Argues for an interactionist approach to spatial development that incorporates and integrates essential insights of the Piaget, Nativist, and Vygotskyan approaches.

Infants may seem to do little more than eat, sleep, and play. Yet behind this misleadingly simplistic fa ade occurs an awe-inspiring process of development through which infants make sense of, and learn how to interact with the world around them. Written by leading researchers in the field, Introduction to Infant Development, Second Edition, provides fascinating insight into the psychological development of infants. This new edition captures the latest research in the field, with new chapters on perceptual and cognitive development as well as memory development; the text also examines the role of gender, culture, and social class in infant development. The coverage of language development and motor development has also been revised to account for the latest research. With enhanced pedagogical features throughout and a new Online Resource Center, Introduction to Infant Development is the ideal teaching and learning tool for those studying this intriguing field.

The study of infant memory has flourished in the past decade for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the tremendous growth of interest in normal and pathological adult memory that began in the late fifties. Despite its common lineage to other areas of memory research, however, infant memory has perhaps been the least integrated into the mainstream. In reading the literature, one gets a sense of discontinuity between the study of infant memory and memory at all other stages of development from childhood to old age. The reasons for this are not hard to find. The techniques used to study memory in infants are usually very different from those typically used even in children. These techniques often limit the kind of inferences one can draw about the nature of the memory systems under investigation. Even when terms, concepts, and theories from the adult literature are applied to infants, they often bear only a loose relationship to their original usage. For example, an infant who stares longer at a new pattern than an old one is said to "recognize" the old one and to have a memory system that shares many characteristics with a memory system that makes recognition possible in adults. Simi larly, an infant who emits a previously learned response, such as a leg kick, to an old stimulus is said to "recall" that response and to be engaged in processes similar to those of adults who are recalling past events.

Children take their first steps, speak their first words, and learn to solve many new problems seemingly overnight. Yet, each change reflects previous developments in the child across a range of domains, and each change provides opportunities for future development. Developmental Cascades proposes a new framework for understanding development by arguing that change can be explained in terms of the events that occur at one point in development, which set the stage or cause a ripple effect for the emergence or development of different abilities, functions, or behavior at another point in time. It is argued that these developmental cascades are influenced by different kinds of constraints that do not have a single foundation: they may originate from the structure of the child's nervous system and body, the physical or social environment, or knowledge and experience. These constraints occur at multiple levels of processing, change over time, and both contribute to developmental cascades and are their product. Oakes and Rakison present an overview of this developmental cascade perspective as a general framework for understanding change throughout a lifespan, although it is applied primarily to cognitive development in infancy. Issues on how a cascade approach obviates the dichotomy between domain-general and domain-specific mechanisms and the origins of constraints are addressed. The framework is illustrated utilizing a wide range of domains (e.g., attachment, gender, motor development), and is examined in detail through application to three domains within infant cognitive development (looking behavior, object representations, and concepts for animacy).

This special issue of Memory brings together some of the most exciting new research on infant memory. Using innovative research designs, the five studies presented here are addressing questions of central importance to understanding the development of human memory. In particular, the studies seek to discover whether, and if so under what conditions, memories of events experienced during infancy are retained over the preschool years. Research questions include how long retention of early memories may persist, what form these memories may take, the role of language and language development, and the role of intervening experience in the retention of early memories. The results provide provocative evidence that experiences occurring even during the first year of life may be retained in some form for at least several years. However, much of this memory is expressed more as familiarity than as explicit recall. The researchers and commentator present different theoretical views about what these results mean and the conclusions we may or may not be able to draw. Although many questions remain unanswered, the researchers contributing to this volume are on the edge of making important new discoveries about human memory and its development.

The chapters in this book are based on papers presented at the 23rd Carnegie Mellon Symposia on Cognition. At this exciting event, speaker after speaker presented new discoveries about infants' visual perception in areas ranging from sensory processes to visual cognition. The field continues to make significant progress in understanding the infant's perceptual world. Several advances have come from the development of new methods for exploring infant perception and cognition that have brought new empirical findings. Advances have also been made in understanding the mechanisms underlying perceptual development. Outstanding examples of this ongoing progress can be seen in the chapters of this volume.