ABSTRACT
The changes occurring in human intelligence from birth to the end of adolescence and the corollary increase in knowledge, skills, and abilities are probably among the most striking phenomena that can be studied in natural sciences. Though physical growth from the embryo to the mature organism is by itself astonishing, cognitive development is even more impressive as unique to our species and appears as the main fact of the extended developmental period that characterizes Homo sapiens sapiens. It does not come as a surprise that, from the very beginning of scientifi c psychology at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, the discovery of the mechanisms underlying cognitive development has been a fascinating challenge. There is no doubt that among these psychologists, Jean Piaget was the author who offered the most vivid picture of these developmental changes, contrasting the limitations of the young child’s thinking with the capacity of the adolescent’s and adult’s formal thinking to grasp complexity and deal with abstract and hypothetical matters. As noted by Nelson Cowan in this book, no scientifi c enterprise starts within an individual, and Piaget acknowledged the infl uence on his thinking, among others, of the ideas put forward by J. M. Baldwin (1894) about the role of the span of attention, which he conceived as the maximum number of mental elements that the child can simultaneously take into account, a limitation resulting from neurological constraints and a slow physical development. Of course, Piaget described cognitive development as a progression towards rationality through the construction of logical structures underlying behavior, but his account of the egocentric and intuitive thinking of young children as the incapacity to coordinate different points of view and dimensions echoes Baldwin’s notion of a limited span of attention in children. Thus, right from the start, developmental psychologists surmised that most of the developmental differences between children and adults would come from the limited capacity of the former in embracing all the relevant aspects and dimensions of the situations they are faced with and try to understand. The cognitive revolution that occurred during the 50s and Miller’s magical number provided the general theoretical framework to describe this limitation and how it is overcome with age. The mind was then understood as an
information processing system whose capacity is limited by the amount of information that can be held active and ready for treatment and by the speed at which this information can be processed. The integration of this information processing approach within the Piagetian constructivism and structuralism led to theories of cognitive development known as neo-Piagetian (Case, 1985; Demetriou & Efklides, 1987; Demetriou & Raftopoulos, 1999; Halford, 1978, 1993; Pascual-Leone, 1970). Among the main tenets of the neo-Piagetian theories is the idea that cognitive activities impose a load to the processing system (Morra, Gobbo, Marini, & Sheese, 2008), with the corollary idea, whose origin can be traced back as we have seen to J. M. Baldwin, that there is some processing or cognitive capacity, often considered as attentional, which is limited but increases with age and permits to cope with higher information load. Within the contemporary experimental cognitive psychology, this general processing capacity is described as the capacity of working memory. Devoted to maintain information temporarily active and ready for treatment in face of any distracting events, working memory is considered to be the “workbench of cognition” (Jarrold & Towse, 2006). From the seminal work of Baddeley and Hitch (1974), many theories have been proposed to account for the functioning and limited capacity of this system (Baddeley & Logie, 1999; Barrouillet, Bernardin, & Camos, 2004; Cowan, 2005; Engle & Kane, 2004; Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995), and for its development (Barrouillet, Gavens, Vergauwe, Gaillard, & Camos, 2009; Case, Kurland, & Goldberg, 1982; Towse & Hitch, 1995). From the commonality of concepts developed by neo-Piagetian and working memory theorists, a tradition of exchanges and mutual enrichment could have been expected between the two traditions of research. Surprisingly, and apart from some noticeable exceptions (Baddeley & Hitch, 2000; Cowan, Saults, & Elliott, 2002; Halford, Cowan, & Andrews, 2007; Kemps, De Rammelaere, & Desmet, 2000; Morra, 2000), the two realms have remained separated. The aim of the present book was to bridge this gap by offering an opportunity of dialog between both traditions. Issuing from a series of conferences held in Geneva in July 2008 for the 18th Advanced Course of the Archives Jean Piaget, it gathers preeminent neo-Piagetian theorists of cognitive development with specialists of the development of working memory. A fi rst part is devoted to neo-Piagetian theories and the role they assign to working memory in development. Though each of these theories develops its own account of what the cognitive resources are underlying cognitive development, these resources being described as mental attention, central executive resources, or capacity of a processing system, all of them agree that there is some limited capacity that increases with age and permits solution of more and more complex problems. With Juan Pascual-Leone’s theory of constructive operators (TCO), Halford’s Relational Complexity (RC) theory, and Demetriou’s theory of experiential structuralism, three of the most important neo-Piagetian theories are represented and developed here. A second part addresses the arduous problem of the nature of the processes underlying
working memory development. As Towse, Hitch, and Horton (2007) noted in their recent survey of the literature, although an extensive body of research has been devoted to working memory in children, it is not easy to discern a developmental model of working memory. Three contributions are presented here, issued from three different conceptions of working memory (the seminal multi-component model of Baddeley and Hitch, Cowan’s embedded process model, and Barrouillet and Camos’ time-based resource-sharing model). Of course, these contributions do not constitute a defi nitive answer to Towse, Hitch, and Horton’s observation, but rather a body of proposals that could delineate the bases for a future integrative theory of working memory development. Finally, a third part illustrates the role of working memory in atypical development by investigating its impact on learning disabilities and the working memory profi le of several atypical populations.
