The articles in this special issue of the "Journal of Cognition and Development" examine the cognitive development of children who are following typical and atypical developmental pathways. The articles offer a mixture of theory-based considerations, reviews of the literature, and new empirical data addressing fundamental aspects of…

For many decades, tool use has been viewed primarily as a cognitive achievement, an ability that separates not only adults and older children from infants, but humans from virtually all other species. According to this standard account, tool use and associated means-ends behaviors are dependent on symbolic or representational thinking. Organisms…

The expert performance approach championed by Ericsson et al. provides a scientific way forward for research on giftedness, and offers exciting new ways to further one's understanding of the determinants of high ability within a particular domain of expertise. While the methods the authors use are commendable and are likely to further one's…

Jones and Herbert describe research on deferred imitation and how this research reflects on the development of explicit memory in infancy. The article raises several interesting questions about how the medial temporal lobe memory system develops. In this commentary, I discuss some of the additional theoretical and empirical questions that are…

Developmental contextualism focuses on changes in fused relations between developing people and their changing contexts. Research on cognitive training in the aged years provides evidence about plasticity throughout life because it alters developmental trajectories through revised person-context relations. The studies in the current issue support…

Maintains that there are core-specific and non-core-specific domains of knowledge, but that only the core-specific domains benefit from innate skeletal structures. Asserts that core skeletal domains are universally shared, even though their particular foci may vary. Emphasizes that individuals vary in terms of the noncore domains they acquire.…

Argues that developmental psychologists need attitudes, methods, and conceptual schemes that integrate the distinctive contributions of both nature and nurture in order to study change and consistency in developmental functions, as well as individual differences in behaviors of interest. A conceptual scheme for early mental development is…

Questions the validity of current reductionist assumptions concerning learning differences and proposes a new science of life based on dynamic, transforming, hierarchically organized systems of energy. This view of cognition is related to Piaget's insights, which are extended to include a view of learning differences consistent with these…

The low predictive validity of infant tests is discussed in light of current issues in developmental psychology. Considers continuity and discontinuity in the development of early cognitive competence, intellectual heterogeneity problems, and individual-environment transactions. Provides suggestions for increasing predictive validity and indicates…

Because developmental theories of Vygotsky, Piaget, and Bandura are far more complex than much of the empirical work based on them, researchers have concentrated on relatively narrow aspects of each man's ideas, in the process magnifying the differences between them. Nevertheless, basic differences do exist in each theorist's conceptualization of…

Agrees with proposition of Tudge and Winterhoff in the previous article that the differences between the developmental theories of Vygotsky, Piaget, and Bandura have been exaggerated over the last 30 years. Perceived differences that distinguished these theories in the early 1960s have diminished dramatically, due in part to the later work of the…

Notes that the Piagetian perspective admits the existence of interindividual differences but interprets them as noise masking the universal logical succession of structures, whereas the differential perspective views development as consisting of "vicarious processes." Asserts that the main aim of the "procedural studies"…

Some feel that a persistent shortcoming of the collective views of human action is that they often advocate a view of the individual as merely a bearer or token for the group to which he or she belongs. These theories do not account for individual choice. This project attempts to arrive at a general critique of individualism, drawing on a number…

Lev Vygotsky maintained that historical and cultural aspects of development started from the point at which humans could first be distinguished from apes. It is critical to consider the dialectical relationship between the individual and the cultural environment in which the child actively masters cultural behavior. Interaction with others…

In response to Leonard (EC 600 867), two aspects of language development are identified in which the discrepancies between domains of language and/or cognitive development often observed in specific language impairment children occur naturally as a consequence of individual variation in rate of development together with relative independence of…