Although there is consensus about the importance of early communicative gestures such as pointing, there is an ongoing debate regarding how infants develop the ability to understand and produce pointing gestures. We review competing theories regarding this development and use observations from a diary study of infants' social development, focusing…

Game theory has been one of the most prominent theories in the social sciences, influencing diverse academic disciplines such as anthropology, biology, economics, and political science. In recent years, economists have employed game theory to investigate behaviors relating to fairness, reciprocity, and trust. Surprisingly, this research has not…

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…

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…

To bring out Giyoo Hatano's contributions to the understanding of culture and cognitive development, we note first his special style--thoughtful, inventive, and always focused on central issues and on combining theory with data--and then, for three areas, some of the conceptual advances he proposed. The areas have to do with ties between cognitive…

Outlines how levels of the interpretation of reality and categories of a naive theory of action that constitute these levels are differentiated and coordinated in a specific developmental sequence. Subsumed within this theoretical framework are the distinction between action on physical objects and social interaction and the distinction between…

Comparisons of research on theory of mind and on social development yield divergent conclusions regarding children's awareness of others' internal states. This divergence reflects differences in methodology of the two models and in researchers' framing of the problem of understanding others' mental states. Argues that children's understandings of…

Presents a model of the development of desociocentering, decentering relative to the social group, which is based on Piagetian research and theory and Wernerian concepts. (Author/SS)

Briefly discusses similarities and differences between social and physical knowledge. Argues that the study of social cognition cannot be derived from, nor reduced to, the study of physical cognition, and that the social origins of knowledge need to be emphasized more in contemporary developmental theory. (Author/SS)

Attempts to integrate Piaget's conceptualization of the development of social knowledge with the position of dialectical psychologists. (BD)

Argues for a constructivist theoretical approach to the developmental study of the self, an approach which focuses on self-other differentiation and acquisition of categories of self. (SS)

Study of regular changes in an interpersonal interaction over time, and how these changes can be related to the individual development sequences of the members of the interaction. (ST)

Discusses the article by Lewis in this issue in the context of complex systems theory. Reviews several concepts of complex systems theory, including self-organization, entropy, phase transitions, stochastic processes, nonlinearity, and attractors. Notes that Lewis highlights the need for psychological models to treat nonlinear processes, chaotic…

Studies the effects of mothers' presence and absence on two infants from birth to two years. (AJ)