Dynamic skill theory an integrative theory of psychological development

Dynamic Skill Theory Mascolo, M F (2020) Dynamic skill theory: An integrative model of psychological development In M F Mascolo & T Bidell (Eds.) Handbook of Integrative Psychological Development (91-135) Routledge/Taylor & Francis DYNAMIC SKILL THEORY: AN INTEGRATIVE MODEL OF PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT Michael F Mascolo Merrimack College This chapter contains an elaboration of dynamic skill theory (Fischer, 1980; Fischer & Bidell, 1998, 2006; Mascolo & Fischer, 2015) as an example of an integrative model of psychological development As an integrative model, dynamic skill theory covers a great deal of ground The core of the theory is (a) the concept of skill as the capacity to control thinking, feeling and action within particular contexts and domains of action, and (b) a framework for tracking the dynamic structure of skilled actions through 13 developmental levels These basic ideas provide the foundation for the integrative elaboration of a variety of principles, derived from theory and evidence, that have broad extension for understanding the structures and processes of psychological development In what follows, I elaborate and illustrate these principles and their extensions In so doing, I my best both to describe the progression of these principles over the years, and to show how the various tenets of the model come together to provide an integrative theoretical and empirical framework Foundations: The Concept of Skill The foundational concept of skill is itself an integrative concept As elaborated by Fischer (1980), a skill refers to the capacity to control elements of acting, thinking and feeling within particular contexts and psychological domains Fischer proposed the concept of skill in order to solve a particular set of conceptual problems In so doing, it draws upon ideas from Piaget, Skinner (1938) and Bandura Piagetian Foundations During the mid to latter part of the 20th century, research in developmental psychology was dominated by the Piagetian tradition As is well known, Piaget advanced a theory of intellectual development organized around the structuralist idea of the scheme or cognitive structure (Piaget, 1983) For Piaget, thinking and acting are structured processes A scheme refers to a pattern of thought or action For Piaget, intellectual development consists of the process by which forms of thinking and action undergo structural change over time Piaget proposed that structures of thought develop in four broad stages or periods For Piaget, thinking is a type of activity – an organized process involving the manipulation of symbolic representations in real time As a type of activity, the capacity for thought builds upon Dynamic Skill Theory sensorimotor forms of action that develop during the first two years of life (Piaget, 1952) During the sensorimotor period, infants are capable of acting on their worlds but are not yet capable of forming symbolic representations of those worlds For Piaget, the capacity for thought emerges at the end of the second year of life with onset of the semiotic function During the pre-operational period, which occurs between the ages of two and about seven years, the child is able to construct symbols (e.g., images) and signs (e.g., words) in the absence of the objects and events to which those representations refer The capacity to form symbolic representations – to make one thing stand for another – develops as a form of abbreviated action Images are formed as the sensorimotor capacity to act on objects in the world “goes underground” (Piaget, 1962) The capacity for imagery emerges as children are able to internally what they could previously perform in sensorimotor action on objects For example, the capacity to imagine drinking milk from a bottle develops as a child is increasingly able to abbreviate the sensory and motoric aspects of these acts – of reaching and lifting the bottle to the lips; of accepting the liquid into the mouth; of tasting and swallowing the milk until the child is able to produce a fully internalized form of the activity in the absence of the sensorimotor act itself As a result, the internalized imagining of the act of drinking functions a symbolic representation – it “stands for” the act of drinking The capacity for symbolism underlies the capacities for language, symbolic play, deferred imitation, and related abilities (Piaget, 1951, 1952) While the preoperational child can construct and symbolic representations, he is limited in the capacity to manipulate those representations in a systematic way They tend to fail to perform logical tasks conservation, seriation, class inclusion, etc until about five to seven years-of-age For Piaget, children are able to solve such task through their capacity to form concrete operations logical and reversible systems of thought Children solve logical tasks through their capacity to coordinate and reverse mental actions (Piaget & Inhelder, 1958) This occurs, for example, when children understand that pouring liquid from a tall-and-thin container into a short-and-fat one (A B) can be reversed by the act of pouring the same liquid back again (A ß B) Nonetheless, despite their logical abilities, concrete operational reasoning is limited to problems with concrete and tangible content It is not until the stage of formal operations (Piaget, 1971) that teens and young adults are able to manipulate abstract forms rather than concrete content (e.g., algebra; abstract scientific thinking) During the 1960s and 1970s, researchers began to report studies whose findings were inconsistent with many of the tenets considered to be definitive of Piagetian theory (Gelman & Baillargeon, 1983; Brainerd, 1978) Research began to show that the age at which children particular Piagetian tasks could be accelerated if children were provided with training or if the tasks were presented in simplified forms (Bryant & Trabasso, 1971; Trabasso et al., 1978; Keller & Hunter, 1973) Research showed that predicted sequences of development postulated by Piaget were sometimes violated (Williams 1976), and that logical tasks predicted be solvable around the same age would often be solved at dramatically different ages, even by the same children (Gelman & Baillergeon, 1983) This body of work challenged central Piagetian principles, namely the idea that cognitive abilities developed as structures d’ensemble – broadbased but tightly-knit structures of logical abilities with wide applicability to a variety of similarly structured tasks Dynamic Skill Theory This research posed deep challenge to the very concept of development as structural change If the ability to solve similarly structured tasks develops at different times under different circumstances even in the same children – how is it possible to speak of general stages of development? To address this problem, Fischer (1980; Fischer et al., 1993) proposed the concept of skill as a local rather than general structure A skill is a type of local control structure – the capacity to regulate particular elements of thinking and acting within particular contexts, task domains and even tasks From this view, a skill is no longer regarded as property of the individual person Instead, it is a property of the person-in-context A change in context can produce significant changes in the task to be performed, and thus in what an individual must in order to perform the task Performing a conservation task in the context of training is different from performing such a task anew Running on a rubberized track is different from running on a grass surface, which itself differs from running on a sandy beach Similarly, a skill is not a general ability with broad-based application Skills are tied to particular conceptual domains: conservation skills are different from class inclusion skills which are different still from transitivity skills Even within a particular skill area, skills are tied to local content: conservation of volume is different from conservation of mass which is different still from conservation of number Still further, skills are often tied to the particular objects on which they operate Skills for typing on one’s own computer often fail to generalize to the use of a different computer, despite the similarity in the keyboards and operating systems Skills are not global structures that generalize spontaneously; an active period of adjustment is typically required in order to adapt skills from one area, domain, task or object to another (Fischer et al., 1993) Skinnerian Contributions As used by Fischer, the concept of skill also owes a debt to ideas culled from behaviorism, most particularly Skinner’s (1938) notion of operant and Bandura’s (1976) approach to social learning through modeling and imitation Skinner proposed the concept of operant as a way to avoid the invocation of “mentalistic” explanations in psychology For Skinner, organisms operate on their environments Operations “reinforced” by environmental contingencies are selected, while those that are not are extinguished The concept of operant or operation provided a way to address the problem of Piagetian decalage – the staggering and variability in the developmental ordering of abilities over time (Jamison, 1977) Instead of thinking of children’s developing capacities in terms of general competencies, it was better to understand them as local operations that function in particular contexts Under this interpretation, there would be no necessary reason to believe that skills for performing even similarly structured tasks would develop at the same time A second way in which Skinner’s thinking informed skill theory involved the use of dispositional and “mentalistic” thinking For Skinner, because “mental” events such as goals, beliefs, expectations and the like could not be directly observed, the use of mentalistic constructs could at best be considered unscientific and at worst reflected an invocation of fictional entities For example, Skinner (1957) regarded what others would call thinking as a form of covert behavior Without rejecting appeals to experiential states, Fischer adopted the view that psychological processes are forms of doing During the period in which cognitive Dynamic Skill Theory developmental theory was dominant, studies often sought to track changes in “the child’s understanding” of this or that area of the world Such studies tended to treat “understandings” as static dispositional structures that lay behind and explain children’s actions in the world For Fischer, there is no “the child’s understanding” that lies behind action; a child’s “understanding” is both a product and a form of action that emerges and takes shape within contexts and conceptual domains Despite these influences, Fischer’s concept of skill nonetheless differs substantially from the concept of operant Unlike Skinner, Fischer’s theory seeks to explain psychological processes He does so by adopting the Piagetian concept of action Action is not a mere synonym for behavior An action consists of a goal-directed and experience-mediated operation1 on the world (Mascolo, Basseches & el-Hashem, 2014) For both Piaget (1952) and Fischer (Fischer, 1980), the first actions consist of reflexes – innate sensorimotor operations that require direct stimulation for their evocation Such reflexes include sucking an object placed in the mouth; grasping an object placed in the palm of the hand; looking at an object or face positioned within the infant’s gaze (Fischer & Hogan, 1989) While innate, such reflexes are not mere mechanistic reactions like knee-jerks or eye-blinks For Piaget, the sensorial and motoric components of action provide the experiential bases from which higher-order patterns of action and thought are built (Fischer & Hencke, 1996) Fischer would further draw out the role of perceptual, socio-emotional and motivational processes as part of this sensorimotor foundation (Bidell & Fischer, 1992) Symbolic forms of thought arise from the higher-order coordination of sensorimotor actions In this way, thinking is an experience-mediated doing – a form of representational action that may or may not be accompanied by motoric processes (Mascolo & Fischer, 1998) A second difference between the concepts of skill and operant has to with the concept of control In referring to the role of environmental contingencies in “shaping” an organism’s operations on the environment, Skinner invoked the idea of “stimulus control” (Morse & Skinner, 1958) – the control of behavior by the contingencies of reinforcement Freed from the Skinnerian injunction against the use of psychological predicates, Fischer was able to invoke the concept of action as a kind of control structure (Bidell & Fischer, 2000; Mascolo, Neimeyer & Fischer, 1999) It became possible to think of a skill as an operation that is under the joint control of individual and context (see Patsenko & Altmann, 2010) Contributions from Social Learning Theory A third influence on Fischer’s concept of skill came from Bandura’s social learning model of social and personality development In their famous Bobo doll study, Bandura, Ross and Ross (1963) showed that children who observed adults beating an inflatable clown (called The operation refers to any goal-directed process that functions to transform some aspect of the world or one’s representation of the world The term operation is sufficiently general to encompass all forms of action – reflexes, sensori-motor actions, representational acts, actions mediated by abstract concepts; discursive activity and emotional action tendencies From this perspective, the Piagetian concepts of pre-operations and concrete operations consist of but one type of operation – namely representational activity with certain logico-mathematical properties Dynamic Skill Theory Bobo) acted more aggressively toward the doll than those who did not witness such behavior from adults This finding – so obvious to us today – was among many studies that challenged the prevailing belief that reinforcements were necessary conditions for learning For Fischer, the concepts of modeling and imitation could not only help explain how individuals acquire new skills, they also cast light on the processes by which skills could be assessed The finding that children imitate novel forms of modelled action suggests that modeling and imitation could function as a way to assess children’s capabilities in a given context Fischer introduced the modeling-and-imitation technique for assessing level of children’s developing skills (Fischer & Pipp, 1984a; Fischer, Pipp & Bullock, 1984) Fischer asked children to imitate tasks of varying levels of complexity that were modeled by another person For example, children were asked to re-tell stories about various types of social interactions that were modelled by an adult (Fischer & Hencke, 2001) Fischer found that when asked to tell any story that they wished, children’s stories were less complex than they were when asked to imitate more complex stories (Fischer et al., 1993; Fischer & Lamborn, 1989) Children are only able to imitate modelled behavior up to their highest level of capability in a given context Thus, by asking children to imitate multiple tasks modelled at different levels of complexity, it is possible to identify the highest level of complexity that children can perform in that task and context (Watson & Fischer, 1980; Fischer et al., 1993) Using the modeling and imitation procedure, Fischer and his colleagues demonstrated that, in any given task domain, children are able to perform at higher levels of complexity in contexts that provide high levels of support than in contexts that provide lower levels of support or in everyday situations in which children are acting spontaneously (Kennedy & Fischer, 1997; Kitchener, Lynch, Fischer, & Wood, 1993; Rappolt-Schlichtmann, Tenenbaum, Koepke & Fischer, 2007; Watson & Fischer, 1980) This phenomenon, which Fischer et al (1993) refer to as the developmental range, is shown in Figure The developmental range refers to the difference between the level of complexity that individuals can master under high and low support conditions respectively Under high levels of support – for example, when children are asked to imitate a complex story within their capability – they tend to function at their highest or optimal levels In the absence of such support, individuals tend to operate at their everyday functional levels, which tends to be significantly lower than their optimal levels (Fischer, Hand, Watson, van Parys & Tucker, 1984) Dynamic Skill Theory Figure 1: The Developmental Range The Importance of Emotion The concept of skill provides the foundation for Fischer’s model of development At its inception, skill theory was often understood as a theory of cognitive development However, from the start, Fischer was aware of the limitations of the concept of skill as a complete unit of psychological functioning While the concept of skill provided a way to understand the structure of action and thought, it could not explain what motivates human action, what makes some goals matter more than others, or the role of feeling in psychological functioning and development Drawing on Freud and others, Fischer sought to incorporate into his theory a model of how conscious action is motivated and organized by emotion processes – and especially emotional processes as they occur as parts of social relationships (Fischer & Pipp, 1984b; Fischer & Watson, 1981; Watson & Getz, 1990) Cognition and action mutually organize each other in human action This is illustrated in a recent interaction that occurred between a physician and patient The patient visited his doctor complaining of a series of minor ailments that seemed to arise together all at once When asked the reason for his visit, the patient said, “I’m a mess! I have a bunch of problems.” The physician replied “Okay, let’s wait on that Let’s start with the problems.” The patient enumerated the issues, each of which was addressed in turn As the visit was ending, the physician sat down, looked the patient in the eye, and said, “So, what’s this about you having MS?” The physician had misheard the patient’s opening complaint as “I have MS” multiple sclerosis rather than “I’m a mess!” The physician was equipped not only with expert knowledge about human disease, but also an appreciation of the seriousness of diseases Attuned with the emotional concerns of the patient, the physician’s cognitive system was emotionally biased by his sense of the seriousness of MS The physician’s mishearing thereupon Dynamic Skill Theory framed how he structured the visit sensitively guiding the patient through less troublesome concerns before addressing the seriousness of what he took to be the primary complaint Figure shows a model of the emotion process initially proposed by Fischer, Shaver & Carnochan (1990) and revised and updated in subsequent decades (Daley, Willett & Fischer, 2014; Li & Fischer, 2007; Mascolo, Li & Fischer, 2003; Mascolo & Fischer, 2010, 2015; Tangney & Fischer, 1995) According to this model, the emotion process consists of several component processes It begins with the detection of some change in the relation between individual and environment These changes undergo appraisal, which consists of the evaluation of the significance of changes for a person’s goals, motives and concerns (Frijda, 1980) and assessments of the one’s current to cope with the appraised changes in question Appraisals thereupon generate emotion-typical action tendencies and concomitant patterns of physiological activity, which, in any given context, are manifested in terms of actions and expressions that serve adaptive functions relative to a person’s goals, motives and concerns The phenomenal experience of emotion is a product of feedback from a person’s actiontendencies and patterns of physiological responsiveness Although the experience of emotion is immediate, the conscious classification of emotion requires acts of reflection in terms of available categories and knowledge representations A central principle in the emotion process is the mutual influence of motive-relevant appraisals and the production of affect (Brown, 1994; Lewis & Granic, 1999) As assessments of relations between events and a person’s motives, the appraisals that modulate feeling operate primarily outside of conscious awareness As event appraisals produce and modify feeling, affective processes function to select those same unconsciously-appraised events for conscious awareness In this way, feeling amplifies the importance of appraised events for the experiencing organisms and organizes representations of those events in consciousness to support adaptive action (Lewis & Granic, 1999; Mascolo, Li & Fischer, 2003) This occurs as emotional action tendencies that have already been triggered by ongoing appraisal and affect produce fast-acting responses and expressions that serve adaptive functions for the organism Figure 2: The Emotion Process (Fischer, Shaver & Carnochan, 1990) For example, waiting for a ride to an appointment, unconscious appraisal activity monitors the passage of time relative to the time of the meeting As meeting time approaches, unconscious appraisal processes produce emotional states of anxiety for fear These states thereupon select the evolving appraisal – “I may be late for my appointment” – for conscious Dynamic Skill Theory awareness The appraisal, now operative in consciousness and amplified in importance by anxiety, organizes immediate (e.g., increased vigilance) and deliberate action (e.g., thinking about the appointment, looking at one’s watch, calling a friend), until some resolution of the event occurs In this way, emotion plays a central role in the organization of all action – intentional or otherwise Emotion and cognition operate together in the production of skilled action Feeling is an inextricable part of the process of acting, and a central organizer of the development of action In what follows, we examine Fischer’s model of the development of skilled action A more complete analysis of both the development of emotion and its role of psychological development will occur in a later section in the paper The Developmental of Structures of Action and Thought As a developmental theory of action and thought, skill theory built upon Piaget’s theory of intellectual development In so doing, Fischer (1980) accepted core tenets of Piaget’s developmental theory, while modifying others Table shows the principles that skill theory appropriated from Piaget’s model, and those that were revised Table 1: Fischer’s Modification of Piagetian Theory Piaget’s Model Skill Theory Structures d’ensemble Structures of Local skills in context Structures of action and action and thought consist of broad thought develop through a series of levels within competencies that develop in a series of particular psychological domains, tasks and holistic stages (structures d’ensemble) contexts Stages of development Development Levels of skilled action As skills develop, they can moves through four broad stages, each so through a series of 13 levels and an of which consist of various substages indeterminant number of intermediate steps Universal sequence Stages of thought Universal yardstick, individual trajectories While and action develop in a universal the abstract sequence of levels of development is sequence Stages form a hierarchical universal (the yardstick), individual skills develop progression, which later stages building along different trajectories in different domains, upon earlier stages cultures, tasks and children Qualitative transformation Stages of Qualitative transformation, growth, and intellectual development reflect quantitative change Levels of skill development primarily qualitative transformations in involve qualitative changes across different tiers of the nature of thinking and acting development, quantitative changes within tiers, and patterns of growth within and between tiers Development through differentiation, Higher order skills develop through the integration and hierarchic integration coordination of lower-order acts Individual skill General patterns of thought develop structures develop through a series of change through the differentiation, integration processes, including (a) differentiation, (b) shift-ofand hierarchic integration of lowerfocus, (c) compounding, (d) substitution, (e) order stage structures generalization, and (f) intercoordination Dynamic Skill Theory At its most basic, the developmental component of skill theory is based upon the principle that higher-level structures of action and thought are constructed through the differentiation and coordination of lower-level actions and representations Skill theory maintains that skills develop through four broad tiers of development: Skills in the reflex tier consist innate actions that require direct physical or socio-emotional stimulation for their evocation In the sensorimotor tier, which begins to emerge around ½ to months of age in contexts that support their development, infants are capable of performing controlled actions on objects and people in the absence of direct stimulation The representational tier begins to emerge, in supportive contexts, around 18-24 months of age with the development of the capacity for concrete acts involving symbolism Within the representational tier, using actions, images, words and other means, children can begin to make one thing stand for another The abstract tier of development begins to emerge around 10-11 years of age, in supportive contexts and interactions, with the capacity to generalize across concrete ideas and create intangible, hypothetical and abstract concepts Within each developmental tier, skills move through four levels Each tier begins with a single set – for example, a single reflex, sensorimotor act, representation, or abstraction This is indicated in Figure in terms of a single point Over time, each higher level is created through the coordination of lower-level elements Mappings emerge as individuals gain the capacity to coordinate or bring into correspondence two single sets This is indicated in Figure in terms of a straight line connecting two single sets As shown in Figure 2, systems emerge through the coordination of at least two mapping structures Finally, systems of systems arise through the intercoordination of two of more system level structures Importantly, as shown in Figure 3, a system of systems is the emergent equivalent of the first level of the next broad tier of development That is, a system of systems in one developmental tier (e.g., sensorimotor actions) is the equivalent of a first-order single set within the next broad tier of development (e.g., representations) The result of this Figure 3: iterative process is a model that identifies 13 distinct levels of Four Levels within Individual Tiers developing skills and an indefinite number of transitional steps Figure identifies the full sequence of levels in the development of individual skills The skill levels described in Figure provide a universal yardstick for assessing developmental changes in the structure of thinking, feeling and acting The levels can be used to assess developmental levels and sequences in virtually any domain of skill functioning Dynamic Skill Theory 10 Figure 4: Levels of Developing Skills Postulated by Skill Theory A detailed set of illustrations of the structure of skills at each of the 13 levels of functioning specified by skill theory is provided in Appendix A Emergent Pathways: The Developmental Web Skill theory is not so much a theory of the development of children or adults, but instead a theory of the development of psychological structures It is not a child or individual who operates at any particular level of development; it is the particular skill as it operates within a particular context (Bidell & Fischer, 1992) It follows that at any given moment in time, individual persons create particular skilled actions in order to meet particular adaptive challenges and environmental demands As a result, although, at any given point in development, there are limits to the highest level of skill that an individual can construct, it makes no sense say that skills operate at any single level – even within individual persons and domains of action The level of skill produced by an individual can change from moment to moment, as illustrated by the developmental range shown in Figure Both across and within particular domains of functioning, the level of skill that an individual creates changes as a function of the demands of the environment, and individual’s physical or emotional state, the level of support available, the novelty of the skill or context in question, and so forth Against this backdrop, it makes little sense to think of development as a kind of unidirectional ladder or fixed staircase It is preferable to conceptualize development as a kind of web, with multiple connecting and diverging strands (Ayoub & Fischer, 2006; Fischer & Bidell, 2006; Fischer & Rose, 2001) A representation of the developmental web is provided in Figure Each strand in the web represents a different developmental pathway The pathways in the web can represent developmental changes in different skills or skill domains within the same individuals or in groups of individuals Within the web, development can move in multiple directions, converging or diverging from its current trajectory at any given point in time Questions about the pathways that development actually takes in particular individuals, groups, Dynamic Skill Theory 36 At the level of single sensorimotor actions, infants are able to direct their attention and movement to single objects or persons that enter into their perceptual fields In face-to-face social interaction, in patterns of engagement structured largely by others, infants are able to engage others as stable social agents This is shown, for example, in the child’s participation in early form of the game of “peek-a-boo”: In this situation, the caregiver uses her voice to draw the infant’s attention to the caregiver’s face Having engaged the infant’s attention, the caregiver moves a book in front of her face in order to hide it Still engaged, the infant looks more intently at the book The infant then sees the caregiver remove the book and show her face The infant’s smile upon seeing the caregiver’s face indicates pleasure in resolving the uncertainty that occurred as the caregiver hid her face, and in re-instating the ongoing pattern of emotionally-charged engagement While four-month-olds are capable of performing single actions, it is not until seven or eight months of age that infants are able to coordinate two sensorimotor actions into a sensorimotor mapping (Sm2) At this level, the act of reaching becomes more coordinated By integrating two sensorimotor actions, an infant can adjust her reach around an obstacle in order to reach for and grasp an object Alternatively, from the outset of a situation, an infant can coordinate previously separate acts of reaching and looking in order to reach for an object in order to look at it, or look at an object in order to reach for it In social interaction, using sensorimotor mappings, infants become more active participants in social interactions For example, in the game of peek-a-boo, when the caregiver hides her face behind a screen, the infant is able to maintain a sense of her continued presence, as is indicated by the infant’s act of seeking to remove the screen to see the caregiver In the context of an ongoing game of peek-a-boo, one 8-month-old, in response to hearing his mother ask “where’s mommy?” when she was not hidden, lifted the blanket that was being used as a screen in front of the mother’s face These interactions can be represented as follows: Dynamic Skill Theory 37 By 12-13 months, using sensorimotor systems (Sm3), infants are capable of seamlessly coordinating multiple actions in elaborated acts of exploring and manipulating objects They can, for example, engage in multiple coordinated acts of looking and turning an object in order to explore it from many angles Social interaction is markedly transformed through the use of sensorimotor systems In peekaboo, the child can assume control of the game and act as the hider: Tier 3: Symbolic Representations By 18-24 months of age, infants gain the ability to coordinate two or more sensorimotor systems into a single representation (Rp1) Using representations children are able to make one thing stand for another (Namy, 2009; Piaget, 1952; Mascolo & Fischer, 1999) This occurs when children use words to make requests or refer to objects; construct images of absent objects, people or processes; engage in pretend play; use an image to guide the production of action, and so forth (Watson & Fischer, 1980) Representations are used to control and communicate meaning A meaning conveyed in a single representation is the basic equivalent of a single declarative sentence (e.g., “Eating candy is fun”, “mommy is mad”, “I can it.” A are able to use one sensorimotor system – an action, the sound of a word or an image – to regulate a second sensorimotor system In pretend play, a child can pretend that a teddy bear is walking, talking, jumping or the like In so doing, a child can use one sensorimotor system to control the movement of a stuffed animal in order to represent the meaning conveyed by a second system – the act of walking: An important difference between skills in the sensorimotor and representational tiers involves the capacity of children to control the construction of images independent of sensorial, perceptual and emotional aspects of direct experience In the sensorimotor tier, contrary to Piaget’s beliefs, infants are able to construct images However, the images created in sensorimotor action tend to be structured by sensory, perceptual and emotional constraints of ongoing action and interaction When playing peekaboo, the 4-month-old is able to maintain a degree of continuity the caregiver as an active agent as she hides her face from the child At 78 months, the infant is clearly able to maintain a stable image of the caregiver as an agent as Dynamic Skill Theory 38 she is hiding behind the occluding object At 12-13 months, the child is able to conserve a coordinated and enduring experience of self and other as he hides himself while taking charge of the game While each of these situations involves some form of continuity of experience beyond the sensory and motoric components of action, each is also organized by the cocontours of co-regulated social interaction as it unfolds over time With the capacity for representation, children become fully capable of forming beyond the here-and-now of structured interaction – symbolic images and representations of self and other as psychological agents, with beliefs, desires, intentions and so forth Analysis of changes in children’s representation of conservation can help illustrate development within the representational tier The lower panel of Figure 17 describes the steps of Piaget’s famous conservation of volume task An individual is (1) presented with two containers of equal height and width (e.g., tall and thin), filled to the same level with liquid The participant is asked to verify that the containers are filled with the same amount of liquid A third container of different height and width (e.g., short and wide) is introduced At this point, (2) the contents of the first two containers is poured into the third container Finally, the participant is asked (3) to indicate which, if either, of the containers now holds more liquid, and to explain his or her reason Figure 17 describes changes in the structure of representations of conservation and related scientific concepts from childhood through young adulthood Using single representations (Point in Figure 17), upon viewing a glass of water, a child can construct a series of separate single concrete representations such as “the water spilled”, “that’s a lot of water” or “that glass is fat” Over time, as children act upon, observe or work with others using liquids and glasses, they begin to make differentiations in their representations of their experiences Beginning around ½ to years of age, children begin to coordinate two representations into a single and seamless representational mapping (Point 2) At this point, children can begin to represent various types of relationships (e.g., cause and effect, part/whole, reciprocity, before/after, etc.) between two concrete ideas For example, comparing the level of liquid in two glasses, a child can make comparative judgments “This one’s bigger than that one”, or “there is more water in this glass than that glass” Dynamic Skill Theory 39 Figure 17: Iterative Development through the Representational and Abstract Tiers In the conservation task, recall that after having observed liquid from a tall and thin container poured into a short and fat one, the child is asked to indicate which of the two remaining containers has more water At the level of representational mappings, children are able compare events along a single bipolar dimension (e.g., height or width) As a result, they tend to compare the height of the liquid in the two glasses, and conclude that the tall (but thin) glass contains more liquid than the short (but fat) glass As such, they fail to understand that the volume of liquid remains the same despite the fact that it has been poured into a container of a different shape and dimensions An important change occurs between about 5-7 years of age when children become able to coordinate two mappings into a concrete representational system At this level (Point 3), children can think through the bi-dimensional logic of the classic Piagetian conservation task Using only mappings, children under years compare the heights of water in the two glasses and conclude that the one with the higher level has more water Able to coordinate two representational mappings into a representational system, 6-7-year-olds understand that when water is poured from the tall and thin glass to the short wide one, changes in the height of the water are compensated for by changes in width; the amount of liquid remains the same despite a change in its appearance Over time, at the level of representational systems, children are able to produce clear rationales to explain why the volume remains the same They can correctly conclude, for example, that because nothing was added or removed during the course of the act of pouring, the volume must remain the same Alternatively, they can demonstrate that if one can reverse the effect of pouring the liquid from B C by pouring the liquid from C Dynamic Skill Theory 40 B back again Not only different children provide different rationales to justify the task, such rationales emerge at different points in time both within and between children Tier 4: The Construction of Abstractions in among Adolescents and Young Adults Around 10-11 years of age, pre-teens enter a new tier of development, and gain the capacity to form single abstractions (Ab1) (Fischer & Kennedy, 1997; Fischer, Kenny & Pipp, 1990; Fischer & Pruyne, 2003) Using abstractions, older children begin to think in terms of the intangible aspects of things, people and events An abstraction results from the act of generalizing across multiple concrete representations of events For example, as indicated in Point of Figure 17, in contexts that support the construction of single abstractions, 10-11year-olds become capable of constructing an abstract concept of conservation in general For example, a pre-teen can begin to develop an understanding that – across various content domains – conservation occurs when a quality of something remains the same despite a change in appearance At the level of abstractions, an individual is able to explain the abstract concept in question in terms of similarities among its concrete exemplars For example, to demonstrate a genuine understanding of conservation, a person should be able to explain how various forms of conservation – volume, number, mass, etc., are similar to one another In so doing, an individual is able to abstract what is common (or typical) across instances of a given concept Over time, pre-teens and teens are able to differentiate multiple abstract concepts within particular domains In physics, these include individual abstractions such as mass or energy Early in adolescence, although it is possible to represent multiple single abstractions, individuals are not able to represent the relation between those abstractions If asked to explain the relation between mass and energy, in the early teen years, adolescents typically simply the task and respond within the range of single abstractions For example, given sufficient support – an adult giving explanations and examples of how mass and energy are related a young adolescent might be able to produce an understanding such as, “mass and energy cannot be destroyed” While such a statement reveals progress beyond the capacity to understand mass and energy in isolation, it does not yet function at the level of abstract mappings (Ab2) which begins to emerge in high support contexts around 14-15 years of age At this level (Point 5), in contexts that provide high levels of support, an adolescent can simultaneously articulate a clear understanding of scientific concepts such as mass and energy, but also identify the relation between them in terms of those understandings “Energy is the capacity of something to work (Ab1), while mass is the amount of physical matter (Ab1) Mass can turn into energy, and energy can turn into mass.” With further development, around 18-19 years, older adolescents and young adults can bring two abstract mappings together to form an abstract system (Point 6) At this level, with instruction and high levels of support, young adults can begin to understand the abstract law of conservation of mass and energy (e = mc2) This law maintains that the amount of physical matter remains constant in a physical system despite any physical or chemical changes that might occur in that system The law thus implies that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but instead can be converted into one another under appropriate conditions At the level of abstract systems, individuals are not only able to coordinate mutual relations Dynamic Skill Theory 41 among multiple abstract ideas, they can also explain those principles in terms of specific examples using concrete content Developing Expertise in Adulthood The final level of thinking begins to arise in early adulthood, but only for accomplished individuals who have reached a high level of expertise within particular fields At this level, multiple abstract systems are brought together into higher-order abstract principles Principles function to integrate large bodies of knowledge within particular areas In physics, abstract principles organize multiple higher-order abstract concepts into the laws of quantum physics Quantum physics explains the processes by which matter interacts with energy at the level of atoms and subatomic particles Quantum mechanics is the result of the integration of a suite of concepts, laws and mathematical formulations, including but not limited to the law of conservation of mass and energy, the theory of relativity, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and other formulations At the simplest level, we can represent the laws of quantum mechanics at the level of principles as the integration of multiple systems of abstract concepts: Principled based understandings are typically the product of years of training and intensive experience within a specialized disciplines and areas of functioning (Commons, Ross & Bresette, 2011; Kallio, 2011; Fischer & Pryune, 2003) The types of abstract principles that people construct varies both within and between psychological domains Like any other level of development, because such structures must be constructed through intensive experience over long periods of time, there is no fixed timetable for the construction of such structures Although individuals are not typically able to begin to develop abstract principles until young adulthood, given deep experience in particular fields and domains, higher levels of thought can begin to emerge at any point throughout the lifespan Of course, people who not engage in intensive training in particular fields are unlikely to reach such levels of functioning at all Dynamic Skill Theory 42 References Augustinova, M., & Ferrand, L (2014) Automaticity of 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Socio-Emotional Dynamics of Development The analysis of emotional processes plays an important role in the elaboration of skill theory as an integrative model of psychological development Attention