Elsevier

Developmental Review

Volume 18, Issue 3, September 1998, Pages 237-278
Developmental Review

Regular Article
Hierarchical Complexity of Tasks Shows the Existence of Developmental Stages,☆☆

https://doi.org/10.1006/drev.1998.0467Get rights and content

Abstract

The major purpose of this paper is to introduce the notion of the order of hierarchical complexity of tasks. Order of hierarchical complexity is a way of conceptualizing information in terms of the power required to complete a task or solve a problem. It is orthogonal to the notion of information coded as bits in traditional information theory. Because every task (whether experimental or everyday) that individuals engage in has an order of hierarchical complexity associated with it, this notion of hierarchical complexity has broad implications both within developmental psychology and beyond it in such fields as information science. Within developmental psychology, traditional stage theory has been criticized for not showing that stages exist as anything more thanad hocdescriptions of sequential changes in human behavior (Kohlberg & Armon, 1984; Gibbs, 1977, 1979; Broughton, 1984). To address this issue, Commons and Richards (1984a,b) argued that a successful developmental theory should address two conceptually different issues: (1) the hierarchical complexity of the task to be solved and (2) the psychology, sociology, and anthropology of such task performance and how that performance develops. The notion of the hierarchical complexity of tasks, introduced here, formalizes the key notions implicit in most stage theories, presenting them as axioms and theorems. The hierarchical complexity of tasks has itself been grounded in mathematical models (Coombs, Dawes, & Tversky, 1970) and information science (Lindsay & Norman, 1977). The resultant definition of stage is that it is the highest order of hierarchical complexity on which there is successful task performance. In addition to providing an analytic solution to the issue of what are developmental stages, the theory of hierarchical complexity presented here allows for the possibility within science of scaling the complexity in a form more akin to intelligence.

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  • Cited by (0)

    Portions of this paper were presented at theSociety for Research in Child Development,April 1987; theThird Beyond Formal Operations Symposium held at Harvard: Positive Development During Adolescence and Adulthood,June, 1987; and the 17th Annual Convention for theAssociation of Behavior Analysis,May, 1991. R. Duncan Luce and Katherine Estes commented on an earlier presentation version and suggested a proof for a theorem. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Rebecca Young, Patrice M. Miller, Kwang Sung Pak, and Linda M. Bresette in editing versions of the manuscript. Many of the comments of the reviewer Robert Campbell have been incorporated into the manuscript.

    Address reprint requests to Michael L. Commons, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts Mental Health Center, 74 Fenwood Road, Boston, MA 02115-6196.

    ☆☆

    C. N. AlexanderE. J. Langer

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