Constructivist developmental theory is needed in developmental neuroscience.

Marie Arsalidou,Juan Pascual-Leone

doi:10.1038/npjscilearn.2016.16

Abstract

Neuroscience techniques provide an open window previously unavailable to the origin of thoughts and actions in children. Developmental cognitive neuroscience is booming, and knowledge from human brain mapping is finding its way into education and pediatric practice. Promises of application in developmental cognitive neuroscience rests however on better theory-guided data interpretation. Massive amounts of neuroimaging data from children are being processed, yet published studies often do not frame their work within developmental models—in detriment, we believe, to progress in this field. Here we describe some core challenges in interpreting the data from developmental cognitive neuroscience, and advocate the use of constructivist developmental theories of human cognition with a neuroscience interpretation.

Highlights

The study of cognition has focused mainly on adults
With the arrival of constructivist theoreticians such as Jean Piaget, cognitive developmental theory became more visible in psychology
Theory-based developmental research is critical for advancing both developmental psychology and developmental neuroscience

Summary

Introduction

The study of cognition has focused mainly on adults. With the arrival of constructivist theoreticians such as Jean Piaget, cognitive developmental theory became more visible in psychology. Misleading situations, used by Binet, Piaget and neo-Piagetians, of theories, agree with the importance of constructivist-learning can assess effective complexity reliably—whereas facilitating processes but think that this sort of learning (in contrast to situations, common in learning/memory paradigms and psychometric-intelligence tasks, do not.[62] This is one key difference associative learning) is only possible by maturational growth of a limited resource: mental/executive attention.[11,13,26,36,71,72,73] between developmental-constructivist research designs and Maturational attention is a key determinant of working memory.

Results

Conclusion