Cognition in Children

by Goswami,Usha

• ISBN13: 9780863778247
• ISBN10: 0863778240
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-03-01
• Publisher: Psychology Pres

Summary

This textbook aims to provide a selective, but representative, review of work in cognitive development, grouped around themes that are familiar from textbooks of adult cognition. The book focuses on the question of what develops, rather than on why it develops. The findings of a given experimental study what develops are generally fixed, but the interpretation of what particular findings mean why is fluid. Some of the experiments discussed in this book have alternative explanations, and every student interested in children's cognition is invited to develop their own ideas about what different studies mean.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vi
Series preface	xiii
Foreword	xv
The ``what'' and ``why'' of children's cognition	xv
Domain-general vs. domain-specific accounts of cognition in children	xvi
The causal bias	xvii
Innate vs. acquired accounts of cognition in children	xviii
Qualitative vs. quantitative accounts of developmental change	xix
Piaget's stage theory	xix
The organisation of this book	xxi
Cognition in infancy: Basic cognitive processes	1	(24)
Memory and learning	1	(8)
Neonate memory for the mother's voice	2	(1)
Neonate memory for familiar stories	2	(1)
Memory for objects	3	(2)
Memory for events	5	(1)
Memory for causal events	6	(3)
Procedural vs. declarative memories?	9	(1)
Perception and attention	9	(9)
Attention in infancy	10	(2)
Visual preference and habituation	12	(2)
Rudimentary categorisation	14	(1)
Cross-modal perception in infancy	15	(3)
Links between measures of early learning, memory, perception, attention, and later intelligence	18	(4)
Speed of habituation and individual differences	18	(2)
Visual recognition memory and individual differences	20	(2)
Summary	22	(3)
Cognition in infancy: Higher cognitive processes	25	(48)
Moving into cognition: Perception-based knowledge representations	25	(28)
Representing the structure of object features: The extraction of prototypes	25	(1)
Processing inter-relations between features: The differentiation of prototypes	26	(5)
Processing relations between objects	31	(22)
Moving further into cognition: Meaning-based knowledge representations	53	(3)
Image schemas	54	(1)
Specialised modules for certain information?	55	(1)
Reasoning and problem solving	56	(4)
The bear in the cup	57	(1)
The dog beneath the cloth	58	(1)
The rabbits behind the wall	58	(2)
The box suspended in mid-air	60	(1)
Learning	60	(6)
Learning by imitation	61	(3)
Learning by analogy	64	(2)
What babies can't do	66	(4)
Search errors in reaching	66	(2)
Search errors in crawling	68	(2)
Summary	70	(3)
Conceptual development	73	(44)
Superordinate, subordinate, and ``basic-level'' categories	73	(11)
The core developmental role of the ``basic level''	74	(1)
Sequential touching as a measure of basic-level categorisation	75	(2)
The matching-to-sample task	77	(1)
The core developmental role of the superordinate level?	78	(2)
Child-basic categories vs. adult-basic categories	80	(1)
Beyond the role of perceptual similarity in categorisation	81	(3)
The role of language in conceptual development	84	(2)
The biological/non-biological distinction	86	(16)
Evidence from studies of biological movement	87	(2)
Evidence from knowledge of self-generated movements	89	(1)
Evidence from the assumption of shared core properties	90	(2)
Concrete or abstract knowledge?	92	(2)
Structure vs. function in categorising natural kinds and artifacts	94	(1)
Evidence from studies of growth	95	(2)
Analogy as a mechanism for understanding biological principles	97	(1)
Evidence from studies of inheritance	98	(3)
Evidence from studies of natural cause	101	(1)
The representation of categorical knowledge	102	(7)
The role of thematic relations in organising conceptual knowledge	102	(2)
Representing categories in terms of characteristic vs. defining features	104	(1)
Representing categories in terms of prototypes	105	(4)
Conceptual development, ``essences'' and naive theories	109	(2)
The essentialist bias	110	(1)
The ``causes and effects of changes'' mode	110	(1)
Conceptual change in childhood	111	(2)
Summary	113	(4)
The development of causal reasoning	117	(44)
Reasoning about causes and effects	118	(5)
Reasoning about the causal transformations of familiar objects	119	(2)
Reversible reasoning about causal transformations of familiar objects	121	(1)
The salience of non-canonical states in early causal reasoning	122	(1)
Reasoning on the basis of causal principles	123	(7)
The priority principle	124	(2)
The covariation principle	126	(1)
The temporal contiguity principle	127	(1)
The principle of the similarity of causes and effects	128	(2)
The understanding of causal chains	130	(7)
The understanding of mediate transmission	131	(2)
The understanding of logical search	133	(4)
Scientific reasoning: The understanding of situations involving multiple causal variables	137	(5)
Integrating causal information about different physical dimensions	142	(9)
The integration of knowledge about two dimensions	142	(8)
The integration of knowledge about three dimensions	150	(1)
Intuitive physics	151	(6)
Intuitive physics and projectile motion	152	(2)
The distinction between knowledge and action	154	(1)
Causal reasoning and the direction of causality	155	(2)
Summary	157	(1)
Is the development of causal reasoning domain-general?	158	(3)
The development of memory	161	(38)
Early memory development	162	(5)
Infantile amnesia: A real phenomenon?	162	(2)
Understanding symbolic representation as an aid to memory	164	(3)
The development of different memory systems	167	(30)
Recognition memory	167	(2)
Implicit memory	169	(5)
Episodic memory	174	(5)
Eye-witness memory	179	(6)
Working memory	185	(12)
Summary	197	(2)
Mnemonic strategies, metamemory and cognition	199	(22)
The development of strategies for remembering	199	(7)
The emergent use of mnemonic strategies	199	(2)
Evidence for the strategic use of rehearsal	201	(2)
Evidence for the strategic use of organisation by semantic category	203	(3)
Metamemory	206	(3)
The relationship between memory development and cognitive development	209	(9)
The novice-expert distinction	210	(4)
The development of processing capacity	214	(1)
Representational redescription as a theory of cognitive development	215	(3)
Summary	218	(3)
Logical reasoning in childhood	221	(38)
Early-developing modes of logical reasoning	221	(13)
Reasoning by analogy	221	(6)
Deductive logic and deductive reasoning	227	(7)
Later-developing modes of logical reasoning	234	(20)
Transitive inferences	234	(7)
The understanding of invariance	241	(8)
Class inclusion	249	(5)
Halford's structure-mapping theory of logical development	254	(2)
Summary	256	(3)
Piaget's theory of logical development	259	(22)
Overview of the theory	259	(2)
The mechanisms of cognitive change	259	(1)
Stages in cognitive development	260	(1)
The sensory-motor stage	261	(8)
The six stages of sensory-motor cognition	261	(2)
Sensory-motor cognition in different domains	263	(3)
Evaluation of Piaget's sensory-motor stage in the light of recent research	266	(3)
The pre-operational and concrete operational stages	269	(4)
Pre-operational thought	270	(1)
Concrete operational thought	271	(1)
Evaluation of recent research on the concrete operations	271	(2)
Formal operational thought	273	(4)
Formal operational tasks	274	(2)
Evaluation of recent research on the formal operations	276	(1)
Summary	277	(4)
The ``what'' and ``why'' of children's cognition	281	(14)
What develops?	281	(2)
Why does development pursue its observed course?	283	(8)
Domain-general vs. domain-specific accounts of cognition in children	283	(2)
Innate vs. acquired accounts of cognition in children	285	(3)
Qualitative vs. quantitative accounts of developmental change	288	(3)
The causal bias	291	(4)
References	295	(22)
Author index	317	(8)
Subject index	325