50 Fun Facts About Jean Piaget

Peek-a-boo delights babies who still lack which ability, first studied in infants by Jean Piaget?

Object permanence is knowing a thing still exists when it is out of sight, so a baby without it treats a hidden face as gone for good. Piaget tested it by covering a favourite toy with a blanket.

Jean Piaget's account of how intelligence begins in infancy rested on close observation of which babies?

His own three children, Jacqueline, Lucienne and Laurent, were the only subjects of The Origins of Intelligence in Children. His wife Valentine, a psychologist, worked as his research associate on the study.

Jean Piaget vividly remembered which childhood event until his former nanny admitted she had made it up?

A kidnapping attempt on baby Jean in his pram never happened: the nanny wrote to his parents when he was 15 to confess the lie. The memory stayed vivid even after he knew it was false, which fascinated him.

Jean Piaget said his research into how children understand time was suggested by which famous physicist?

Albert Einstein, presiding over a lecture course at Davos, asked whether our intuitive grasp of time is primitive or derived, and how it relates to our grasp of speed. Piaget's book-length answer came over fifteen years later.

As a teenager, Jean Piaget won a scientific reputation by publishing articles about which animals?

Mollusks made the schoolboy so well known among European zoologists that he was offered a curator's post, which he had to turn down in order to finish high school.

In Jean Piaget's best-known test, water poured into a taller, thinner glass shows whether a child grasps what?

Conservation is knowing that an amount stays the same when its appearance changes. Children younger than seven or eight typically insist the taller glass now holds more water.

To study how children come to understand rules, Jean Piaget joined boys playing which traditional game?

Marbles gave him a ready-made rulebook to probe: he played alongside the boys and asked where the rules came from and who made them up. He used the game to trace how a child's sense of rules grows into a sense of morality.

Seymour Papert, who worked with Jean Piaget in Geneva, drew on that work to create which programming language?

Logo, famous for the turtle that children steer with typed commands, grew out of Papert's five years at Piaget's side. Piaget once said that nobody understood his ideas as well as Papert did.

Which is the first of Jean Piaget's stages of development, lasting from birth to about age two?

Sensorimotor comes first because babies know the world only through their senses and physical actions. Piaget split the stage into six sub-stages, running from simple reflexes to the first mental images.

Jean Piaget's stage theory began at a Paris laboratory school named after which pioneer of intelligence testing?

Alfred Binet's school is where Piaget, marking reasoning tests, saw that young children kept making kinds of mistakes that older children avoided. It convinced him their thinking differed in kind, not just amount.

Jean Piaget used which term for a preschooler's assumption that everyone else sees what they see?

Egocentrism, in Piaget's sense, is not selfishness: the child is simply unaware that other viewpoints exist. He thought it eased at about seven, when children start to grasp how things look to someone else.

In a famous Jean Piaget task, children said what a doll could see from the far side of which model?

Three mountains stood on the table, one capped with snow, one with a cross and one with a hut, and children under seven picked the picture showing their own view instead of the doll's.

At Royaumont near Paris, Jean Piaget debated how children acquire language with which American linguist?

Noam Chomsky argued that the core of language is innate, while Piaget held that it grows out of a child's general intelligence. Their exchange was published as the book Language and Learning.

Which American psychologist built his six stages of moral development on Jean Piaget's earlier work?

Lawrence Kohlberg probed moral reasoning with stories such as the Heinz dilemma, about a man who steals a drug, and followed moral judgment well beyond the ages Piaget had studied.

Which Russian psychologist, born the same year as Jean Piaget, stressed culture's role in a child's development?

Lev Vygotsky never met Piaget, though he read his books closely before coming to disagree with him. He died of tuberculosis at 37, while Piaget worked on for another 46 years.

Jean Piaget was born in which Swiss town, where his father taught medieval literature at the university?

Neuchâtel, in the west of Switzerland, kept its hold on him: he studied at its university and came back as a professor there for four years in the 1920s.

In Jean Piaget's terms, a farm child who calls his first elephant a horse is showing which process?

Assimilation squeezes something new into an idea the child already has, here a large animal with a tail and a long face. Piaget saw babies doing it whenever they sucked on everything within reach.

A child who says the stars twinkle because they are happy shows which belief described by Jean Piaget?

Animism is the young child's belief that lifeless things can act and feel, so a pavement can be angry enough to trip someone up. Piaget placed it among children aged roughly two to seven.

Jean Piaget is called the great pioneer of which theory of knowing, the basis of discovery learning in schools?

Constructivism holds that learners make knowledge for themselves instead of soaking it up from a teacher. Piaget wanted schools to turn out inventors and innovators, not conformists.

When a child rewrites an existing schema because a new experience will not fit, Jean Piaget called it what?

Accommodation is the harder half of learning: instead of bending the world to fit old ideas, the child changes the ideas. Piaget saw babies do it when they adjusted their sucking reflex to suit each new object.

Which psychologist was Jean Piaget's closest collaborator in Geneva, co-writing The Growth of Logical Thinking?

Bärbel Inhelder studied under Piaget and then worked beside him for decades; her experiments with adolescents were central to identifying the formal operational stage.

Jean Piaget founded a Geneva research centre in 1955 for which field, the label he used for his life's work?

Genetic epistemology uses 'genetic' in the sense of genesis, meaning origins, not genes. Piaget ran the centre until his death, and its output earned it the nickname 'Piaget's factory'.

In Jean Piaget's preoperational stage, a child who treats a box as a table is engaged in what?

Symbolic play lets one thing stand for another, so checkers become snacks and scraps of paper become plates. Piaget read it as a sign that children have begun to think in images rather than only in actions.

A child who judges a glass of water only by its height shows which tendency named by Jean Piaget?

Centration means locking on to one striking feature, such as height, and ignoring another, such as width. Piaget saw it as a chief reason children under seven fail his water-glass test.

Knowing that frozen water can be thawed shows which ability from Jean Piaget's concrete operational stage?

Reversibility is the grasp that some changes can be undone, which is also why a seven-year-old sees that 5 − 3 = 2 follows from 2 + 3 = 5. Eggs, as the textbook example goes, cannot be unscrambled.

Jean Piaget's formal operational stage, starting at about eleven, is marked by which new kind of thinking?

Abstract reasoning lets adolescents test what-if ideas with no link to reality, the hypothetical thinking that science and mathematics demand. Piaget put the stage's completion at about 14 or 15.

Jean Piaget's first published scientific note, written as a schoolboy of about ten, described a sighting of what?

An albino sparrow was the subject of the short notice, the first step in a scientific career that went on to produce more than 50 books and 500 papers.

The Geneva institute where Piaget became research director in 1921 was named after which philosopher?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was chosen because the institute's founder credited him with putting the child, rather than the teacher, at the centre of education. It opened in 1912 to turn educational theory into a science.

Jean Piaget spent almost four decades from 1929 as director of which Geneva-based organisation?

The International Bureau of Education became, in the year he took charge, the first intergovernmental organisation devoted to schooling. He used its yearly speeches to argue that only education could save societies from collapse.

Jean Piaget wrote his many books in which language, the mother tongue of his home region of Switzerland?

French was his working language, and English readers often waited years for him: his 1936 book on the origins of intelligence in infants did not reach them until 1952.

Jean Piaget likened a one-year-old who keeps trying new things with objects to a young version of what?

A scientist was his image for the child of 12 to 18 months, who runs small experiments to discover new ways of making things happen. Piaget tied the phase to finding fresh means of reaching a goal.

Jean Piaget's preoperational stage begins at about age two, when a child reaches which milestone?

Learning to speak opens the stage, which Piaget said lasts until about seven. Words let children think about things that are not in front of them, though not yet with adult logic.

Shown two rows of equal numbers of blocks, a young child tested by Jean Piaget says which has more?

The widely spaced one wins because it looks longer, and children under about seven trust appearances over counting. Piaget saw the same slip when water was poured into a taller glass.

A child who sees eight dogs and three cats and says there are more dogs than animals fails which Jean Piaget task?

Class inclusion means seeing that a group contains its subgroups, so animals must outnumber dogs. The child knows dogs are animals but cannot hold the whole and its parts in mind at once.

Jean Piaget's formal operational stage brings which capacity, often summed up as thinking about thinking?

Metacognition lets adolescents monitor and reason about their own thought processes. It arrives alongside the ability to plan a problem methodically instead of by trial and error.

Jean Piaget added which fourth factor to maturation, experience and social environment as a driver of development?

Equilibration is the child's drive to keep ideas in balance: when something new does not fit, the discomfort pushes the child to ignore it, absorb it or rethink. Piaget made it the engine of his theory.

Arranging sticks in order from shortest to longest shows which skill from Jean Piaget's concrete operational stage?

Seriation means ordering things along a dimension such as length or weight. Piaget found that younger children tackle the same pile of sticks haphazardly, while those past seven work methodically.

Jean Piaget's key term schema was first proposed, as a structure for perceiving the world, by which philosopher?

Immanuel Kant treated schemata as inborn structures that help us perceive the world. Piaget's twist was that children make and remake theirs through experience.

A child who says clouds are white because someone painted them shows which belief described by Jean Piaget?

Artificialism is the young child's conviction that people made the natural world, so the wind blows because someone is puffing very hard. Piaget counted it among the 'precausal' ideas children hold before about seven.

Alongside his Geneva posts, Jean Piaget held a chair of psychology from 1952 at which Paris institution?

The Sorbonne kept him for more than a decade while he went on running his institutes in Switzerland. By one account he was the only Swiss invited to teach there in that period.

In 1972 Jean Piaget received which award, named after a Dutch Renaissance humanist?

The Erasmus Prize honours exceptional contributions to culture, society or social science. Seven years later Piaget added the Balzan Prize for social and political sciences.

In Jean Piaget's account of infancy, a baby repeating an accidental action such as thumb-sucking shows a primary what?

Circular reaction was Piaget's term for an action a baby stumbles on and then repeats. Primary ones centre on the baby's own body; secondary ones, from about four months, reach out to objects such as a rattle.

Jean Piaget coined which term for a toddler copying an action hours or days after first seeing it?

Deferred imitation mattered to Piaget because the child must be carrying a mental picture of what someone else did. He took it as evidence that the mind had begun to represent things that are no longer present.

In 1921 Jean Piaget underwent eight months of psychoanalysis in Geneva with which Russian-born analyst?

Sabina Spielrein was already on the staff of the Geneva institute he joined, and the two collaborated closely there. Her work in those years is thought to have had considerable influence on his thinking.

Which psychologist's impossible-event studies suggested babies of 3.5 months know more than Jean Piaget believed?

Renée Baillargeon timed how long infants stared at events that broke physical laws, so no reaching was needed. She argued that Piaget's babies had failed his tests for lack of motor skill, not lack of understanding.

Which co-creator of an early intelligence test ran the Paris boys' school where Jean Piaget worked around 1920?

Théodore Simon directed the school at the time, and it was there that Piaget standardised an intelligence test and ran his first experimental studies of the growing mind.

While studying in Zürich, Jean Piaget attended many lectures given by which famous psychoanalyst?

Carl Jung drew him with his emphasis on the psyche's drive toward balance and wholeness. Piaget later turned away from psychoanalysis, which he judged insufficiently empirical.

A child who decides a dog's bark made a balloon pop is using which kind of reasoning described by Jean Piaget?

Transductive reasoning jumps from one particular to another, linking two events simply because they happened together. Piaget set it apart from deduction and induction, which move between the general and the specific.

Jean Piaget used which term when a child masters a skill in one task but not in a similar one?

Décalage was Piaget's own admission that development is less tidy than his stages imply: a child may solve one problem well before another that needs the very same logic.

To test formal operational thinking, Jean Piaget asked children to work out weight and distance on which apparatus?

A balance scale sorted the ages neatly: seven-year-olds matched the weights but ignored where they hung, ten-year-olds relied on trial and error, and only at 13 or 14 did some grasp the rule.