Jean Piaget's theoretical contributions to developmental psychology

¶ … child development is aimed at helping adult researchers become familiarized with how they were created out of the blissful ignorance of childhood. How do we know what we know, and how does the mind work within the limited context it is brought up within? In more recent times, neo-Vygotskian and Piagetian thinking, as seen in the work the Neo-Vygotskiam Approach to Child Development, adds additional dialogue into a long and heated debate regarding the evolution of the human mind from its origins in childhood.

Piaget posited a theory that we eventually reach a state of equilibrium when we have a good solid understanding of the world around us. We begin our journey as children with little understanding of the world. Eventually, we are exposed to various new stimuli which we then have to explain within our frame of mind. This understanding of stimuli within one's already structured existence is what Piaget called assimilation. The stimulus is assimilated into the bank of knowledge already in existence. However, some stimuli are more powerful in that they break free of prior understandings, forcing the child to create new schemas and understandings to explain the stimuli. This is the process of adaptation, where the child adapts his or her perceived notion of the world in order to account for new stimuli. The child's mind is thus in a state of equilibrium when there is a strong correlation between the nature of assimilation and accommodation. One reaches a state of equilibrium when one has a good solid and concrete knowledge of the universe and has adapted enough of its mind to accommodate for enough assimilation with relatively few needs for a full adaptation.

Yet, neo-Piagetian theories differ in the original theory in their concept of stage-by-stage transition. Rather than blindly accepting Piaget's stages as absolute truth, much of modern neo-Piagetian theories posit differences within the stages. These new changes to Piaget's stages were aimed primarily at exploring the intra-individual and inter-individual evolutions within the growing cognitive mind of the child. In addition to these changes, neo-Piagetian theory also suggests that development along all lines of stage-by-stage transgression occurs primarily because of an increasing working capacity, where the child is slowly becoming more and more capable of larger memory storages and therefore recalls. With more in the child's memory bank, they are able to process stimuli around them more efficiently.