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Alfred Binet was born in 1857 in Nice, France. His parents divorced when he was young and he was raised by his mother. He entered college with the goal of getting a medical degree, but dropped out when he became interested in psychology. He never completed a degree but continued to read and study psychological topics.
In 1883 Binet accepted a position at a clinic at La SalpˆtriŠre, where he worked with Jean Charcot, who was studying hypnosis at the time. In 1890 he resigned this position and spent time studying the cognitive abilities of his young daughters. Binet began working at the Laboratory of Physiological Psychology at the Sorbonne, and was appointed director there in 1894. He studied memory, thinking, hypnosis, handwriting, and perception. He also served as editor of the French psychological journal, @i[L'Annee Psychologique.] In 1904 he began work on developing a test to identify students who needed special education because of their low level of intellectual functioning. Binet and his colleague, Theodore Simon, published the first intelligence scale in 1905. During the next several years, Binet spent much of his time testing children and revising the intelligence test, first in 1908 and again in 1911, the year of his death. Binet's early work on intelligence testing has stimulated an enormous amount of research in this area of psychology. |
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