ABSTRACT
This session was supposed to be about cognitive skills and domain specificity. I confess that when I agreed to be a discussant I was unsure what was intended by this designation. My knowledge of Piaget persuaded me that he was interested both in domain-specific thinking and in the domain-general structures and processes that support such thinking. Throughout his many and mighty works there was a pattern of studying development across a range of specific domains—distinguished by content —followed by a synthesis of these separate developmental progressions in a general theory of development. ‘Domain specificity’ is now generally used as a buzz-phrase for the sort of results reported by Chi (e.g. Chi, 1978; Chi and Koeske, 1983); namely that if motivated to acquire expertise in some domain—for example, dinosaur taxonomy—very young children will seem to do so, so much so that they come to function in that domain much as an adult expert would. I wonder, though, if Chi has the courage of her convictions? Would she eat a dish of wild mushrooms picked and prepared by a four-year-old expert in the taxonomy of the large fungi? But leaving questions of validity aside, it is difficult to make a connection between these findings and the products of Piaget’s usual methods. After all, in all but his earliest work he took considerable pains to present children with unfamiliar tasks—tasks in which no expertise had been accumulated, no doubt for the excellent reason that he wanted to be sure that he was studying thinking rather than well-grooved habits and heuristics executed without effort or reflection (see Campbell and Olson, 1990).
