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It may be that I did not make my question very clear. I'm trying to understand how behaviorists understand mental activity as it is occurring in a child regardless of whether stage change is occurring. MLC:?In general, behaviorist are not concerned with unobserved mental activity.?But they are concerned with activity and are willing to infer brain activity.?I have no idea why there were two children used in your example.?We usually study changes in each person, the way Inhelder and Piaget did.?Comparisons of children behavior are OK but it is hard to make any sense of them other than to say they are different.?We can compare what tasks one did and and what tasks the other did and did not. I think you to be saying that accommodation is what produces stage change so you wonder how in my example could we possibly observe any accommodation in a single child. I think you are saying there is no accommodation process that could be identified in the activity of each of the two children as they think about the situation. Perhaps that is why you refer to the situation as static. I then asked if there was activity. I don't want to misunderstand behaviorism so let me see if I can make my question about the subject's activity clearer by breaking it down. 1. From the perspective of behaviorism, is it possible to directly investigate the actual thinking, the mental activity, of each of these two children as it is occurring? Or do behaviorists believe we must avoid that because it is a form of mentalism which can never be studied objectively nor could facts be obtained that describe mental activity much less to go beyond the descriptions to then study its development??In other words, you seem to always use the term behavior or performance (probably not synomous?), not activity. Does behavior include mental activity? Is mental activity a behavior or do you limit your study of behavior to overt, performances by the student? MLC:?Behaviorist think that when a research is infering mental activity in an organism, there has to be clear evidence for that activity.?More often than not, it is a "just so" Kipling account.?Behavior does include mental activity.?To your question, Do you limit your study of behavior to overt, performances by the student??The simple answer would be no.?But how it is done is very different from most Piagetians.?We surly know that brain events elicit opreant behaviors even though we do not usually observe them.?We know that there are intraverbal behaivor in which we do not directly observe people talking to themselves and going over rules to follow in problem solving.?Like Piaget, we think that behavior precedes the explanation of the behavior by the participant.?&AuthorName=Michael Lamport Commons