This volume is a festschrift dedicated to James J. Jenkins, a pioneer in many areas of experimental psychology. It has three major goals: to provide a forum for debate on current theoretical issues in cognitive psychology, to capture the "state of the art" in reviews of research methods and results, and to generate ideas for new research directions and methodologies. Contributors -- including Jenkins' former students and present colleagues -- ponder fundamental questions such as:
* How do people learn to read?
* What happens during the processes of speech perception?
* How do people acquire problem solving skills?
* How do cognitive and motor skills develop and integrate with one another?
Many chapters focus specifically on ecological and applied cognitive psychology. Specific topics covered include visual and speech perception, language, memory, motivation, child development, problem solving, and pedagogy.

Throughout its evolution, Piaget's theory has placed meaning at the center of all attempts to understand the nature and development of knowing. For Piaget, all knowing – whether sensorimotor, representational, or reasoned, and whether directed toward successful problem solutions or toward general understanding – is necessarily a construction which arises out of meaning making activity. It was in this context that the editors of this volume, originally published in 1994, approached the board of directors of the Jean Piaget Society with a proposal to organize a recent annual symposium around the topic of the nature and development of meaning. In forming this symposium and in moving from symposium to integrated text, the editors wanted to insure both a breadth and depth to the analysis of the topic. Addressing philosophical, theoretical, and empirical perspectives, this issue-oriented volume provides an integrated exploration of the current understanding of the nature and development of meaning. Contemporary issues that frame alternative understandings of the nature of meaning – nativist vs. constructivist positions, and computational vs. embodied mind contexts – are examined as they impact on the investigation of meaning. Comparative, cognitive, and linguistic developmental dimensions of meaning are described and discussed.

Derived from a conference honoring the legacy of Joachim Wohlwill, this volume is designed to reflect as many facets of the late scholar's wide-ranging work as possible. As its title indicates, the book identifies three broad areas in which Wohlwill made significant contributions: art and aesthetics, human-environment interaction, and concepts of development. In each of these areas Wohlwill made seminal contributions, helping to shape, maintain, and even change the direction of research and thought. Specific topics addressed here by his colleagues, students, and contemporaries include: the shape of development, the intermingling of perception and cognition, the balance between innate and acquired processes, the relation between environmental and ecological psychology, the development of the ability to use external representations of the physical environment, and the way world views underpin beliefs about the nature of development.

Derived from a conference honoring the legacy of Joachim Wohlwill, this volume is designed to reflect as many facets of the late scholar's wide-ranging work as possible. As its title indicates, the book identifies three broad areas in which Wohlwill made significant contributions: art and aesthetics, human-environment interaction, and concepts of development. In each of these areas Wohlwill made seminal contributions, helping to shape, maintain, and even change the direction of research and thought. Specific topics addressed here by his colleagues, students, and contemporaries include: the shape of development, the intermingling of perception and cognition, the balance between innate and acquired processes, the relation between environmental and ecological psychology, the development of the ability to use external representations of the physical environment, and the way world views underpin beliefs about the nature of development.

This volume is a festschrift dedicated to James J. Jenkins, a pioneer in many areas of experimental psychology. It has three major goals: to provide a forum for debate on current theoretical issues in cognitive psychology, to capture the "state of the art" in reviews of research methods and results, and to generate ideas for new research directions and methodologies. Contributors -- including Jenkins' former students and present colleagues -- ponder fundamental questions such as:
* How do people learn to read?
* What happens during the processes of speech perception?
* How do people acquire problem solving skills?
* How do cognitive and motor skills develop and integrate with one another?
Many chapters focus specifically on ecological and applied cognitive psychology. Specific topics covered include visual and speech perception, language, memory, motivation, child development, problem solving, and pedagogy.