Jean Piaget's Thinking Theory

Jean Piaget was born on the ninth august 1896 in Switzerland. Piaget studied biology at Neuchatel University, graduating at the age of twenty, earning a PhD in the study of the mollusc two years afterwards (Davenport, 1994). In 1920, Piaget contributed to the standardisation of intelligence test procedures where he noticed that five-year old children seemed to give similar wrong answers to certain questions. This led to Piaget’s belief that “children are not just ‘little adults’ in the way they think, and that there might be stages in the development of the intellect” (Davenport, 1994, p. 128). Afterwards he furthered onto researching children who suffered from psychological issues at a hospital in Paris. They could not answer his questions; consequently, Piaget provided them with clay to express their ideas (Davenport, 1994). This resulted in the notion; the way people think and behave alternates with age. Aged twenty-five, Piaget was the director of a famous institute for the research on children in Switzerland. Although there was no …show more content…
Perception is being aware of something through the senses (Colman, 2015); there are two different types of perception: bottom up and top down processing. Bottom up is a direct input derived from the five mediational processes; moreover, top down is where perceptual processing relies upon previous experiences wherever perception occurs. Attention is sustained concentration on something specific with limited capacity to handle large amounts of information (Colman, 2015). Language is the ability to be able to communicate (Murray, 2015). Memory is preserving information concerning the processes of encoding, storage and retrieval (Colman, 2015). Thinking is the process of having ideas or thoughts (Colman, 2015). The cognitive school of thought supports the view that our mediational processes influence our