Piaget & Schema

Talan erdekelhetei a nepet a most mar 3. forduloju tistazas, honnan is vettuk a "semat". udv Csaba Hi All, Several folks on this list have questioned why I did not include Piaget in my intellectual genealogy of the construct *schema* in current cognitive psychology/cognitive science. My basic reason was that examination of the texts shows that both the citation trail and the actual construct being discussed follows the path as I outlined it in the previous message: (Head)--Bartlett--Minsky--Rumelhart and other cognitive psychologists. For me this seems the crucial point. An interesting aspect of the line of descent of schemata is that it has a very crooked path. Bartlett actually gathered the memory data on which he based the schema construct during WWI. He tried to explain the data in the 1920's with the construct of "conventionalization" taken from anthropology. He was unsatisfied with this and in the late 1920's while interacting with Henry Head he developed the schema construct (roughly--unconscious mental structures that represent generic knowledge in long term memory). The schema construct had a large impact on British psychology. For example Burt (1933) stated that Bartlett's book (Remembering, 1932) "is by far the most important contribution to psychology that has appeared in this country during recent years." However, the schema concept fell on hard times so by the time of Bartlett's death in 1969 the obituaries were uniformly negative on Bartlett's schema construct. Oldfield (1972) wrote "efforts to clarify the essential elements of the theory so as to make it applicable to further use in empirical investigation and experiment were unsuccessful." Zangwill (1972) wrote "[schema] theory in my view never very plausible, is perhaps best forgotten." Then in 1975 the computer scientist, Marvin Minsky, read Bartlett and wrote a very influential paper on frames (his term for schemata) and from this source the idea spread into current cognitive psychology where by the 1980's Bartlett's book, Remembering, was the second most cited work in the area of human memory. (This little history should be good for the morale of all of us who feel some aspect of our work has not been appreciated by the rest of the field--its time may yet come!) While I have argued against Piaget as being in the main line of intellectual descent of the schema construct it would be interesting to know what Piaget had in mind. However, this is not easily done. There is enormous confusion in the developmental literature on both the word *schema* and the construct *schema*. For example, Flavell (1977) made a public apology for mistranslating the French *scheme* as *schema*. In his later work Piaget (1970) himself made an explicit distinction between a *scheme* construct and a *schema* construct. And Furth (1969) was harsh about this issue. He wrote, "Is this use of the word schema [by American developmentalists] perhaps another subtle indication of how Piaget's expressions can become assimilated to a different cognitive framework with the result of fundamental misconceptions about Piaget's position?" When a conceptually deep student of Piaget says things like that, I for one, am not willing to make a simple equation of Piaget's ideas with those of Bartlett or those of current cognitive psychology. It will require serious scholars and historians of Piaget & developmental psychology to sort this one out. Bill Brewer ------------------ Prof. William F. Brewer, Dept. Psychology, U. of Illinois 603 E. Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61820 USA phone: (217) 333-1548 fax: (217) 244-5876 email: w-brewer(a)uiuc.edu http://www.psych.uiuc.edu/~wbrewer/ Csaba Pleh Department of Psychology Attila Jozsef University, Szeged Petofi sgt 30-34, 6722 Hungary Home: Budakeszi Zichy P. u. 4 2092 Hungary, (36)(23) 453932 or 933 Editor, Hungarian Review of Psychology