function in that domain much as an adult expert would (the famous example being dinosaur ... All we can buy now is Sociological Studies (Routledge). If we think ...
Cognitive skills and domain-specificity∗ Robin N Campbell, Department of Psychology, University of Stirling This session was supposed to be about 'Cognitive Skills and Domain-specificity' – a buzz-phrase for the idea that ample motivation and experience in a specific domain will produce expertise independent of age or stage – very young children can come to function in that domain much as an adult expert would (the famous example being dinosaur taxonomy). It is difficult to connect these findings to Piaget's, since he presented children with tasks in which no expertise had been accumulated, no doubt because he wanted to study thinking rather than heuristics. There is also an issue about whether all domains are equal, from this point of view. Can the concept of expertise be applied to the domains of 1–1 correspondence or quantity conservation? However, the papers avoided these questions. Resnick and LeGall had little to say about Piaget, Vygotsky or domainspecificity. On the positive side, they made some suggestions about how educational practice might be improved by 'deliberately socializing learning goal orientation', but this is unfortunately a domain in which other participants lacked expertise! Bryant began with an apology: 'Young Turks' like his former self went too far in criticizing Piaget. I would go further: the treatment of Piaget's work in Britain and America has been disgraceful. Convenient opinions of that work are casually constructed from reading a page of one Piaget book, or worse, from second-hand accounts. These opinions lead to crude experiments to refute them, and complaisant editors publish yet another paper proving a toy version of 'Piaget's theory' wrong. Contempt for Piaget scholarship is particularly strong in Britain, as shown by the unavailability of his books. All we can buy now is Sociological Studies (Routledge). If we think Piaget worth reading, then young and old Turks had better show more care and respect. So far as the work that Bryant reported goes, it was certainly not anti-Piagetian. Rather, his clever experiments complemented and clarified Piaget's analysis of the development of arithmetic. Perhaps this was true of the former Young Turk's work too, even if his conclusions were more aggressively stated then. Desperately seeking a connection to our topic, I observed that Bryant's review of transitivity research provided a compelling picture of a set of domain-specific cognitive skills. What I had in mind were the tactical moves mapped out in Smedslund's paper 'Psychological Diagnostics'. That paper offered a list of factors to be considered if cognitive-developmental diagnoses were to be made accurately, but in practice it was used through three decades as a handbook for Piaget-bashers, notably Smedlund himself and Bryant! The critical analysis of developmental experiments using Smedslund's intellectual toolkit, with recent supplements, is a skill at the heart of the skirmishing that goes on around Piaget's work, and it is the study of transitivity that we must thank for this lively state of affairs!
∗
from The Psychologist, August 1996, p. 369 (Reports of the Piaget-Vygotsky Centenary Conference)
