Dr. Skinner, An American Psychologist, And Jean Piaget

B. F. Skinner, an American psychologist, and Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, were two of the most influential human development theorists of the twentieth century. The two men approached the question of human development from very different angles. Skinner, a behaviorist, worked from a learning perspective and saw human development as a continuous process in which changes in behavior were responses to experience and adaptation to the environment. Piaget, on the other hand, took a cognitive approach and was concerned with the evolution of mental structures. Where Skinner saw development in quantitative terms, Piaget held that development occurred in â€Å"stages of development† in which qualitative changes enabled the individual to construct†¦show more content†¦He was fascinated with finding that at a certain age, children could solve a particular reasoning problem, but, more than that, at an earlier age, they nearly always gave the same wrong answer. Jean Piaget’s theory believed that cognitive development involves changes in cognitive processes and abilities. Piaget believed that early cognitive development is based upon actions and later progresses to changes in mental operations. Jean Piaget’s interest in cognitive development in children was first influenced by watching his 1-year-old nephew at play. Piaget observed his nephew playing with a ball. When the ball rolled to a place where the boy could still see it, the infant simply retrieved the ball and continued playing. When the ball rolled out of his sight, however, the child began looking for it where he had last seen it. This reaction surprised Piaget and struck him as irrational. Piaget came to believe that children lack what he referred to as the object concept. The object concept is the knowledge that objects are separate and distinct from both the individual and the individual s perception of that object. Jean Piaget set out to study his daughter as she developed through infancy, toddlerhood, and childhood. He quickly noted that during the early months of his daughter s life,