Most research on children's conception of death has probed their understanding of its biological aspects: its inevitability, irreversibility and terminal impact. Yet many adults subscribe to a religious conception implying that death marks the beginning of a new life. Two recent empirical studies confirm that in the course of development, children…

Both drawing and language are fundamental and unique to humans as a species. Just as language is a representational system that uses systematic sounds (or manual/bodily signs) to express concepts, drawing is a means of "graphically" expressing concepts. Yet, unlike language, we consider it normal for people not to learn to draw, and consider those…

Differential cognitive performance across cultural contexts has been a standard result in comparative research. Here we discuss how societal changes occurring when a small-scale traditional community incorporates elements from industrialized society may contribute to cognitive development, and we illustrate this with an analysis of the cognitive…

The goal of this paper is to contribute to the revival of Heinz Werner's organismic-developmental theory by considering some of its key claims in relation to contemporary developmental theory and research. The organismic-developmental definition of development in terms of differentiation and integration is first discussed in relation to…

The theory of conceptual fields is a developmental theory. It has two aims: (1) to describe and analyse the progressive complexity, on a long- and medium-term basis, of the mathematical competences that students develop inside and outside school, and (2) to establish better connections between the operational form of knowledge, which consists in…

Adolescence is a period of marked change in the person's cognitive, physical, psychological, and social development and in the individual's relations with the people and institutions of the social world. These changes place adaptational demands on adolescents, ones involving relations between their actions upon the context and the action of the…

The developmental psychology of mathematical thinking and the clinical interview method can make major contributions to education by transforming the process of formative assessment--the attempt to use information concerning student performance, knowledge, learning potential, and motivation to inform instruction. The clinical interview is a…

While recognizing major contributions of the contemporary theory-of-mind framework, we identify conceptual and cultural gaps with respect to its inattention to deontic considerations. The framework has tended to portray behavior as purely self-directed, thereby neglecting everyday reasoners' understanding of behavior as normatively based. However,…

Studying human development involves describing, explaining, and optimizing intraindividual change and interindividual differences in such change and, as such, requires longitudinal research. The selection of the appropriate type of longitudinal design requires selecting the option that best addresses the theoretical questions asked about…

The assumption of domain specificity has been invaluable to the study of the emergence of biological thought in young children. Yet, domains of thought must be understood within a broader context that explains how those domains relate to the surrounding cultures, to different kinds of cognitive constraints, to framing effects, to abilities to…

Both Vygotsky, a psychologist, and Halliday, a social linguist, argue for the central role of language in human development. Language is the principal mode of meaning making; it mediates both the communication through which thinking with others is made possible and also the inner speech through which individual thinking is brought under conscious…

Philosophers and scientists seeking to conceptualize consciousness, and subjective experience in particular, have focused on sensation and perception, and have emphasized binding--how a percept holds together. Building on a constructivist approach to conception centered on separistic-holistic complexes incorporating multiple levels of abstraction,…

The study of neurobehavioral development focuses on the mechanisms through which the experiences of an individual influence the ontogeny of brain circuits that ultimately control complex functions, such as social engagement, mood and emotional regulation and cognition. Advances in experimental approaches and technologies provide opportunities to…

This paper synthesizes two perspectives on essentialism: cognitive and social. The cognitive essentialist perspective argues that our bias to appeal to the psychological belief that categories have innate essences enables us to make inferences about social categories such as race, caste, and gender. The social essentialist perspective argues that…

This paper builds on Hatano and Inagaki's pioneering work on the role of experience and cultural models in children's biological reasoning. We use a category-based induction task to consider how experience and cultural models shape rural and urban children's patterns of biological reasoning. We discuss the implications of these findings for…