ABSTRACT
The elderly people who display a 'regression' may be exhibiting an intellectual decline. However, even if their intelligence levels have fallen, the decline does not lower them to the level of the raw intellectual ability of the average eight or nine years-old child. This means that it is the change which appears to influence the method of thinking, not the level of intelligence itself. In one sense, labelling the stages of Piagetian development as progressive advancement is an example of intellectual chauvinism. The reason why there are these surprising regressions in some elderly people is not that they cannot think in the more 'advanced' fashion, but that their lifestyles have not provided the impetus to do so. To a certain extent this is echoed in a relatively recent school of thought in developmental psychology, which argues that development is at least in part a product of societal expectations of 'correct' development.
