[6] Behaviors that may be scored include those of individual humans or their social groupings (e.g., organizations, governments, societies), animals, or machines.
[9] It is based on the very simple notions that higher order task actions:[2] It is cross-culturally and cross-species valid.
The reason it applies cross-culturally is that the scoring is based on the mathematical complexity of the hierarchical organization of information.
It is different from previous proposals about developmental stage applied to humans;[10] instead of attributing behavioral changes across a person's age to the development of mental structures or schema, this model posits that task sequences of task behaviors form hierarchies that become increasingly complex.
This led them to create a list of two concepts they felt a successful developmental theory should address.
The study of ideal tasks, including their instantiation in the real world, has been the basis of the branch of stimulus control called psychophysics.
The orders of hierarchical complexity are quantized like the electron atomic orbitals around the nucleus: each task difficulty has an order of hierarchical complexity required to complete it correctly, analogous to the atomic Slater determinant.
[11] When the subtasks are carried out by the participant in a required order, the task in question is successfully completed.
Hierarchical complexity refers to the number of recursions that the coordinating actions must perform on a set of primary elements.
Although simply adding results in the same answer, people who can do both display a greater freedom of mental functioning.
Arbitrary organization of lower order of complexity actions, possible in the Piagetian theory, despite the hierarchical definition structure, leaves the functional correlates of the interrelationships of tasks of differential complexity formulations ill-defined.
According to these theories, progression to higher stages or levels of cognitive development is caused by increases in processing efficiency and working memory capacity.
The sequence is as follows: (0) calculatory, (1) automatic, (2) sensory & motor, (3) circular sensory-motor, (4) sensory-motor, (5) nominal, (6) sentential, (7) preoperational, (8) primary, (9) concrete, (10) abstract, (11) formal, and the five postformal: (12) systematic, (13) metasystematic, (14) paradigmatic, (15) cross-paradigmatic, and (16) meta-cross-paradigmatic.
The higher stages of the MHC have extensively influenced the field of positive adult development.
[16] Jordan (2018) argued that unidimensional models such as the MHC, which measure level of complexity of some behavior, refer to only one of many aspects of adult development, and that other variables are needed (in addition to unidimensional measures of complexity) for a fuller description of adult development.
It is designed to assess development based on the order of complexity which the actor utilizes to organize information.
Other advantages of this model include its avoidance of mentalistic explanations, as well as its use of quantitative principles which are universally applicable in any context.
[2] The following practitioners can use the MHC to quantitatively assess developmental stages:[2] In one representative study, Commons, Goodheart, and Dawson (1997) found, using Rasch analysis (Rasch, 1980), that hierarchical complexity of a given task predicts stage of a performance, the correlation being r = 0.92.
The following are examples of tasks studied using the model of hierarchical complexity or Kurt W. Fischer's similar skill theory:[2] As of 2014, people and institutes from all the major continents of the world, except Africa, have used the model of hierarchical complexity.
[17] With the help of the model, it is possible to quantify the occurrence and progression of transition processes in task performances at any order of hierarchical complexity.