Children's thinking is highly variable at every level of analysis, from neural and associative levels to the level of strategies, theories, and other aspects of high-level cognition. This variability exists within people as well as between them; individual children often rely on different strategies or representations on closely related problems…

The marriage of evolution and development to produce the new discipline "evo-devo" in biology is situated in the general history of evolutionary biology, and its significance for developmental cognitive science is discussed. The discovery and description of the highly conserved, robust and "evolvable" mechanisms that organize the vertebrate body…

Neuroconstructivism is a theoretical framework focusing on the construction of representations in the developing brain. Cognitive development is explained as emerging from the experience-dependent development of neural structures supporting mental representations. Neural development occurs in the context of multiple interacting constraints acting…

Individuals with low working memory capacity (e.g. preschoolers) are more prone to goal neglect, or a failure to execute a goal even though it is understood. We examined the role of goal neglect in performance on the Dimensional Change Card Sort by including 'redundant' cards that could be sorted without attending to the rules, as well as the…

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…

In theory of mind research, there is a long standing dispute about whether children come to understand the subjectivity of both desires and beliefs at the same time (around age 4), or whether there is an asymmetry such that desires are understood earlier. To address this issue, 3-year olds' understanding of situations in which two persons have…

We investigated a test of strategic reasoning (the Windows task) that in different studies has yielded contrasting pictures of young children's executive abilities [Russell, J., Mauthner, N., Sharpe, S., & Tidswell, T. (1991). "The 'windows task' as a measure of strategic deception in preschoolers and autistic subjects." "British Journal of…

Most leadership programs emphasize knowledge over skills, being skillful over how to be skillful, knowledge about skills over skill application, and ad hoc and hard-to-assess field activities over focused and observable skill practice. "Knowledge and skill application laboratories" provide opportunities to experiment with--and receive…

Across two studies, a wide age range of participants was interviewed about the nature of death. All participants were living in rural Madagascar in a community where ancestral beliefs and practices are widespread. In Study 1, children (8-17 years) and adults (19-71 years) were asked whether bodily and mental processes continue after death. The…

Behavioral, neuropsychological, and brain imaging research points to a dedicated system for processing number that is shared across development and across species. This foundational Approximate Number System (ANS) operates over multiple modalities, forming representations of the number of objects, sounds, or events in a scene. This system is…

This article aims to outline the reported experiences of practitioners in a local authority in England where, since the mid-1990s, a high proportion of teachers have undertaken professional development in the field of teaching thinking skills. The article is based on the main findings from a questionnaire survey which was carried out among first,…

Quinlan et al. [Quinlan, p., van der Mass, H., Jansen, B., Booij, O., & Rendell, M. (this issue). Re-thinking stages of cognitive development: An appraisal of connectionist models of the balance scale task. "Cognition", doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.02.004] use Latent Class Analysis (LCA) to criticize a connectionist model of development on the…

This paper is in memory of Esther Thelen, who passed away while President of the Society for Research in Child Development. A survey of Esther Thelen's career reveals a trajectory from early work on simple movements like stepping, to the study of goal-directed reaching, to work on the embodiment of cognition, and, ultimately, to a grand theory of…

Reports on a portion of a long-term investigation carried out to determine the prognostic significance of newborn behavioral assessments for later development and behavior, in terms of identifying a subpopulation which would be a high risk group. (Author/SDH)

There are promising suggestions in ethical philosophy that may assist substantially in the clarification of issues in the affective domain in education. These suggestions may be viewed in two aspects--as analytical distinctions and as synthetic coordination of these analytic elements. It is possible to construct an intelligible theory of the…