DP3 - Jean Piaget Theories (Assimilation and Accommodation)

Question 1

Original theories

Answer 1

Infants were not capable of much thinking.
Infant behaviours were seen as random and occurring without purpose.
Some psychologists saw infants as ‘empty vessels’ — as unresponsive organisms with limited perceptual abilities and little capacity to learn, remember or think.

Question 2

Jean Piaget’s work

Answer 2

Explored the ideas of concrete and symbolic thinking. (1951, 1952).
He looked at Mental Adaptation in the way of Accommodation and Assimilation.
He looked at how our thinking processes change over time.

Question 3

Assimilation

Answer 3

The process of taking in new information andfittingit into and making it part of a pre-existing mental idea about objects or experiences.
For example, a young child may see a truck and call it a car, simply because a car is the only type of vehicle for which the child has a pre-existing mental idea.

Question 4

Accommodation

Answer 4

Involveschanginga pre-existing mental idea in order to fit new information. This is a more advanced process than assimilation.

Question 5

Reason for accommodation

Answer 5

Sometimes we cannot assimilate new information into a pre-existing mental idea, regardless of how hard we try. It simply won’t fit because we can’t change it in any way to link it in with what we already know. In this case, we are forced to adjust a pre-existing mental idea to deal with the new information.