Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist whose research described how children construct knowledge and develop reasoning through successive stages of cognitive development.

Schema (psychology): A mental structure used to organize and interpret information. Piaget used schemas to explain how children organize experience and guide action.
Sensorimotor stage: The first stage in Piaget’s model, when infants learn through perception and action. Piaget placed the development of object permanence within this stage.
Three Mountains Task: A Piagetian task testing whether a child can represent a scene from another viewpoint. Piaget used it to investigate egocentrism in children’s spatial judgments.
Bärbel Inhelder: A Swiss developmental psychologist who collaborated closely with Piaget on studies of children’s reasoning. Her research helped develop and extend Piaget’s account of stages and formal reasoning.
Neo-Piagetian theories: Theories that retain aspects of Piaget’s stage approach while incorporating factors such as working memory and processing speed. They revise his framework rather than rejecting stage-like changes outright.
Assimilation (psychology): The process of interpreting new experience through an existing mental schema. It explains how a child can incorporate new information without changing an existing schema.
Preoperational stage: The stage in Piaget’s model when symbolic thought develops but logical operations remain limited. It describes the reasoning Piaget associated with many preschool and early school-age children.
A-not-B error: An infant’s repeated search for a hidden object in its former location after seeing it moved. Piaget interpreted this error as evidence about developing object permanence.
Alfred Binet: A French psychologist who developed an influential intelligence test with Théodore Simon. Piaget’s early work scoring children’s tests helped turn his attention to their reasoning errors.
Core knowledge theory: The view that infants begin life with specialized expectations about domains such as objects, agents, and number. It challenges the idea that early knowledge is built chiefly through general sensorimotor activity.

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