QUESTION:

I am trying to build a bibliography of studies of the development of cognition, considered in braodly Piagetian terms, through history. I have in mind the work by people like Hallpike, Radding, and so on. Does anyone have either suggestions on particular papers/books or views on where I should be looking?

ANSWER 1:

Try this [1953] paper along with paper contributions to the 1967 book:

Piaget, J. (1953). Structure operationelles et cybernetique. L'Anne Psychologique, 53, 379-88.
Piaget, J. (1967) Logique et connaissance scientifique. Parius: Gallimard.

ANSWER 2:

AI cannot do Piagetian Stages at all.¡¡But stacked neural networks can.

http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Anderson/Commentators/.Commons.html

ANWER 3:

If you would like to *decide for yourself* the extent to which there has been progress in "constructivist AI," I suggest you start by reading the work of Gary Drescher to implement a "Piagetian system" -- his book contains an overview (circa 1990) of AI from a broadly Piagetian perspective.

Similarly, you can do a search in professional literature on the phrase "constructivist AI" and you will find a number of researchers who are working in this area. (I've included a brief bib at the end of this mail.) These researchers tend to be quite careful about how much of Piagetian theory they feel they have implemented -- and also careful about the future potential of such work.

Drescher, Gary. Made Up Minds: A Constructivist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

Thelen, Esther and Linda B. Smith. A dynamic systems approach to the development of cognition and action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.

Kelso, J.A. Scott. Dynamic Patterns: the self-organization of brain and behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.

Some of Tom Ziemke's papers have summaries of Piaget implementations. http://www.his.se/ida/%7Etom/

Look for papers by Jari Vaario, Alex Reigler, Antonio Carlos da Rocha Costa, Gert Westermann, and Harold Henry Chaput.

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(This article is from email discussions through owner-piaget-list@interchange.ubc.ca)