Leone and Johnson (chap. 8) and Labouvie-Vief and Gonzalez (chap. 9)
carry over the Piagetian legacy of the former, not the latter. This makes per-
fect sense if we take notice of the fact that Piaget’s stage theory was an at-
tempt to present a psychologically plausible (but not necessarily realistic in
the sense of how individuals actually develop) account of genetic or develop-
mental epistemology (Lourenço & Machado, 1996). Such a theory, by na-
ture, has a philosophic overtone, addressing the normative structure of hu-
man intelligence (the Kantian question of how knowledge is possible), rather
than explaining manifestations of diverse intellectual development in reality
(Zigler, 1986). A constructivist approach, on the other hand, looks into ac-
tions that connect the whole person to a functional context, thus making in-
tellectual development fully grounded in psychology.
Besides, both chapters postulate higher-order self-regulatory agency, as
well as lower-order attentional and working-memory resources, as support-
ing or constraining motivation (see also Guttentag, 1995). Both chapters
raise the issue of style or characteristics ways of dealing with environmental
challenges, reminiscent of Matthews and Zeidner’s (chap. 6) cognitive-
adaptive view of intellectual functioning, wherein affect, coping (by a self-
regulatory agent), and cognitive engagement are inextricably related in intel-
lectual functioning.
Development of Biologically Secondary Competencies
While the Piagetian and neo-Piagetian traditions bring insights into how in-
tellectual functioning and development can be understood in the context of
personal adaptation and self-organization, the research on expertise, an
emergent branch in cognitive psychology, has forced us to consider another
set of constraints for the development of intellectual competencies. As
Matthews (1999) pointed out, adaptation to real-life pressures and demands
often depends on acquired skills rather than fundamental components of in-
formation processing.
The learning perspective on intellectual development brought in by the ex-
pertise research and other traditions (e.g., information processing ap-
proaches; Siegler, 2000) raises several interesting points about intellectual
functioning and development (Canfield & Ceci, 1992). First of all, it has es-
tablished domain-specific knowledge as a legitimate ingredient of intellectual
functioning (Estes, 1986). Chi (1978), for example, demonstrated that chil-
dren with chess expertise recalled more chess pieces than adult novices when
the meaningful positions were presented; however, the opposite is the true
when chess pieces are arranged in a random fashion. In fact, most domains of
intellectual functioning, including everyday cognition, can be characterized
- BEYOND COGNITIVISM 21