Cognitive Advancements across the Globe: Intelligence Research and Piagetian Psychology in Comparison

Abstract

It is widely accepted that there are two main approaches to studying “intelligence” and “cognition”, psychometric intelligence research and Piagetian developmental psychology. While the psychometric approach measures intelligence without having a true theory of intelligence, ascribing different scores to test persons according to their respective mastering of tests, thus measuring abilities regarding abstractive and logical capabilities, the Piagetian approach comprises a complete theory of human development, a comprehensive theory of stage developments from infancy over adolescence to adulthood, including a detailed description of the development of psyche, consciousness, personality, and understanding of logic, physics, social affairs, law, religion, politics, morals, and arts. While intelligence research gages and assigns numbers (the average number is 100) to test persons, the Piagetian approach identifies their test person’s belonging to certain developmental stages.