avoid falling prey to strategy Y, the person must mobilize and apply bothI-
interruption andM-capacity in the context of exerting his or her will. From
our perspective (Pascual-Leone, 1990; Pascual-Leone & Irwin, 1998),the Will
is an X strategy, driven by personal–emotive executive schemes, that, mindful
of other self-priorities (e.g., an urgent life project), interrupts the schemes of
Y and boosts withM-capacity the schemes of X. James (1892/1961) was al-
ready defining the Will along these lines: “effort of attention is thus the essen-
tial phenomenon of the Will” (p. 317, emphasis in the original).
Because mental-attention (MandIin coordination) usually grows in power
with chronological age up to adolescence (see Tables 8.1 and 8.2), the X-
boosting (and Y-interrupting) power of the Will grows (other things equal)
with the growth ofdevelopmental intelligence(i.e., the maturational growth of
mental attentional capacity and of learning potential). However, this matura-
tion of the Will is a small factor in the emergence ofemotional intelligence,
which is influenced more by the development of affective control variables, life
experiences, family context, mentoring, etc. (Pascual-Leone, 1990, 2000b).
The progressive developmental growth of mental attention (i.e.,E,M,I,
F) causes the emergence of epistemological levels of processing that are in-
dexed by the mental-processing complexity (estimated in terms ofM-capacity
demand) ofnovel(not already learned or automatized) misleading situations,
which subjects of a certain age can solve by themselves. This is what we retain
of the controversial concept of developmental stages.
IMPACT OF AFFECT AND MOTIVATION
ON INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT
Contrary to the brilliant recent school of developmental neo-nativists (e.g.,
Baillargeon, 2002) and consistently with most neo-Piagetians, we believe that
children are not born with a large repertoire of complex, content-specific and
situation-specific cognitive schemes, whether concepts, percepts, or proce-
dures. Instead we think that only a more modest repertoire of simpler innate
(cognitive or affective) schemes might actually exist, which includes a variety
of primary affect–emotion schemes and also a few more-complex schemes
that carry specific emotions (such as schemes for emotional attachment, i.e.,
the need for “mother love”; or positive emotions such as mastery–control, cu-
riosity, etc.; or innate negative–aversive emotions such as fear, etc.). Other
substantive schemes would be acquired from experience with the support of a
rich collection of innate general-purpose functional mechanisms; mecha-
nisms that we callhiddenorganismic operators and principles.
Examples of these hidden operators are the operators of endogenous men-
tal attention previously described, that is,E,M,I, andF. Other examples are
content learning (e.g., basic, conditioning or perceptual learning) and logi-
- AFFECT, SELF-MOTIVATION, AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 211