Jean PiagetDied 17 Sep 1980 at age 84 (born 9 Aug 1896). Swiss psychologist and zoologist. By age 15 he was contributing articles on molluscs to journals of zoology, and his doctoral degree (1918) thesis was on the distribution of molluscs in the Valaisian Alps. Thereafter, he turned to researching how mental growth develops in several successive stages from infancy to adulthood - “the embryology of intelligence” - for which he became distinguished. In the journal Science (27 Jun 1958), he summarized that at the age of eleven or twelve “a child becomes capable of certain formal or abstract operations of thought which before were possible only as concrete operations on properties of the immediately present object world. This provides the last of three mental revolutions during development.”« |
