Second Generation Francophone Psychology

Genevan School

In 1918, Jean Piaget (1896–1980) turned away from his early training in Natural History and began post-doctoral work in psychoanalysis in Zurich. In 1919, he moved to Paris to work at the Binet-Simon Lab. However, Binet had died in 1911 and Simon lived and worked in Rouen. His supervision therefore came (indirectly) from Pierre Janet, Binet's old rival and a professor at the Collège de France.

The job in Paris was relatively simple: to use the statistical techniques he had learned as a natural historian, studying molluscs, to standardize Cyril Burt's intelligence test for use with French children. Yet without direct supervision, he soon found a remedy to this boring work: exploring why children made the mistakes they did. Applying his early training in psychoanalytic interviewing, Piaget began to intervene directly with the children: "Why did you do that?" (etc.) It was from this that the ideas formalized in his later stage theory first emerged.

In 1921, Piaget moved to Geneva to work with Edouard Claparède at the Rousseau Institute.

In 1936, Piaget received his first honorary doctorate from Harvard.

In 1955, the International Center for Genetic Epistemology was founded: an interdisciplinary collaboration of theoreticians and scientists, devoted to the study of topics related to Piaget's theory.

In 1969, Piaget received the "distinguished scientific contributions" award from the American Psychological Association.

Cognitivism

Noam Chomsky's (1957) review of Skinner's book Verbal Behavior (that aimed to explain language acquisition in a behaviorist framework) is considered one of the major theoretical challenges to the type of radical behaviorism that Skinner taught. Chomsky showed that language could not be learned solely from the sort of operant conditioning that Skinner postulated. Chomsky's argument was that people could produce an infinite variety of sentences unique in structure and meaning and that these could not possibly be generated solely through experience of natural language. As an alternative, he concluded that there must be internal mental structures - states of mind of the sort that behaviorism rejected as illusory. Similarly, work by Albert Bandura showed that children could learn by social observation, without any change in overt behaviour, and so must be accounted for by internal representations.

The rise of computer technology also promoted the metaphor of mental function as information processing. This, combined with a scientific approach to studying the mind, as well as a belief in internal mental states, led to the rise of cognitivism as the dominant model of the mind.

Links between brain and nervous system function were also becoming common, partly due to the experimental work of people like Charles Sherrington and Donald Hebb, and partly due to studies of people with brain injury (see cognitive neuropsychology). With the development of technologies for accurately measuring brain function, neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience have become some of the most active areas in contemporary psychology.

With the increasing involvement of other disciplines (such as philosophy, computer science, and neuroscience) in the quest to understand the mind, the umbrella discipline of cognitive science has been created as a means of focusing such efforts in a constructive way.