Discusses creativity, play, and nonconformity in children, including the illusion of thought disorder or abnormality, and aspects of everyday creativity, health, and survival. Describes creative divergence, chaotic amplification, the evolution of information, and primitive cognitive processes. Concludes with a discussion of cognitive styles,…

Uses results of laboratory and natural language analyses of 2- to 4-year olds' explanations of human behavior to argue for a theory-type view of biological, psychological, and physical domains of thought. Concludes that children as young as 2 years show three different reasoning systems in their explanations of everyday phenomena, especially human…

Examined reasoning in normal, autistic, and deaf individuals. Found that deaf individuals who grow up in hearing homes without fluent signers show selective impairments in theory of mind similar to those of autistic individuals. Results suggest that conversational differences in the language children hear accounts for distinctive patterns of…

Presents a three-component model of arithmetical development in young children. Applies this model as a basis for analysis of developmental processes in early mathematics learning that may be universal. (RJC)

Focuses on three main issues emerging from studies of conceptual development: (1) young children's naive theories of the world; (2) how innate constraints in conceptual development work; and (3) how innate and sociocultural constraints are integrated. Maintains that early development of core domains of thought (naive psychology, physics, and…

Psychological and biological reasoning are intertwined yet differentiated in preschoolers' understandings of bodily processes and events. Three studies suggest that preschoolers distinguish biological phenomena from psychological ones in their causal reasoning, although their reasoning about biological phenomena is sometimes influenced by…

Uses clinical case studies showing autistic children's fascination with and understanding of machines, family studies focusing on occupations of fathers and grandfathers of children with autism or Asperger Syndrome, and experimental evidence using picture-sequencing methods to identify physical or intentional causality to show that children with…

Reviews the major literature on creative processes in children that should be predictive of adult creativity, focusing on affective processes and children's play. Describes Russ's (1993) model of affect and creativity, and cognitive processes, personality processes, and affective processes important in creativity. Discusses theories of play,…