will tell him about the development of knowledge more generally. Theres a very snooty phrase that--I dont know if you ever heard it before. Its a great phrase. Its Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. And the idea of this--What that means is that development of an individual mimics or repeats development of the species. Now, its entirely not true, but its a beautiful phrase and Piaget was committed to this. He was very interested in saying, Look. Well figure how a kid develops and that will tell us about the development of knowledge more generally. So, Piaget viewed the child as a scientist who developed this understanding, these schemas, these little, miniature theories of the world. And they did this through two sorts of mechanisms: assimilation and accommodation. So, assimilation would be the act of expanding the range of things that you respond to. Piagets example would be a baby whos used to sucking on a breast might come to suck on a bott