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This text synthesizes 15 years of empirical research on essentialism into a coherent framework, examining children's thinking and ways in which language influences thought. It shows that children do not come into the world as passive recipients of data.
Essentialism is the idea that certain categories, such as "dog," "man," or "intelligence," have an underlying reality or true nature that gives objects their identity. Where does this idea come from? In this book, Susan Gelman argues that essentialism is an early cognitive bias. Young children's concepts reflect a deep commitment to essentialism, and this commitment leads children to look beyond the obvious in many converging ways: when learning words, generalizing knowledge to new category members, reasoning about the insides of things, contemplating the role of nature versus nurture, and constructing causal explanations. Gelman argues against the standard view of children as concrete or fo...
Navigating the Social World covers the development of social cognition from infancy into adolescence, with a focus on the first decade of human life. (dust cover).
A collection of essays introducing the reader to `domain-specificity'.
This book examines a key issue in current cognitive theories - the nature of representation. Each chapter is characterized by attempts to frame hot topics in cognitive development within the landscape of current developmental theorizing and the past legacy of genetic epistemology. The chapters address four questions that are fundamental to any developmental line of inquiry: How should we represent the workings and contents of the mind? How does the child construct mental models during the course of development? What are the origins of these models? and What accounts for the novelties that are the products and producers of developmental change? These questions are situated in a historical con...
This collection of original essays integrates the exciting recent scholarship on feminist theories and methods into developmental psychology. It also acquaints women's studies scholars with issues in developmental psychology that raise interesting questions for feminist theories. Its focus goes beyond that of traditional scholarship that tends to focus only on sex differences and sex roles; instead it considers alternative views of what is worth studying, how one should study it, etc. The chapters provide new, feminist perspectives on topics of great current interest to developmental psychologists.
This book presents current observational and experimental research on the links between thought and language in such children.
Reflecting the focus of a Jean Piaget Symposium entitled Biology and Knowledge: Structural Constraints on Development, this volume presents many of the emergent themes discussed. Among these themes are: Structural constraints on cognitive development and learning come in many shapes and forms and involve appeal to more than one level of analysis. To postulate innate knowledge is not to deny that humans can acquire new concepts. It is unlikely that there is only one learning mechanism, even if one prefers to work with general as opposed to domain-specific mechanisms. The problems of induction with respect to concept acquisition are even harder than originally thought.
This handbook presents a cutting-edge overview of cognitive development, spanning methodology, key domain-based findings and applications.
New in paperback-- A transformative book on the way we think about the nature of concepts and the relations between language and thought.