Accommodation and Assimilation

Cognitive Change as an Adaptive Process Rooted in Biology

Interestingly, the roots of Piaget’s theory are in biology. It has been said that his career began with a paper on the classification of mollusks, specifically snails. Piaget noted that snails that living in moving water developed musculature to hang on to a surface so as not to be washed away, but snails living in still water did not develop this musculature.

The leap to cognitive development is clear: The human organism develops cognitions in response to environments in order to adapt to and live in those environments. Ways of thinking are like muscles; individuals think in order to adapt and [Page 10]survive, using the mind to adapt to and act on the world. They develop structures in the mind built in response to what they come across in the world, using the basic human biology inherited through evolution as a starting point.

Accommodation and assimilation take a note from biological theory as well. When an organism assimilates, it takes in food, digests it, and makes it a part of itself. Piaget made the leap to cognitive processes. In Piagetian theory, assimilation is a cognitive process by which a learner takes in information and fits it into existing cognitive structures in the mind. For example, a child who uses the word dog to describe the family terrier and who hears a parent call a golden retriever dog, assimilates the golden retriever into the existing mental structure dog. The child internalizes the new exemplar of dogs, the golden retriever, into the mind. Learning something new that fits into categories already internal to the mind is generally straightforward.

In accommodation, a learner must change a cognitive structure or build a new structure in response to new information from the world. An example is when a child who uses the word dog to describe the family terrier sees a long-haired rabbit and calls it dog. A parent might say, “That’s not a dog. That’s a rabbit.” The child then has to accommodate the new information and make a new mental structure: rabbit. In this example, the internal structure of the mind must be adapted to accommodate the new concept, the rabbit. Adapting categories in the mind to fit new information is also a natural and straightforward process, and the process of equilibration balances assimilation and accommodation as development proceeds.

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