In the early 20s, Jean Piaget worked at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, forerunner of the Department of Psychology at the University of Geneva. Psychology was not his main interest, though.

Instead, Piaget was trying to understand how humans acquire knowledge. Unable to travel back in time and study our evolution from apes to humans, Piaget focused on children as a way to study the development of intelligence. Piaget found that children’s minds aren’t empty boxes waiting to be filled with knowledge, but rather, their brains are like those of mini scientists – constantly developing theories about the world around them and testing them out via experimentation.

Revealing that this kind of intelligence exists before infants acquire language – something that usually happens around the age of two – was a great milestone in the exploration of human intelligence.

In 1955, Piaget went on to found the Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva, which he directed until his death in 1980. His studies and those of his many collaborators have informed current research on the practical and abstract understanding of children.