Year: 1995
Type: article
Abstract: The recently revived interest in the development of intentional behavior can be traced back to one century ago when there was an important debate between As• sociationism and Voluntarism.Associationist theories emphasize on the aspect of integration in developing intentional behavior.The Voluntarist theories emphasize on how the child's psychodynamic system, such as desire, affect, perception, and action, differentiates as a result of interaction between organism and environment Such a contrast of different ways of conceptualizing the course of early development can be seen in more recent theories.Piaget hypothesizes that processes underlying the early development of intentional behavior are generalizing assimilation and apprenticeship, which leads toward a more coordinative and integrated level of fun• ctioning.Bower and Gibson posit that infants begin life with more general and undifferentiated states and become more specific and differentiated throughout devel• opment In the end, an attempt was made to reconcil both Piagetian and Bowerian views on the development of intentional behavior.It is proposed that infants start with an abstract sense about the function of behavior.They become more discrimi• nating in selecting an intentional behavior with development, and later on are more active in interacting with the environment which enable them to invent new effective behavior. 1Intentionality is one of the basic concepts that have been used by psychologists who attempt to explain the active nature of behavior in an organism.Such an attempt of researchers existed one hundred years ago when psychology just emerged as a scientific discipline.The interest in intentionality decreased with the movement of Behaviorism in psychology, and has been greatly revived especially during the last decade in several interrelated fields such as philosophy (Searle, 1983(Searle, , 1984)), cognitive science (Bechtel, 1988), and developmental psychology (Lewis, 1990).The issues about the origin and early development of intentional behavior in human beings fascinate developmental psychologists for at least two reasons.One, it is often observed that human adults in general are more advanced than chidren in their
Author: Hongtu Chen
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W92443407