The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development (eBook)

Usha Goswami (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB | PDF

2010 | 2. Auflage
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-1-4443-2549-2 (ISBN)

Infos

This definitive volume is the result of collaboration by top scholars in the field of children's cognition.

• New edition offers an up-to-date overview of all the major areas of importance in the field, and includes new data from cognitive neuroscience and new chapters on social cognitive development and language 
• Provides state-of-the-art summaries of current research by international specialists in different areas of cognitive development
• Spans aspects of cognitive development from infancy to the onset of adolescence
• Includes chapters on symbolic reasoning, pretend play, spatial development, abnormal cognitive development and current theoretical perspectives

Usha Goswami is Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. She is also Director of the Centre for Neuroscience in Education, which carries out research into the brain basis of literacy, numeracy, dyslexia, and dyscalculia. Dr Goswami has received numerous awards for her work, including the British Psychology Society Spearman Medal, the Norman Geschwind-Rodin Prize for Dyslexia research, and fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust in the United Kingdom, the National Academy of Education in the United States, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany.

Inhalt

Acknowledgements x

List of Contributors xi

Introduction 1

Part I Infancy: The Origins of Cognitive Development
5

1 How Do Infants Reason About Physical Events? 11

Renée Baillargeon, Jie Li, Yael Gertner, and Di Wu

2 Social Cognition and the Origins of Imitation, Empathy, and
Theory of Mind 49

Andrew N. Meltzoff

3 Kinds of Agents: The Origins of Understanding Instrumental and
Communicative Agency 76

György Gergely

4 Social Cognition and Social Motivations in Infancy 106

Malinda Carpenter

5 Born to Categorize 129

Paul C. Quinn

6 Early Memory Development 153

Patricia J. Bauer, Marina Larkina, and Joanne Deocampo

7 Early Word-Learning and Conceptual Development: Everything Had
a Name, and Each Name Gave Birth to a New Thought 180

Sandra R. Waxman and Erin M. Leddon

Part II Cognitive Development in Early Childhood 209

8 Development of the Animate-Inanimate Distinction
213

John E. Opfer and Susan A. Gelman

9 Language Development 239

Michael Tomasello

10 Developing a Theory of Mind 258

Henry M. Wellman

11 Pretend Play and Cognitive Development 285

Angeline Lillard, Ashley M. Pinkham, and Eric Smith

12 Early Development of the Understanding and Use of Symbolic
Artifacts 312

Judy S. DeLoache

Part III Topics in Cognitive Development in Childhood
337

13 Memory Development in Childhood 347

Wolfgang Schneider

14 Causal Reasoning and Explanation 377

Barbara Koslowski and Amy Masnick

15 Inductive and Deductive Reasoning 399

Usha Goswami

16 The Development of Moral Reasoning 420

Larry P. Nucci and Matthew Gingo

17 Spatial Development: Evolving Approaches to Enduring
Questions 446

Lynn S. Liben and Adam E. Christensen

18 Children's Intuitive Physics 473

Friedrich Wilkening and Trix Cacchione

19 What is Scientific Thinking and How Does it Develop?
497

Deanna Kuhn

20 Reading Development and Dyslexia 524

Margaret J. Snowling and Silke M. Göbel

21 Children's Understanding of Mathematics 549

Peter Bryant and Terezinha Nuñes

22 Executive Function in Typical and Atypical Development
574

Philip David Zelazo and Ulrich Müller

23 Language and Cognition: Evidence from Disordered Language
604

Barbara Dodd and Sharon Crosbie

24 The Empathizing-Systematizing (E-S) Theory of Autism: A
Cognitive Developmental Account 626

Simon Baron-Cohen

Part IV Theories of Cognitive Development 641

25 Piaget's Theory: Past, Present, and Future 649

Patricia H. Miller

26 Vygotsky and Psychology 673

Harry Daniels

27 Information-Processing Models of Cognitive Development
697

Graeme S. Halford and Glenda Andrews

28 Neuroconstructivism 723

Gert Westermann, Michael S. C. Thomas, and Annette
Karmiloff-Smith

29 Individual Differences in Cognitive Development 749

Robert J. Sternberg

Index 775

Rezensionen

"All these will find the material in this new companion topical and challenging . . The essays are provided with generous and well-chosen lists of further reading, and many of the works will or should be in any well-stocked academic or research library". (Reference Reviews, 2011)

"This is an authoritative, comprehensive and cutting-edge account of psychological theory and research on children's cognitive development from infants to early adolescence. Written by a cast of world leading academics, this handbook provides a single volume resource that covers all the major topics...This second edition reflects the significant developments within the field arising from the latest cognitive neuropsychological research...This handbook brings together such a wealth of material to constitute possibly the single best reference book in its subject area and, as such, should serve as a key text for advanced students, researchers and practitioners." (The Psychologist, May 2011)

"Overall, the handbook is a thoughtful and valuable reference work, to which users can refer for an impressive range of research." (Julia Carroll, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 44:6)

"Though the structure of this book is similar to other volumes in the series, I welcome it with even greater enthusiasm than the rest. While they all summarise and review the latest scientific research in their particular area of child development, research in the field of infant cognition has, in the last few years, completely overturned all previous conceptions. This volume, therefore, not only summarises and updates the literature in its field, but also replaces much of it ... at the moment this book series is the cutting edge ... As with other volumes in the series, all libraries serving postgraduate level studies in psychology and related disciplines should seriously consider acquisition." (Martin Guha, Librarian, Institute of Psychiatry, Reference Reviews, 17 February 2003)

"Summing up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals." (K.L. Hartlep, California State University, Bakersfield, Choice, March 2003)

"The book is a timely addition to to the literature on infant and child cognitive development... The significant value of this volume lies in the breadth of its coverage and the sheer comprehensiveness of its execution... For academics and researchers in the field of infant and child cognitive development this is an invaluable resource that encompasses the current state of knowledge in this central developmental area." (Mark Tomlinson, Journal of Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 2005, 17(2))

"This Handbook contains new insights from developmental
neuroscience and comprehensive reviews of theories and research in
virtually all area of cognitive development. The authors constitute
a Who's Who list of eminent European and American scholars."

--Robert Siegler, Teresa Heinz Professor, Carnegie
Mellon University

"Usha Goswami has assembled all the best people to present all
the important topics in children's cognitive development. This
handbook is an indispensable introduction to the field."

--Nora S. Newcombe, Temple University

Textauszug

Introduction

Usha Goswami

Since the first edition of this Handbook, the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience has begun in earnest. In my view, this will have a lasting impact on our understanding of childhood cognitive development. Neuroscience has the potential to have a transformative effect on our theories and our explanatory frameworks. This is because understanding the neural codes that the brain uses to organize and transmit information will provide insights into developmental causal mechanisms. These insights may transform our views about cognitive development.

For example, the formats that are provided by neural coding mechanisms will inevitably affect how the brain develops a cognitive system from sensory inputs. One powerful metaphor is the idea of neural ensembles, groups of active cells that represent a particular percept or concept via the spatial or temporal patterning of their firing. Different cells in the same ensemble (neural network) that represent a percept or concept will be linked to each other, so that when there is noise in the input, or partial information, the ensemble can still activate – the cells that do fire will perform a pattern-completion process and trigger the other cells that represent the percept or concept. This pattern-completion process is in principle equivalent to what is traditionally termed generalization, as it enables abstraction and categorization – argued by Quinn (chapter 5, this volume) to be the primitive in all behavior and mental functioning.

Indeed, neuroimaging reveals that even the brains of young infants show sustained activity based on abstracted dependencies in the absence of sensory input, for example, when a hidden object disappears unexpectedly (Kaufman, Mareschal, & Johnson, 2003). The sensory processing of spatio-temporal structure can in principle yield the abstracted dependencies traditionally discussed as “prototypes” of concepts, as “causal knowledge” about physical systems, and as “naïve psychology” (e.g., Rosch, 1978; Shultz, 1982; Wellman & Gelman, 1998; see Goswami, 2008, for a fuller discussion). Sensory learning is rapid, and so the brain is frequently responding not to a particular sensory event itself, but to the abstract dependencies that are typical of that class of events, or to the dependencies that occur between patterns of sensory events, that may in essence comprise concepts or causal systems. In principle, these neural learning mechanisms are analogous to the “generalization across instances” that traditionally has been assumed to underpin conceptual development.

How can such neural mechanisms give rise to causal knowledge? For example, while the specific perceptual features of two objects in a launching event may vary, the spatiotemporal dynamics (and therefore the causal structure, e.g., the fact that A causes B to move) will vary less. The ensemble of cells that responds to the spatio-temporal motion of one particular launching event will therefore also trigger some of the other cells that were responsive in previous, but perceptually slightly different, launching events. As more such launching events are experienced, the neural network will in effect abstract and represent the “knowledge” that A causes B to move. The perceptual illusion of causality during launching and other visual events noted by Michotte (1963) is one example of how sensory perceptual dynamics enable the development of conceptual representations (see also Scholl & Tremoulet, 2000).

The highly distributed nature of neural representations means that cognitive behavior will reflect properties of these distributed representations (Szűcs & Goswami, 2007). An example is infants’ behavior when apparently reasoning about physical events (Baillargeon, Li, Gertner, & Wu, chapter 1, this volume). For example, rather than postulating completely distinct neural networks for, say, occlusion events versus containment events, it could be that a weaker neural network representation of a hidden object suffices for occlusion events than for containment events. As discussed by Munakata (2001), a neural representation can be graded in terms of (for example) the number of relevant neurons firing, their firing rates, the coherence of the firing patterns, and how “clean” they are for signaling the appropriate information. Graded representations offer an alternative explanation of behavioral dissociations, for example in infant looking behavior (Johnson & Munakata, 2005). As we understand more about how the brain builds cognitive representations from sensory input, our theories about cognitive development will inevitably change.

One relevant theoretical perspective, addressed in this volume, is neuroconstructivism (see Westermann, Thomas, & Karmiloff-Smith, chapter 28). As they demonstrate, a neuroscience perspective makes basic sensory processes more important in cognitive development than is traditionally acknowledged. Although provocative, it can be argued that young children’s apparent tendency to seek hidden features to help them to understand what makes objects and events similar may not be a cognitive “bias” or a naï ve “theory,” but may rather reflect the operation of basic mammalian learning algorithms. The causal explanatory frameworks that are central to cognitive development may originate from statistical perceptual learning by the brain of spatio -temporal structure, enriched developmentally with information gained through sociocultural learning, imitation, analogy, and action. Using relatively simple learning mechanisms, the infant brain develops complex conceptual representations about how the world is (see Goswami, 2008). These conceptual representations originate in the sensory coding of the dynamic spatial and temporal behavior of objects, and are enriched as the infant distinguishes agents and their goal-directed actions, learns by imitation, and learns by analogy. Perceptual-cognitive representations are further enriched once the infant becomes capable of autonomous action. However, mental representations are transformed by the acquisition of language.

Currently, there are rather few sensory and neuroscience studies available to include in this new edition of the Handbook, but all the contributors comment on such studies when they are available. Therefore, this second edition is still focused on how different aspects of cognitive development unfold during the period of peak sensitivity for learning, infancy and childhood. The plasticity of the child’s brain is often remarked upon, but equally remarkable is the similarity in cognitive development across cultures and social contexts. In the first section of the Handbook, on infancy, the authors focus on the basic kinds of knowledge that are central in human cognitive development. These are knowledge about the physical world of objects and events (Baillargeon, Li, Gertner, & Wu, chapter 1), knowledge about social cognition, self, and agency (Meltzoff, chapter 2; Gergely, chapter 3; Carpenter, chapter 4), and knowledge about the kinds of things in the world – conceptual knowledge (Quinn, chapter 5; Waxman & Leddon, chapter 7). These “foundational” domains (naï ve physics, psychology, and biology) also depend on the development of memory (Bauer, Larkina, & Deocampo, chapter 6). Each chapter illustrates ways in which the foundational domains of cognition are functioning from the earliest months. Infants are characterized as active learners, equipped with certain innate expectations which, although quite primitive, enable them to benefit hugely from experience. Experience of the physical and social worlds allows infants to enrich and revise their initial expectations, so that they appear to be replaced with new understandings.

References

Goswami, U. (2008). Cognitive development: The learning brain. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

Johnson, M. H., & Munakata, Y. (2005). Processes of change in brain and cognitive development. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 152–158.

Kaufman, J., Csibra, G., & Johnson, M. H. (2003). Representing occluded objects in the human infant brain. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B (Suppl.), 270, S140–S143.

Kaufman, J., Mareschal, D., & Johnson, M. H. (2003). Graspability and object processing in infants. Infant Behavior and Development, 26, 516–528.

Michotte, A. (1963). The perception of causality. Andover, UK: Methuen.

Munakata, Y. (2001). Graded representations in behavioral dissociations. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 1, 5 (7), 309–315.

Rosch, E. (1978). Principles of categorization. In E. Rosch & B. B. Lloyd (Eds.), Cognition and Categorization (pp. 27–48). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Scholl, B. J., & Tremoulet, P. D. (2000). Perceptual causality and animacy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 299–309.

Shultz, T. R. (1982). Rules of causal attribution. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 47 (1, Serial No. 194).

Szűcs, D., & Goswami, U. (2007). Educational neuroscience: Defining a new discipline for the study of mental representations. Mind, Brain and Education, 1(3), 114–127.

Wellman, H. M., & Gelman, S. A. (1992). Cognitive development: Foundational theories of core domains. Annual Review of Psychology, 43, 337–375.

Wellman, H. M., &...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 11.7.2011
• Reihe/Serie: Blackwell Handbooks of Developmental Psychology
• Reihe/Serie: Blackwell Handbooks of Developmental Psychology
• Reihe/Serie: Wiley Blackwell Handbooks of Developmental Psychology
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Allgemeine Psychologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Entwicklungspsychologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Verhaltenstherapie
• Schlagworte: Child cognition, infancy, adolescence, neuroscience, child language, developmental psychology • Cognitive Development • Entwicklungspsychologie • Kognitionsentwicklung • Kognitive Psychologie • Psychologie • Psychology
• ISBN-10: 1-4443-2549-3 / 1444325493
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4443-2549-2 / 9781444325492