Imaging Piaget

Imaging Piaget

I read your contribution to the Nov. 3 issue of The Scientist with interest.¹ It has occurred to me that fMRI [functional magnetic resonance imaging] could be used to get at some surprisingly detailed aspects of human consciousness if taken while the subject was considering the answers to Piagetian questions. So, [I would like to know] if someone with access to fMRI might be willing to take on such a project.

[As] fMRI reveals the locales of functioning responses to inputs, such a study could let us see first where simple sensory-motor functions appear and then follow the changes in location and strength during the maturation into concrete and then formal reasoning schemes.

Jean Piaget found that children only begin to reason logically about directly experienced aspects starting around age 6 years. This is called concrete reasoning and is composed of a dozen elementary reasoning schemes such...