Accommodation. Process by virtue of which the environment produces modifications in the living being, or it is modified by the influence of the environment. Accommodation can be biological or cognitive and, according to another criterion, it can also be exogenous or endogenous. Accommodation does not exist in isolation: all behavior implies accommodation and assimilation, which are the two inseparable aspects of adaptation.
Generalities
Piaget chose the term “accommodation” by analogy with what biologists call “accommodative”, an expression referring to the various phenotypic variations that genotypic characters can have. Indeed, each gene ( genotype ) is expressed in some somatic characteristic ( phenotype ), but the latter can change under the influence of the environment (accommodated).
Two people with the same genetic endowment in terms of musculature, can develop different musculature (different phenotypes) due to being in different environments, as can be the case of a lumberjack and a sedentary individual. Another example is mimicry , where the living being is also modified depending on the environment.
All behavior has an aspect of assimilation and another of accommodation, but there can also be a primacy of accommodation, in which case the action is modeled on the objects themselves, for example when this becomes more interesting than the assimilative use that the subject could. use. Such is the case with imitation.
In short, accommodation is the action of the environment on the organism: the pressure of things always ends, not in a passive submission, but in a simple modification of the action referred to them. While assimilation is conservative because it seeks to change the environment to adapt it to the organism as it is, accommodation is instead “innovative” because it seeks to change the same organism through the influence of the environment. If in the beginning these two functions are antagonistic, the role of mental life in general and that of intelligence in particular consists precisely in coordinating them with each other.
Classification
The most comprehensive way to classify accommodation phenomena is to establish, on the one hand, a biological accommodation and, on the other, a cognitive accommodation, depending on whether it is a phenomenon of organic adaptation or one of functional adaptation. Jean Piaget established a second classification, which he rarely refers to when he indicates that there are exogenous accommodations and endogenous accommodations.
An exogenous accommodation implies a modification of the subject based on facts external to him, while an endogenous accommodation is a modification of the subject based on the change that occurred in another part of the same subject.
