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.

Reflecting the focus of a Jean Piaget Symposium entitled Biology and Knowledge: Structural Constraints on Development, this volume presents many of the emergent themes discussed. Among these themes are: Structural constraints on cognitive development and learning come in many shapes and forms and involve appeal to more than one level of analysis. To postulate innate knowledge is not to deny that humans can acquire new concepts. It is unlikely that there is only one learning mechanism, even if one prefers to work with general as opposed to domain-specific mechanisms. The problems of induction with respect to concept acquisition are even harder than originally thought.

This is a philosophical work that develops a general theory of ontological objects and object-relations. It does this by examining concepts as acquired dispositions, and then focuses on perhaps the most important of these: the concept of learning. This concept is important because everything that we know and do in the world is predicated on a prior act of learning. A concept can have many meanings and can be used in a number of different ways, and this creates difficulty when considering the nature of objects and the relationships between them. To enable this, David Scott answers a series of questions about concepts in general and the concept of learning in particular. Some of these questions are: What is learning? What different meanings can be given to the notion of learning? How does the concept of learning relate to other concepts, such as innatism, development and progression? The book offers a counter-argument to empiricist conceptions of learning, to the propagation of simple messages about learning, knowledge, curriculum and assessment, and to the denial that values are central to understanding how we live. It argues that values permeate everything: our descriptions of the world, the attempts we make at creating better futures and our relations with other people.

Marianella Casasola is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development at Cornell University, where she has been teaching since earning her doctorate in Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research examines aspects of infant spatial cognition, young children's acquisition of spatial language, and the interplay between language and cognition during the first two years of development.

Ming porcelain is widely regarded among the world's finest cultural treasures. From ordinary household items patiently refined for imperial use, porcelain became a dynamic force in domestic consumption in China and a valuable commodity in export trade. In the modern era, it has reached unprecedented heights in art auctions and other avenues of global commerce. This book examines the impact of consumption on the evolution of porcelain and its transformation into a foreign cultural icon. The book begins with an examination of ways in which porcelain was appreciated in Ming China, followed by a discussion of encounters with Ming porcelain in several global regions including Europe and the Americas. The book also looks at the invention of the phrase and concept of 'the Ming vase' in English-speaking cultures and concludes with a history of the transformation of Ming porcelain into works of art.

An overview of object-based models of attention.

New in paperback-- A transformative book on the way we think about the nature of concepts and the relations between language and thought.