Microgenesis: The Best Kept Secret in Developmental Psychology Research

The chapter is built by the texts that are grouped between the first and the last publication of Bärbel Inhelder on microgenesis. It introduces the functional subject, the role of procedures, schemas, and representational models, as nuclei in the construction of this new object of study that she introduced to explore children’s minds when they have to re-envision solutions and apply knowledge to particular problems. She reviews the relations between micro- and macrogenesis and the possible relations with reflecting abstraction and optimizing equilibration, but more as allusions on which further research will be necessary.