La naissance de l’intelligence chez l’enfant

Celebrated by Henri Piéron as a “milestone” in the history of psychology, this book is innovative both in its methodology of observation of its own children—in collaboration with Valentine Piaget—and in its use of a biologically inspired, but not reductionist, model of knowledge of the baby. Piaget distinguishes between the functional aspect (interaction between the subject and the object through regulated adaptation) and the structural aspect (organization of action in schemas that are generalized and whose assimilatory perimeter increases as the interaction progresses). In this way, he offers the first synthetic model of the development of intelligence from birth to the appearance of language.