Jean Piaget

Piaget was born in 1896 in Neuchâtel in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. His father, Arthur Piaget, was a professor of medieval literature at the University of Neuchâtel. Piaget was a precocious child who developed an interest in biology and the natural world, particularly molluscs, and even published a number of papers before he graduated from high school. In fact, his long career of scientific research began when he was just eleven, with the 1907 publication of a short paper on the albino sparrow. Over the course of his career, Piaget wrote more than sixty books and several hundred articles.
Piaget received a Ph.D. in natural science from the University of Neuchâtel, and also studied briefly at the University of Zürich. During this time, he published two philosophical papers which showed the direction of his thinking at the time, but which he later dismissed as adolescent work. His interest in psychoanalysis, a strain of psychological thought burgeoning at that time, can also be dated to this period. He then moved from Switzerland to Paris, France, where he taught at the Grange-Aux-Belles street school for boys run by Alfred Binet, the developer of the Binet intelligence test. It was while he was helping to mark some instances of these intelligence tests that Piaget noticed that young children consistently gave wrong answers to certain questions. Piaget did not focus so much on the fact of the children's answers being wrong, but that young children kept making the same pattern of mistakes that older children and adults did not. This led him to the theory that young children's thought or cognitive processes are inherently different from those of adults. (Ultimately, he was to propose a global theory of developmental stages stating that individuals exhibit certain distinctive common patterns of cognition in each period in their development.) In 1921, Piaget returned to Switzerland as director of the Rousseau Institute in Geneva.
In 1923, he married Valentine Châtenay, one of his students; together, the couple had three children, whom Piaget studied from infancy. In 1929, Jean Piaget accepted the post of Director of the International Bureau of Education and remained the head of this international organization until 1968. Every year, he drafted his “Director's Speeches” for the IBE Council and for the International Conference on Public Education in which he explicitly expressed his educational credo.

Jean Piaget Theory

The stages of cognitive development
Piaget's 'Four levels of development' are (1) infancy, (2) preschool, (3) childhood, and (4) adolescence. Each stage is characterized by a general cognitive structure that affects all of the child's thinking (a structuralist view influenced by philosopher Immanuel Kant)[citation needed]. Each stage represents the child's understanding of reality during that period, and each but the last is an inadequate approximation of reality. Development from one stage to the next is thus caused by the accumulation of errors in the child's understanding of the environment; this accumulation eventually causes such a degree of cognitive disequilibrium that thought structures require reorganizing.
The four development stages are described in Piaget's theory as:
Sensorimotor stage: from birth to age 2. Children experience the world through movement and senses (use five senses to explore the world). During the sensorimotor stage children are extremely egocentric, meaning they cannot perceive the world from others viewpoints and explore using senses. The sensorimotor stage is divided into six substages: "(1) simple reflexes; (2) first habits and primary circular reactions; (3) secondary circular reactions; (4) coordination of secondary circular reactions; (5) tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and curiosity; and (6) internalization of schemes." [3] Simple reflexes is from birth to 1 month old. At this time infants use reflexes such as rooting and sucking. First habits and primary circular reactions is from 1 month to 4 months old. During this time infants learn to coordinate sensation and two types of scheme (habit and circular reactions). A primary circular reaction is when the infant tries to reproduce an event that happened by accident (ex: sucking thumb). The third stage, secondary circular reactions, occurs when the infant is 4 to 8 months old. At this time they become aware of things beyond their own body; they are more object oriented. At this time they might accidentally shake a rattle and continue to do it for sake of satisfaction. Coordination of secondary circular reactions is from 8 months to 12 months old. During this stage they can do things intentionally. They can now combine and recombine schemes and try to reach a goal (ex: use a stick to reach something). They also understand object permanence during this stage. That is, they understand that objects continue to exist even when they can't see them. The fifth stage occurs from 12 months old to 18 months old. During this stage infants explore new possibilities of objects; they try different things to get different results. During the last stage they are 18 to 24 months old. During this stage they shift to symbolic thinking. [3]
Preoperational stage: from ages 2 to 5 (magical thinking predominates. Acquisition of motor skills) Egocentricism begins strongly and then weakens. Children cannot conserve or use logical thinking.
Concrete operational stage: from ages 5 to 11 (children begin to think logically but are very concrete in their thinking) Children can now conserve and think logically but only with practical aids. They are no longer egocentric.
Formal operational stage: after age 11 (development of abstract reasoning). Children develop abstract thought and can easily conserve and think logically in their mind.

[edit] The developmental process
Piaget provided no concise description of the development process as a whole. Broadly speaking it consisted of a cycle:
The child performs an action which has an effect on or organizes objects, and the child is able to note the characteristics of the action and its effects.
Through repeated actions, perhaps with variations or in different contexts or on different kinds of objects, the child is able to differentiate and integrate its elements and effects. This is the process of "reflecting abstraction" (described in detail in Piaget 2001).
At the same time, the child is able to identify the properties of objects by the way different kinds of action affect them. This is the process of "empirical abstraction".
By repeating this process across a wide range of objects and actions, the child establishes a new level of knowledge and insight. This is the process of forming a new "cognitive stage". This dual process allows the child to construct new ways of dealing with objects and new knowledge about objects themselves.
However, once the child has constructed these new kinds of knowledge, he or she starts to use them to create still more complex objects and to carry out still more complex actions. As a result, the child starts to recognize still more complex patterns and to construct still more complex objects. Thus a new stage begins, which will only be completed when all the child's activity and experience have been re-organized on this still higher level.
This process is not wholly gradual, however. Once a new level of organization, knowledge and insight proves to be effective, it will quickly be generalized to other areas. As a result, transitions between stages tend to be rapid and radical, and the bulk of the time spent in a new stage consists of refining this new cognitive level. When the knowledge that has been gained at one stage of study and experience leads rapidly and radically to a new higher stage of insight, a gestalt is said to have occurred.
It is because this process takes this dialectical form, in which each new stage is created through the further differentiation, integration, and synthesis of new structures out of the old, that the sequence of cognitive stages are logically necessary rather than simply empirically correct. Each new stage emerges only because the child can take for granted the achievements of its predecessors, and yet there are still more sophisticated forms of knowledge and action that are capable of being developed.
Because it covers both how we gain knowledge about objects and our reflections on our own actions, Piaget's model of development explains a number of features of human knowledge that had never previously been accounted for. For example, by showing how children progressively enrich their understanding of things by acting on and reflecting on the effects of their own previous knowledge, they are able to organize their knowledge in increasingly complex structures. Thus, once a young child can consistently and accurately recognize different kinds of animals, he or she then acquires the ability to organize the different kinds into higher groupings such as "birds", "fish", and so on. This is significant because they are now able to know things about a new animal simply on the basis of the fact that it is a bird – for example, that it will lay eggs.
At the same time, by reflecting on their own actions, the child develops an increasingly sophisticated awareness of the "rules" that govern in various ways. For example, it is by this route that Piaget explains this child's growing awareness of notions such as "right", "valid", "necessary", "proper", and so on. In other words, it is through the process of objectification, reflection and abstraction that the child constructs the principles on which action is not only effective or correct but also justified.
One of Piaget's most famous studies focused purely on the discriminative abilities of children between the ages of two and a half years old, and four and a half years old. He began the study by taking children of different ages and placing two lines of sweets, one with the sweets in a line spread further apart, and one with the same number of sweets in a line placed more closely together. He found that, “Children between 2 years, 6 months old and 3 years, 2 months old correctly discriminate the relative number of objects in two rows; between 3 years, 2 months and 4 years, 6 months they indicate a longer row with fewer objects to have "more"; after 4 years, 6 months they again discriminate correctly” (Cognitive Capacity of Very Young Children, p. 141). Initially younger children were not studied, because if at four years old a child could not conserve quantity, then a younger child presumably could not either. The results show however that children that are younger than three years and two months have quantity conservation, but as they get older they lose this quality, and do not recover it until four and a half years old. This attribute may be lost due to a temporary inability to solve because of an overdependence on perceptual strategies, which correlates more candy with a longer line of candy, or due to the inability for a four year old to reverse situations.
By the end of this experiment several results were found. First, younger children have a discriminative ability that shows the logical capacity for cognitive operations exists earlier than acknowledged. This study also reveals that young children can be equipped with certain qualities for cognitive operations, depending on how logical the structure of the task is. Research also shows that children develop explicit understanding at age 5 and as a result, the child will count the sweets to decide which has more. Finally the study found that overall quantity conservation is not a basic characteristic of humans' native inheritance.

Dr. B. F. Skinner’s Theory

B. F. Skinner’s entire system is based on operant conditioning. The organism is in the process of “operating” on the environment, which in ordinary terms means it is bouncing around its world, doing what it does. During this “operating,” the organism encounters a special kind of stimulus, called a reinforcing stimulus, or simply a reinforcer. This special stimulus has the effect of increasing the operant -- that is, the behavior occurring just before the reinforcer. This is operant conditioning: “the behavior is followed by a consequence, and the nature of the consequence modifies the organisms tendency to repeat the behavior in the future.”
Imagine a rat in a cage. This is a special cage (called, in fact, a “Skinner box”) that has a bar or pedal on one wall that, when pressed, causes a little mechanism to release a food pellet into the cage. The rat is bouncing around the cage, doing whatever it is rats do, when he accidentally presses the bar and -- hey, presto! -- a food pellet falls into the cage! The operant is the behavior just prior to the reinforcer, which is the food pellet, of course. In no time at all, the rat is furiously peddling away at the bar, hoarding his pile of pellets in the corner of the cage.
A behavior followed by a reinforcing stimulus results in an increased probability of that behavior occurring in the future.
What if you don’t give the rat any more pellets? Apparently, he’s no fool, and after a few futile attempts, he stops his bar-pressing behavior. This is called extinction of the operant behavior.
A behavior no longer followed by the reinforcing stimulus results in a decreased probability of that behavior occurring in the future.
Now, if you were to turn the pellet machine back on, so that pressing the bar again provides the rat with pellets, the behavior of bar-pushing will “pop” right back into existence, much more quickly than it took for the rat to learn the behavior the first time. This is because the return of the reinforcer takes place in the context of a reinforcement history that goes all the way back to the very first time the rat was reinforced for pushing on the bar!

Dr. Burrhus Frederic Skinner

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born March 20, 1904, in the small Pennsylvania town of Susquehanna. His father was a lawyer, and his mother a strong and intelligent housewife. His upbringing was old-fashioned and hard-working.
Burrhus was an active, out-going boy who loved the outdoors and building things, and actually enjoyed school. His life was not without its tragedies, however. In particular, his brother died at the age of 16 of a cerebral aneurysm.
Burrhus received his BA in English from Hamilton College in upstate New York. He didn’t fit in very well, not enjoying the fraternity parties or the football games. He wrote for school paper, including articles critical of the school, the faculty, and even Phi Beta Kappa! To top it off, he was an atheist -- in a school that required daily chapel attendance.
He wanted to be a writer and did try, sending off poetry and short stories. When he graduated, he built a study in his parents’ attic to concentrate, but it just wasn’t working for him.
Ultimately, he resigned himself to writing newspaper articles on labor problems, and lived for a while in Greenwich Village in New York City as a “bohemian.” After some traveling, he decided to go back to school, this time at Harvard. He got his masters in psychology in 1930 and his doctorate in 1931, and stayed there to do research until 1936.
Also in that year, he moved to Minneapolis to teach at the University of Minnesota. There he met and soon married Yvonne Blue. They had two daughters, the second of which became famous as the first infant to be raised in one of Skinner’s inventions, the air crib. Although it was nothing more than a combination crib and playpen with glass sides and air conditioning, it looked too much like keeping a baby in an aquarium to catch on.
In 1945, he became the chairman of the psychology department at Indiana University. In 1948, he was invited to come to Harvard, where he remained for the rest of his life. He was a very active man, doing research and guiding hundreds of doctoral candidates as well as writing many books. While not successful as a writer of fiction and poetry, he became one of our best psychology writers, including the book Walden II, which is a fictional account of a community run by his behaviorist principles.
August 18, 1990, B. F. Skinner died of leukemia after becoming perhaps the most celebrated psychologist since Sigmund Freud.

3. Ivan Pavlov: experiment & Multimedia Clip

Research and experiments

The theory of Pavlov could be tested in experiments that where conducted in a laboratory. He often used animals in his experiments. His most famous experiment is the one, in which he used dogs to demonstrate classical conditioning. The dogs he used showed a salivation response when they where offered food (unconditional stimulus). The food was offered a number of time with the sound of a buzzer (conditional stimulus). After this, the sound of the buzzer alone could produce the salivation response.

Classical Conditioning (also Pavlovian or Respondent Conditioning) is a form of associative learning that was first demonstrated by Ivan Pavlov^[1] . The typical procedure for inducing classical conditioning involves presentations of a neutral stimulus along with a stimulus of some significance. The neutral stimulus could be any event that does not result in an overt behavioral response from the organism under investigation. Pavlov referred to this as a Conditioned Stimulus (CS). Conversely, presentation of the significant stimulus necessarily evokes an innate, often reflexive, response. Pavlov called these the Unconditioned Stimulus (US) and Unconditioned Response (UR), respectively. If the CS and the US are repeatedly paired, eventually the two stimuli become associated and the organism begins to produce a behavioral response to the CS. Pavlov called this the Conditioned Response (CR).

Popular forms of classical conditioning that are used to study neural structures and functions that underlie learning and memory include fear conditioning, eyeblink conditioning, and Classical Conditioning of Aplysia gill and siphon withdrawal reflex.

One of Pavlov’s dogs with a surgically implanted cannula to measure salivation, Pavlov Museum, 2005

The original and most famous example of classical conditioning involved the salivary conditioning of Pavlov's dogs. During his research on the physiology of digestion in dogs, Pavlov noticed that, rather than simply salivating in the presence of meat powder (an innate response to food that he called the unconditioned response), the dogs began to salivate in the presence of the lab technician who normally fed them. Pavlov called these psychic secretions. From this observation he predicted that, if a particular stimulus in the dog’s surroundings were present when the dog was presented with meat powder, then this stimulus would become associated with food and cause salivation on its own. In his initial experiment, Pavlov used bells to call the dogs to their food and, after a few repetitions, the dogs started to salivate in response to the bell. Thus, a neutral stimulus (bell) became a conditioned stimulus (CS) as a result of consistent pairing with the unconditioned stimulus (US - meat powder in this example). Pavlov referred to this learned relationship as a conditional reflex (now called Conditioned Response).

If you want to see the animation of Pavlov theory. Please Click the below URL
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=qa4qRW1mTJI

2. Ivan Pavlov theory

Pavlov was a behaviorist. This means that his theories focused on observable behavior, because behavior can be measured and thought can not. The human mind should be interpreted as a black box that can not be opened. Only was goes in the box and what comes out can be known. Scientific evidence is the keyword in his theory.Pavlov studied reflexes, automatic behavior that is caused by a stimulus from the environment. Some reflexes, such as blinking your eyes when a puff of air comes in it, or the sucking of a baby when something is put in his/her mouth. This automatic behavior can be manipulated. This is called conditioning. In this conditioning process, a unconditional stimulus is given to a person. This stimulus causes a reflex on its own. When the unconditional stimulus is now given to the person together with a stimulus that does not cause a reflex on its own. Thus, a unconditional stimulus is given together with a conditional stimulus. Because the presence of the unconditional stimulus, the reflex is caused. This process of stimulus-response is repeated for a number of times. After a while, the unconditional stimulus is not offered any more. Only the conditional stimulus is offered. Because of the repeated association of the unconditional and the conditional stimulus, the conditional stimulus will now cause the reflex on its own. Classical conditioning is succeeded. Pavlov's theories where very influential, in particular in the field of child psychology.

1. Ivan Pavlov

The Russian physicist Ivan Petrovitsj Pavlov was born in 1849.He studied pharmacology and physiology in Sint Petersburg. Later he became a teacher on this academy. Besides teaching, he was involved in medical research.Pavlov was interested in the behavior of both humans and animals, and he was especially interested in reflexes. His biggest contribution to the field of psychology is classical conditioning, a theory about how behavior is learned. He received a Nobel price for his important contribution to science. Pavlov died in 1936 in Russia.