Dear Jimmy.

You are right when you say that Jean Piaget proposed a stage-like process in the acquisition of social and spatial concepts.

As for moral concepts, Piaget argued and found that, with increasing age, children become more socialized and less egocentric. In other words, children acquire first a heteronomous morality, a morality based on the ideas of fear, constraint, and unilateral  respect, and then an autonomous morality, a morality guided by the ideas of cooperation, equality, and mutual respect. In other words, with increasing age children become more socialized, or capable of putting, say, in another's shoes, and less egocentric, or centered in themselves.

As for children's space representations or concepts, children go from an idea of topological to topographic to Euclidean space. This ontogenetic sequence is at odds with the phylogenetic sequence: Euclidean geometry appeared first than either, say, topographic or topological geometries, and topographic geometry appeared first than topological geometry.

This finding shows that those who fault Piaget's theory of stages for being a recapitulation theory -- the ontogenetic order of his stages recapitulates their phylogenetic appearance -- are misinterpreting his theory. This applies also to your idea that there is accumulated evidence showing wide differences between individuals with regard to how they perceive and represent their daily environments, and the spatial relationships within (both intra- and extra-personal) and, hence, that this evidence contradicts Piaget's theory.

Even though Piaget was not interested in inter-individual differences in development because of his concern with the epistemic subject, the findings to you refer are not at complete variance with Piaget's theory. Suffice it to say that on several occasions Piaget explicitly affirmed that, for example, some individuals can be formal in certain domains, but not in others, or that the physical and social milieu wherein individuals live can, for instance, speed up or slow down their cognitive or moral development. This also shows that, contrary claims notwithstanding, there is a place for the psychological subject in Piaget's theory. Note also that Piaget's theory is a theory of inter-individual differences if these differences have to do with individuals' age.

If I not miss your point, you seem to be skeptical about the possible application of Piaget's theory to contemporary research on individual differences in spatial perception because there is amassing evidence that shows wide differences between individuals with regard to how they perceive and represent their daily environments, and the spatial relationships within (both intra- and extra-personal).  As I said before, these findings do not necessarily contradict Piaget's theory. So, you have, I believe, to invoke other and better arguments to exclude Piaget's theory from contemporary research on individual differences in spatial perception. Even so, I think that approaches, others than the Piagetian approach (e.g., neo-Piagetian theories; information-processing theories, neurosciences, and so forth) might be used for framing theoretically contemporary research on individual differences in spatial perception.

I hope that I have not missed your point and that this of some help for you.

Cheers.

OL

Dear Orlando, 

I asked this question upon seeing your theory paper about Piaget's legacy. My intuition tells me that you will answer it -- and not to my surprise, you did. 

Note that I am inquiring about the "relevance" of Piaget's ideas to present day research in spatial perception, cognition, and learning styles, an effort that is lead by cognitive psychology and neuroscience researchers. By no means do I imply that Piaget's ideas are irrelevant. I am well aware of Piaget's developmental principles which asserted the onset of allocentric spatial perception with toward the end of childhood and with the acquisition of formal reasoning/processing capability. With the onset of the teenage years, it is not simply the improvement in spatial reasoning that becomes apparent, but also the ability to make sense of interpersonal relationships. Since both objects and living creatures are ontic entities that we, both social and object-based relationships can be perceived as phenomenal constructs. Thus it would come as no surprise that an elevation in spatial reasoning would lead to an corresponding improvement in social cognition, given the potential for mutual development in these two forms of information.

This issue at hand is not a debate over the correctness of Piaget's ideas of spatial ability development, or the development of perspective-taking/theory of mind, but about how to extend the relevance of his ideas toward explaining noticeable differences between college-aged adults, middle-aged adults, and older adults, in spatial perception, cognition, and navigation. I understand that a delayed acquisition of the formal or post-formal reasoning stages may contribute to such individual differences, and that the sociocultural environment that one grows up in may also mediate the extent of such individual differences. However, these seemingly valid explanations do not seem to hold in the presence cross-sectional studies that cannot vindicate the legitimacy of the aforementioned suggestion. Take for instance, while there are some (cross-sectional) studies that showed the elderly tend to take an egocentric approach toward encoding spatial entities in their daily environments (e.g., Zhong & Moffat, 2016; Wolbers et al.), there are others which showed that the elderly can perceive their environment allocentrically as well as younger adults (Baldwin et al.; Iachini et al.). What contributed to the differences in these cognitive aging studies is the cross-sectional research methodology, which could not address the longitudinal changes (and deterioration) of spatial information processing within each age group. The dearth of longitudinal research on the factors affecting the development and changes in spatial perception and reasoning across the life-span has lead to the ignorance or eshewment of Piaget's ideas, to the extent that Piaget virtually became a persona non grata in most of the cognitive and computational neuroscience papers that existed today. 

Most probably, it is the immense difficulty of conducting any longitudinal study, particularly from childhood to old age, that frightened a lot of would-be researchers, not to mention myself. Papers will take forever to publish if you launch a longitudinal study aiming to reconcile Piaget's ideas with contemporary models of spatial learning. This is not to say that such studies cannot be done, but that there needs to be strong will -- and financial resources -- on the part of any researcher(s) who is bold enough to assume the travails of this onerous undertaking.

JZ

P. S. I shall peruse your 2016 theory paper. Have not read it yet but will do.

Dear Jimmy,

Thank you very much for you answer. It is a well-taken and perceptive answer. As I see it, we agree on several points, namely on Piaget's theory relevance for the study to present-day research in spatial perception, cognition, and learning styles.

You rightly point to the lack of longitudinal studies in the field of developmental psychology, even though longitudinal studies lie at the heart of developmental psychology because only these studies allow us to get access to intra-individual change. To get access to intra-individual change is the main goal of a true developmental psychology.

That developmental psychologists rarely appeal to longitudinal studies and, even so, they want to get access to intra-individual change, only compounds Wittgenstein's astute remark that in psychology there are experimental methods but conceptual confusion (see, for this respect, his famous Philosophical Investigations)

Although cross-sectional studies are the rule in the domain of developmental psychology, they are at the odds of its very nature. Cross-sectional studies, I think, substantiate what I call differential psychology as a function of age. Let me state again that Piaget's theory does not preclude inter-individual differences in spatial perception, cognition, and learning styles.

It is worth mentioning that, with a few exceptions (e.g., his three books on their own children), Piaget's experiments are most of the time cross-sectional studies. This is a generally unnoticed contradiction in Piaget's theory: To intend to be a developmental theory and appeal most of the time to cross-sectional studies. Unfortunately, Piaget is not alone as far as this issue is concerned. The majority of developmental psychologists, including myself, carry out cross-sectional studies rather than longitudinal experiments. More to the point, when longitudinal studies are the case, they are, say, brief longitudinal studies because they cover short periods of age. Longitudinal studies from childhood to old age are eventually non-existent in developmental psychology. As you say, they imply  strong will and financial resources. Note also the North American "publish or perish" policy is highly responsible for the existence of many problems that are afflicting psychology, such as artificial fragmentation, distortion, conceptual confusion, too many dispensable publications, and the like. As we easily recognize, long longitudinal studies are non consistent with the publish or perish policy.

Best regards

OL

Dear Orlando,

Since we're living in the phenomenal world, "publish or policy" applies. To do otherwise will be to reach a higher level of metaphysical awareness for all scholars. Academia will not be she is right now should that unlikely possibility occur. 

JZ

Dear Jimmy,

Yes, we're living in the phenomenal world. This does not mean, however, that we should give up looking for a better world, however ideal it may be. Should we give up looking for the unknown, the justice, or the truth even though we know that there will be always an unknown to be known, a level of justice and truth to be attained, and the like? I don' t think so. What about you? Don't you agree on this idea?

To give up an ideal with basis on the thesis that this ideal will never be attained in factual terms, would be to commit the naturalistic fallacy, that is, to go from, say, the "is" domain to the "ought" domain. Note that when we know a bit more, for example, of the physical or mental reality, we become aware that there is still an unknown to be known or discovered.  Accordingly, our pursuit, for example, for meaning, the unknown, the justice or the truth will never end. Even so, I think that it is scientifically legitimate to look always for an ever increasing knowledge of the unknown and the truth even though we are convinced that a complete knowledge of the unknown is impossible. Among other reasons, because reality whatever is dynamic, not static.

Piaget once remarked that when one knows a bit more of a given reality, it raises new problems whose existence we could not anticipate in advance. So, one's development and learning never ends. As the Greek philosopher Socrates once said, the only thing I know is that I know nothing. I interpret this sentence as meaning that when we compare what we know to what we don't know, we easily come to the conclusion that we know almost nothing. 

Best wishes,

OL.