Journées des Grands témoins : Psychologie du développement quel passé pour quel avenir?

 

Invited speakers

Jean-Paul Bronckart, Université de Genève
Peter Bryant,University of Oxford
Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Birkbeck, University of London
Jacques Mehler, SISSA, Trieste
Marc Richelle, Université de Liège

par Marc Richelle, Professeur émérite, Université de Liège

Evocation de la trajectoire des relations de l'auteur avec la psychologie genevoise depuis son arrivée au Palais Wilson en octobre 1952 jusqu'à aujourd'hui.
Réflexions personnelles sur l'évolution de la psychologie depuis la fondation de l'Institut Rousseau jusqu'à nos jours, suivies d'un coup d'œil à la boule de cristal.

par Peter Bryant, Professeur honoraire, University of Oxford

The theme of my talk will be that in the 70s and 80s many developmental psychologists over- reacted to critical research on Piaget's ideas about children's mathematical development, and prematurely abandoned these ideas altogether. The result has been a concentration, in a lot of
research, on children's knowledge of the number system and on their learning of arithmetical procedures, at the expense of research on their conceptual understanding of quantitative relations. I will argue that this has been a wrong turn, since a great deal of evidence shows the importance of logical reasoning in mathematical development. I will also argue that research on reasoning about quantitative relations is as relevant to individual differences among
children and adults as to development during childhood. I will illustrate this point with work on children's and adult's understanding, and misunderstandings, of probability.

par Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Professeure, Birkbeck, University of London

Developmental science has been changing considerably over the past decades. From the popularity of Piaget’s domain-general Constructivism in the 1960/70s emerged a return in the 1980s/90s to Nativist, domain-specific views, particularly in experimental studies of infancy from which the amazing capacities of typically developing infants were revealed. The atypical development of children with genetic disorders was interpreted in similar ways, i.e., damage to domain-specific modules with the rest of the system intact, much like the models emanating from adult neuropsychology. More recently, a swing back to a modified version of Constructivism – Neuroconstructivism – argues for neither domain-general nor domain-specific
starting states, but one of domain-relevant biases that become domain-specific over developmental time through the mechanism of neuronal competition. It is these initial biases and their differential cascading effects on different domains that are currently being used for interpreting genetic disorders in children. In my view, as we discover increasingly more about gene expression and functional/structural changes in the brain as ontogenesis proceeds, this dynamic Neuroconstructivist view will predominate because it takes account of multiple-level interactions.

par Jacques Mehler, Professeur, SISSA, Trieste

The last forty years in developmental cognitive science, a science that J. Piaget had literally invented things, have seen great changes. Piaget studied infancy once he launched the "épistémologie génétique" framework. Piaget's experiments were pristine and most of the published results were easily replicated. However, Tom Bever and I discovered that some of Piaget's conservation experiments can be replicated if one tests 3.6 year-olds. We replicated that older children would conserve the numerosity of arrays despite the experimenter's change of the density of one of the lines.
Bever and I were influenced by Noam Chomsky who suggested that there is a language acquisition device (LAD) that is part of humans' endowment. In Paris I was using the non-nutritive sucking device (NND) or High Amplitude Sucking (HAS). This behavioral method was extremely useful. We used HAS from the mid-seventies until the end of the century. I will give a short summary of our findings, which were about the precursors of language and about newborns discriminating small numerosity.

par Jean-Paul Bronckart, Professeur ordinaire, Université de Genève

Dans une première partie, nous évoquerons les objectifs ainsi que les projets théoriques et méthodologiques des fondateurs de la psychologie du développement, aux débuts du XXe : Bühler, Mead, Piaget, Stumpf et Vygotski notamment. Nous analyserons ensuite quelques-unes des approches effectivement engagées, avec un accent particulier sur les différentes étapes de l’entreprise piagétienne. Dans une deuxième partie, nous mettrons en évidence les difficultés rencontrées dans ces divers courants pour élaborer une conception du développement qui soit à la fois “objective” (ou d’inspiration moniste matérialiste) et susceptible de prendre en considération la problématique des significations et des valeurs (le rôle qu’elles jouent en tant que facteurs de développement, et les conditions de leur développement au sein du psychisme individuel). Nous montrerons en quoi ces difficultés ont suscité des retours au réductionnisme biologisant
aussi bien qu’au réductionnisme “à rebours” sociologisant. Dans une troisième partie, en nous fondant sur les apports de divers auteurs promouvant “une science de langage au cœur d’une science de l’humain” (de Saussure à Volochinov), nous discuterons des conditions possibles de redéploiement d’une psychologie du développement intégrant l’ensemble des différentes facettes de l’organisation psychologique humaine.

© Centre Jean Piaget | 2024