On the Psychological Reality of Cognitive Structures: A Tentative Synthesis of Piaget's and Bruner's Theories.

The main concern of the present study is the question of the psychological reality of cognitive structures. After a brief outline of Piaget's structural and Bruner's representational theories of cognitive development, Piaget's concept of "internalization" is analyzed and related to the concept of "representation." Cognitive structures are shown to be real exclusively in an actual representation. In that sense, this interpretation approaches a synthesis of Piaget's and Bruner's theories. To account for the construction of representation-bound structures (e.g., operations), microlevel processes taking place in a multimedial feedback system are to be focused. Some empirical support for these considerations will be drawn from the experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]