A COMPARISON OF THE HENRY WALLON’S AND JEAN PIGAGET'S VIEWS DEVELOPING A DIFFERENT VISION IN COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Wallon, like Piaget, has made a general child and adolescent development theory. He has cast the foundations of ontogenic studies (individuality) independent from classical methods. He has tried to understand the individual's development process through rich observations to overcome the introspective, psychological parallelism approaches which were dominant in that period. At the end of the studies, two main results were obtained. First, tried to show how biological, affective, social and mental factors are effective in a relation with the whole called as human, secondly, it has diversified the review subjects and methods to examine how the system consisted of these factors works. In this context, he used physiological, statistical, structural, psychoanalytic methods according to the situation. According to Wallon, development can be explained by the interaction between social conditions related to neurobiological maturation and adaptation conditions. Wallon considered development as six stages. Piaget, on the other hand, explained the development in four stages. It can be argued that Wallon is more concerned with the child's consciousness process related to him/herself, and Piaget tries to explain the cognitive development of the child through his/her relation to the objects. Wallon also leads away from Piaget in psycho-social terms. Piaget tried to explain the development in a linear and orthogenetic way, and Wallon considered it as an epigenetic and intermittent process. Unlike Piaget who claimed that the other stage did not begin until one stage had ended, Wallon argues that the developmental stages were carried out with complex, transitive (between the physical development and central nervous system - alternately), intertwining conflicts and crises