The Psychology of Intelligence summary

What happens if you take a succulent from one of Switzerland’s mild microclimates and place it on the cooler slopes of the Savoy Prealps? How do pond snails react if you pluck them out of the calm waters they favor and drop them into fast-flowing mountain streams? Piaget, a precocious child with an active intelligence, decided to find out. 

The answer? The succulents grow lots of small, thick leaves to increase photosynthesis and boost their energy supply, while the snails develop tougher, rounder shells. In a word, both adapt. 

Earlier, we discussed the philosophical theory that assumes a complete separation between the mind and the world. Since our bodies belong to the world of objects, it follows that mind and body must also be separate entities. 

Piaget rejected this idea, too. Adaptation, he claimed, is both physiological and cognitive. Our bodies and minds may be different, but they are engaged in the same task. The body has biological “structures” like the stomach; our minds have mental structures. Both regulate our interaction with the environment. 

Imagine a young child going for a walk with his mother. They stop at a tree and she points to an animal that adults call squirrels. 

“What is that animal?” she asks. He thinks for a moment before answering, “It’s a dog!”

There are two ways in which we respond to our environments. The first is an act directed outwards toward the world; the second is an act internalized as a thought. 

These acts, according to Piaget, are responses to needs. The feeling that something is missing determines the goal of behaviour. When you feel cold, for example, you seek what is missing – warmth. This is an example of the first kind of act. What form does this seeking take, though? This is where cognition, the second kind of act, enters the picture. Cognition “structures” or guides this behavior– for example, by providing schemata to locate a blanket or thermostat. 

During the first 24 months of their lives, infants embark on a remarkable journey of discovery.

The newborn’s physical structure gives her ready-made sensorimotor functions to explore her world. She can perceive sights and smells and coordinate these perceptions with movements, or motor responses. 

Think back to the woman reasoning about how her keys might have disappeared. Piaget refers to cognitive acts like her deductions about cause and effect as operations. Logic, as we’ll see later on, is at the heart of operational thought. 

During the second stage of development, which lasts from the ages of roughly two to seven, children possess a concept of the object and begin exploring the relationships between things in their environment. This exploration, however, is preoperational – the term Piaget used for this stage. 

The third stage of cognitive development is a milestone in a child’s life. 

Between the ages of seven and eleven, she becomes capable of operational thought – the application of logical rules to objects. This is a major breakthrough, but it does have one important caveat. At this stage, logical operations are restricted to physical objects rather than abstract ideas, which is why Piaget termed this the concrete operational stage. 

If the black cat is larger than the white cat and the white cat is larger than the brown cat, which is the largest cat? 

According to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, the ability to solve this kind of problem marks the advent of mature, or adult, intelligence. This stage is defined by formal operations, and it begins around age twelve.