This book examines a key issue in current cognitive theories - the nature of representation. Each chapter is characterized by attempts to frame hot topics in cognitive development within the landscape of current developmental theorizing and the past legacy of genetic epistemology. The chapters address four questions that are fundamental to any developmental line of inquiry:

• How should we represent the workings and contents of the mind?
• How does the child construct mental models during the course of development?
• What are the origins of these models? and
• What accounts for the novelties that are the products and producers of developmental change?

These questions are situated in a historical context, Piagetian theory, and contemporary researchers attempt to trace how they draw upon, depart from, and transform the Piagetian legacy to revisit classic issues such as the child's awareness of the workings of mental life, the child's ability to represent the world, and the child's growing ability to process and learn from experience. The theoretical perspectives covered include constructivism, connectionism, theory-theory, information processing, dynamical systems, and social constructivist approaches. The research areas span imitation, mathematical reasoning, biological knowledge, language development, and theory of mind.

Written by major contributors to the field, this work will be of interest to students and researchers wanting a brief but in-depth overview of the contemporary field of cognitive development.

This book examines a key issue in current cognitive theories - the nature of representation. Each chapter is characterized by attempts to frame hot topics in cognitive development within the landscape of current developmental theorizing and the past legacy of genetic epistemology. The chapters address four questions that are fundamental to any developmental line of inquiry: How should we represent the workings and contents of the mind? How does the child construct mental models during the course of development? What are the origins of these models? and What accounts for the novelties that are the products and producers of developmental change? These questions are situated in a historical context, Piagetian theory, and contemporary researchers attempt to trace how they draw upon, depart from, and transform the Piagetian legacy to revisit classic issues such as the child's awareness of the workings of mental life, the child's ability to represent the world, and the child's growing ability to process and learn from experience. The theoretical perspectives covered include constructivism, connectionism, theory-theory, information processing, dynamical systems, and social constructivist approaches. The research areas span imitation, mathematical reasoning, biological knowledge, language development, and theory of mind. Written by major contributors to the field, this work will be of interest to students and researchers wanting a brief but in-depth overview of the contemporary field of cognitive development.

This book integrates some of the most exciting recent scholarship on feminist theories and methods into developmental psychology.

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Towards a Feminist Developmental Psychology integrates the exciting recent scholarship on feminist theories with issues and concepts of developmental psychology. This collection of original essays brings to women's studies cholars aspects of developmental psychology that raise raise interesting questions for feminist theories. The volume provides both a critique of developmental psychology and a framework for a broader, richer, and more complex account of development.

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Always reflective of the latest research and thinking in the field, Patricia Miller's acclaimed text offers an ideal way to help students understand and distinguish the major theoretical schools of child development. This fully updated new edition includes a new focus on biological theories of development, and offers new instructor resource materials. Each major theory is discussed in terms of general orientation, mechanisms of development, its' strengths and weaknesses, its' applications, the historical context that led to its' development, and in an all new section the contemporary research associated with it.