Originally published in 1979, this volume represented a unique attempt to connect the usually separated fields of infancy studies and studies of older children. In each chapter, eminent research workers attempt to cross the theoretical, empirical, and methodological barriers that had traditionally separated the study of preverbal infants from the study of verbal children and adults at the time. These completely new and original contributions traced the developmental links between birth and conversation within three major categories: perceptual, cognitive, and language development. Although the chapters range from reports of well-defined research areas to theoretical propositions, the aim throughout was to relate the events of the first year of life to the child¿s later perceptual and cognitive activity. This book will still be of interest for all concerned with child development and related areas, in that it demonstrates the remarkable range of observations about infants brought under a single guiding set of questions about continuity, stability, and the sources of change during and after the first year of life.

Perceptual and Cognitive Development illustrates how the developmental approach yields fundamental contributions to our understanding of perception and cognition as a whole. The book discusses how to relate developmental, comparative, and neurological considerations to early learning and development, and it presents fundamental problems in cognition and language, such as the acquisition of a coherent, organized, and shared understanding of concepts and language. Discussions of learning, memory, attention, and problem solving are embedded within specific accounts of the neurological status of developing minds and the nature of knowledge. - Research advances and theoretical reorientations are updated in the Second Edition; the revision focuses more attention on the cognitive and biological sciences and neuroscience - Illustrates how the developmental approach can yield fundamental contributions to our understanding of perception and cognition as a whole - Discussions of learning, memory, and attention permeate individual chapters

The result of extensive scholarship and consultation with leading scholars, this text introduces students to twenty-four theorists and compares and contrasts their theories on how we develop as individuals. Emphasizing the theories that build upon the developmental tradition established by Rousseau, this text also covers theories in the environmental/learning tradition.