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You will prepare and submit a term paper on Behaviorism vs. Cognitivism. Your paper should be a minimum of 1000 words in length.

You will prepare and submit a term paper on Behaviorism vs. Cognitivism. Your paper should be a minimum of 1000 words in length. The primary aim of this paper is to outline the differences between two schools of academic psychology--behaviorism and cognitivism. I will first outline and explain two experiments purporting to explain human cognition by Jean Piaget. I will then explain how behaviorist B.F. Skinner might object to this methodology. Finally, I will address some possible responses to Skinner that Piaget could use to defend the scientific integrity of his experiments. Jean Piaget is often referred to in academic psychology as a “developmental cognitivist”. A developmental psychologist is one who scientifically studies changes in human personality, thinking and perceptions over the cross of a lifetime. Piaget’s research tends to focus on the development of human children--specifically the intelligence and cognitive capacities of children. Thus he can be said to be a cognitivist, in that he seeks to discover underlying thought processes by observing behavior. In two of his main works, The Construction of Reality in the Child, and The Child’s Conception of Number, Jean Piaget sets up a series of experiments, which purport to demonstrate the differences in cognitive and intellectual processes between adults and children. In the first experiment I am going to examine, Piaget attempts to explain the ability of children to discriminate between quantities of objects. He does this by placing two lines of candy next to each other--one with the candy arranged in a line spread further apart, and one with the same amount of candy in a line placed more closely together. The children are asked to determine which line contains a greater amount of candy. The results were that “Children between 2 years, 6 months old and 3 years, 2 months old correctly discriminate the relative number of objects in two rows. between 3 years, 2 months and 4 years, 6 months they indicate a longer row with fewer objects to have "more". after 4 years, 6 months they again discriminate correctly” (Piaget). Piaget concluded that children gain the capacity to discriminate between quantities of objects at 2 years, 6 months, but for whatever reason, are unable to use this ability effectively for this task between ages 3 and 4. The second example of an experiment by Piaget I would like to discuss, seeks to demonstrate how children view the relationship between space and object: The child is presented with a model, about one square meter in size, representing three mountains in relief.

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