Much progress on how people learn has been madeat the turn of the last century, starting
with the Thorndike’s (1913) “hungry cat experiment” and Piaget’s (1920) “observations”
of how children learn about their world. These studies (initially known under the heading
of Behavioral Sciences) provided the epistemological foundations of a new field that was
emerging in the 1950’s – the “Cognitive Sciences”.Most of Piaget’s theories are still
valid today, though neuroscience and brain research has supplemented and refined these
theories slightly. Though he contributed substantially to cognitive sciences not all of
Piaget’s ideas as still considered valid – for example, Piaget believed that intelligence
itself, at least in part, is a biological adaptation, and that innate ideas and personal
judgments (that can but do not need to be independent of experiences) contribute to our
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process of learning. Today, as more advances especially in the field of neurosciences are
made, we have been accumulating more and more evidence for the “biological origins
theories” – although the possibilities mentioned in the previous paragraph (mostly the
Nativist views and unfortunatelyungrounded spiritual arguments) cannot yet be ruled out
conclusively.