This volume is unique in integrating different domains of psychology, at both theoretical and empirical levels of analysis, in order to understand the development of the human mind. Perspectives include comparative, cultural, and developmental psychology, in addition to neuropsychology. Contributors in this edited collection emphasize both the collective nature of human cognition and the impossibility of separating individuals from their sociocultural environments. They also explain how participation in culture leads to radical changes in an individual's psychological makeup. This volume may also be of interest to anthropologists, philosophy scholars, and semioticians.

Major topics include:

Human Development from the Perspective of Comparative Psychology

Culture in the Developing or Regressing Brain

Cultural Perspective on the Human Development

The Role of Culture in Child Development

Child development is a holistic process multiply determined by complex interactions of individual and environmental properties. It is becoming increasingly obvious that child development cannot be understood by common data analysis procedures, where data are aggregated over individuals into some group-level forms, fragmented studies of relationships between a few variables torn out of the context of the whole, and studies that are either cross-sectional or conceptualize development as a quantitative change. This collection of empirical studies aims at understanding child development in early primary school by applying a consistently systemic, person-oriented developmental approach. An immensely complex web of developmental relationships between cognitive and non-cognitive processes in educational settings is emerging in the synthesis of the empirical contributions to this book.

This brief sets out on a course to distinguish three main kinds of thought that underlie scientific thinking. Current science has not agreed on an understanding of what exactly the aim of science actually is, how to understand scientific knowledge, and how such knowledge can be achieved. Furthermore, no science today also explicitly admits the fact that knowledge can be constructed in different ways and therefore every scientist should be able to recognize the form of thought that under-girds their understanding of scientific theory. In response to this, this texts seeks to answer the questions: What is science? What is (scientific) explanation? What is causality and why it matters? Science is a way to find new knowledge. The way we think about the world constrains the aspects of it we can understand. Scientists, the author suggests, should engage in a metacognitive perspective on scientific theory that reflects not only what exists in the world, but also the way the scientist thinks about the world.

This volume is unique in integrating different domains of psychology, at both theoretical and empirical levels of analysis, in order to understand the development of the human mind. Perspectives include comparative, cultural, and developmental psychology, in addition to neuropsychology. Contributors in this edited collection emphasize both the collective nature of human cognition and the impossibility of separating individuals from their sociocultural environments. They also explain how participation in culture leads to radical changes in an individual's psychological makeup. This volume may also be of interest to anthropologists, philosophy scholars, and semioticians.

Major topics include:

Human Development from the Perspective of Comparative Psychology

Culture in the Developing or Regressing Brain

Cultural Perspective on the Human Development

The Role of Culture in Child Development