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.

Perceptual and Cognitive Development illustrates how the developmental approach yields fundamental contributions to our understanding of perception and cognition as a whole. The book discusses how to relate developmental, comparative, and neurological considerations to early learning and development, and it presents fundamental problems in cognition and language, such as the acquisition of a coherent, organized, and shared understanding of concepts and language. Discussions of learning, memory, attention, and problem solving are embedded within specific accounts of the neurological status of developing minds and the nature of knowledge.
Key Features
* Research advances and theoretical reorientations are updated in the Second Edition; the revision focuses more attention on the cognitive and biological sciences and neuroscience
* Illustrates how the developmental approach can yield fundamental contributions to our understanding of perception and cognition as a whole
* Discussions of learning, memory, and attention permeate individual chapters

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 them:
* 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 book deals primarily with the preschool child's conception of number and how that conception develops. This central concern is, however, embedded in a larger framework, namely, an overriding interest in early cognitive capacities and their relationship to subsequent capacities. The initial chapters develop this broader framework.