As thinking adults depend upon years of practical experience, reasoning about facts and causes, and language to sustain their knowledge, beliefs and memories, and to understand one another, it seems quite absurd to suggest that a newborn infant has intersubjective mental capacities. But detailed research on how neonatal selves coordinate the…

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,…

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…

Evolutionary psychology raises questions about how cognitive adaptations might be related to the emergence of formal schooling. Is there a special role for natural domains of cognition such as folk physics, folk psychology and folk biology? These domains may vary from small fragments of reasoning to large integrated systems. This heterogeneity…

The authors criticize the central place of belief-desire psychology in the theories-of-mind enterprise. They detail the merits of adopting a more agentive framework for conceptualizing human action and demonstrate how children's growing understanding of epistemic agency relates to advances in moral reasoning. (Contains 4 tables and 2 figures.)

The paper attempts some clarifications and differentiations concerning (1) Bick's classic distinction between states of helpless unintegration and states of defensive disintegration; (2) the difference between a state and a phase, and Bick's apparent challenge to some aspects of object relations thinking. The paper then lists some types of early…

The view of musical creativity as spanning a continuum from the noises of the unschooled young child to the artistry of the trained professional fails to account for fundamental, developmental differences in the creators' perspectives. This paper seeks to distinguish two ways in which the creative functioning of the child or novice differ from…

For infants and toddlers, education and care are "two sides of the same coin." The author briefly reviews current research on the importance of relationships to cognitive development and early language and literacy. Instructional strategies that are most appropriate to the early years include "intentionality" and "scaffolding." Intentionality…

Examines five different examples of scribble art with the purpose of entering the experience of the scribbler through empathetic understanding. The participants include a schizophrenic adult; a blind, deaf, and autistic 10-year old; a known artist; a precocious 3-year old; and an elephant. Paper discovers commonalties in their efforts. (MJP)