The Handy Psychology Answer Book. Lisa J. Cohen

He initially developed his behavior modification techniques for use with psychotic psychiatric patients, but variations of his techniques have been applied to work with juvenile offenders and emotionally disturbed children. Similar techniques have been adapted for use with animal training, child rearing, and many other disciplines.

      The behaviorist B. F. Skinner introduced the concept of operant conditioning in which the consequences of a behavior (either positive or negative) causes people (and animals) to modify their behavior accordingly.

      Did Skinner raise his daughter in a baby-tender?

      Skinner also developed a form of crib/playpen that he termed an “air crib” (also called a “baby-tender” or an “heir conditioner”). This was a large, well-lit, and temperature-controlled chamber for a small child. He raised his second daughter Deborah in this chamber for the first few years of her life. Contrary to popular thought, this was not a classic Skinner box, where rats have to press levers to obtain food; it was more like a roomy bassinet. Although critics assumed his daughter had been damaged by a bizarrely technical approach to child rearing, Skinner always maintained that his daughter had not suffered and had, in fact, grown up to be a well-adjusted, college-educated artist.

      What is the Skinner box?

      Another innovation created by B.F. Skinner is called the Skinner box. This was an adaptation of Thorndike’s puzzle box, used by scientists to observe how an animal learns to escape the box. Skinner’s innovation was to connect the animal’s behavior (e.g., a rat pressing a bar) to a counting mechanism so that the number of times the behavior was performed would be automatically recorded. This way the frequency of the behavior could be compared across different reinforcement conditions. For example, the number of times a rat presses a bar when each bar press is rewarded with a food pellet can be compared with the frequency of bar pressing when the rat is not rewarded with food pellets.

      What were Skinner’s contributions to educational practices?

      Skinner was also interested in applying operant conditioning principles to education. He introduced the concept of programmed learning, in which the material to be taught is presented in a sequence of small steps. Thus learning progresses step by step, with positive reinforcement given after each step is mastered. Although this approach has been criticized for its restricted focus on parts rather than the whole and for failing to foster creative thinking, it still serves as the basis for most forms of computerized training.

      JEAN PIAGET

      Who was Jean Piaget?

      Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was a Swiss psychologist who pioneered the study of cognitive development. Ironically, Piaget never received formal training in psychology. In fact, he received his doctorate in the natural sciences. Along with Freud and B.F. Skinner, however, Piaget is one of the most influential figures in psychology. Piaget showed a talent for scientific research from a very early age. He published his first scientific paper on the albino sparrow at age ten, although the publisher had no idea of his extraordinary youth. For four years in his early teens, he classified mollusks in the Neuchåtel Natural History Museum in Switzerland. He published several more scholarly papers from ages fifteen to eighteen. Around the same time, Piaget visited his godfather, Samuel Cornut, who felt that Piaget’s education was too weighted toward the natural sciences. Cornut introduced him to philosophy, sparking Piaget’s interest in epistemology, the philosophical study of knowledge. Questions such as “What is knowledge?” and “Where does knowledge come from?” would form the foundation of his later work.

      How was Piaget influenced by working with intelligence tests?

      Early in his career, Piaget went to work for Théodore Simon in Paris. Simon, along with Alfred Binet, was the author of the Binet-Simon intelligence test, the first successful test of its kind. Piaget’s job was to record the answers of five- to eight-year-old children in order to determine expected scores for each age group. Although he was hired to record the correct answers, he became far more interested in the children’s mistakes, in the typical patterns of error at each age. This sparked his interest in the development of children’s intellectual understanding of the world around them. He had found his life’s work. For the next sixty years, Piaget studied children’s behavior in great detail. From this data, he generated a voluminous body of writings on the subject and changed the way we look at intellectual development.

      Why is Piaget’s work important?

      Freud told us about desire, the behaviorists told us about behavior, and Piaget told us about the way we think and how that develops across childhood. Perhaps more than anyone else, he has told us about how we make sense of our environment and the processes by which we interpret it. His work has been profoundly influential in many branches of psychology: developmental, cognitive, educational, and even clinical.

      What did Piaget discover?

      Piaget’s greatest contribution was to change psychologists’ focus from what we know to how we know. He studied how the mind organizes and transforms information—how it shapes information. The mind is not a blank screen; it is not a camera or a mirror that simply reflects what it sees. It is an active participant in knowledge. The mind takes in information and actively organizes it. As such, it constructs a view of reality through this shaping and transforming of information. This concept is referred to as Piaget’s constructivist view of knowledge. Moreover, the way that the mind organizes information changes across child development. So younger children do not simply know less than older children or adults, they know differently.

      What did Piaget think about the nature/nurture debate?

      There is an age-old debate, dating back to the earliest Greek philosophers, of whether knowledge is innate—that is, we are born with it—or whether it is learned through experience. Piaget’s solution to this ancient dilemma was to propose that knowledge is both innate and learned. What we know is learned and how we know is based on innate capacities.

      How do children learn by action?

      Although other forms of information may be important, Piaget believed the initial and fundamental way that children learn about the world is through action. Through action, children explore and encounter their environment. The memories of these encounters are encoded in their minds as knowledge. These memories then shape their interpretation of later experiences, which in turn modifies their knowledge about the world. For example, a child is given a rattle. By chance the child shakes it and it makes noise. Interested, the child shakes it again. Later, another rattle is produced, which the child immediately shakes, now having a rudimentary concept of rattles as something to shake.

      The Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget studied how the child’s understanding of the world develops from childhood into adulthood. Piaget has had a lasting influence on the field of education.

      What is object permanence?

      Jean Piaget’s notion of object permanence refers to the ability to hold an image of an object in the mind even when it is not concretely present. Piaget developed this concept while studying the behavior of his own children. He noticed that before the age of eight or nine months, if he removed an object of interest from his child (e.g., a rattle), the child would not search for it. Once it was out of sight, it was out of mind. After the development of object permanence, however, the child displayed searching behavior. For example, if Piaget removed the toy from the child and hid it behind a pillow, the child would move the pillow to find the object. This searching behavior shows that the child can think about the