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Re: Stages 99% of psychologists have not done the longitudinal study of three children that Piaget did. A large percentage of psychologists have not used Piaget’s clinical method to try to understand what and how children think.?An entire industry of psychologists has taken piecemeal potshots at one of his ideas or findings, found something that didn’t quite fit, and declared victory.?Sometimes, they claim that infants are scientists, and that newborns fully under distinctions between different objects, and the self as an object.? Maybe not all children go through the same stages in the same way.?Perhaps some stages may be bypassed.?I think it is premature to skip stages in PDE. A large percentage of psychologists have not listened and interacted with psychiatric patients (who I contend are more normal than otherwise) over many years, tried to reconstruct their early caregiving experience, and found that their fundamental social cognition corresponds to stages and phases of cognition found by Piaget.?For empirical studies of normal populations, see Malerstein, Ahern and Pulos (2001) Prediction of three social cognitive-motivational types, Psychological Reports, 89,371-385. I don’t see regression as determining character types, but rather as developmental options that adapt to different social worlds, usually the family. I don’t see Piaget’s notion about equilibration as a normative mechanism, which he tends to see as a driving force, as where to start in order to assess his contribution.?For me, his notion of constructivism and his findings, how infants behave and how their behavior changes, how kids talk about things and how they talk later are vital, as I try to figure out how conscious and unconscious cognition develops from a piece of meat—the brain.