Whether or not infants' earliest perception of the world is a "blooming, buzzing, confusion," it is not long before they come to perceive structure and order among the objects and events around them. At the core of this process, and cognitive development in general, is the ability to categorize--to group events, objects, or properties together--and to form mental representations, or concepts, that encapsulate the commonalities and structure of these categories. Categorization is the primary means of coding experience, underlying not only perceptual and reasoning processes, but also inductive inference and language. The aim of this book is to bring together the most recent findings and theories about the origins and early development of categorization and conceptual abilities. Despite recent advances in our understanding of this area, a number of hotly debated issues remain at the center of the controversy over categorization. Researchers continue to ask questions such as: Which mechanisms for categorization are available at birth and which emerge later? What are the relative roles of perceptual similarity and nonobservable properties in early classification? What is the role of contextual variation in categorization by infants and children? Do different experimental procedures reveal the same kind of knowledge? Can computational models simulate infant and child categorization? How do computational models inform behavioral research? What is the impact of language on category development? How does language partition the world? This book is the first to address these and other key questions within a single volume. The authors present a diverse set of views representing cutting-edge empirical and theoretical advances in the field. The result is a thorough review of empirical contributions to the literature, and a wealth of fresh theoretical perspectives on early categorization.

Early Category and Concept Development

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Rakison, David H.

Oakes, Lisa M.

Psychology & Counseling

Oxford University Press

Despite early speculations that young infants are unable to form memories, since the 1950s developmental scientists have documented amazing memory abilities in infancy and explored how these abilities develop. This research on memory development in infancy and early childhood has recently moved in exciting new directions. Extensions of work on memory systems in adults and the use of behavioral and neuroscience methods to study early developing memory abilities have lead to an explosion of ideas about the neural underpinnings of memory, its development, and the mechanisms involved in these developmental changes. This book focuses on recent empirical and theoretical advances in the study of memory development in infancy and early childhood and on mechanisms of developmental change. Its chapters allow readers to compare and contrast contemporary views of memory development, and gain an understanding of what we do and do not yet know about how memory develops in early childhood.

Short- and Long-Term Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood

Bauer, Patricia J.

Children take their first steps, speak their first words, and learn to solve many new problems seemingly overnight. Yet, each change reflects previous developments in the child across a range of domains, and each change provides opportunities for future development. Developmental Cascades proposes a new framework for understanding development by arguing that change can be explained in terms of the events that occur at one point in development, which set the stage or cause a ripple effect for the emergence or development of different abilities, functions, or behavior at another point in time. It is argued that these developmental cascades are influenced by different kinds of constraints that do not have a single foundation: they may originate from the structure of the child's nervous system and body, the physical or social environment, or knowledge and experience. These constraints occur at multiple levels of processing, change over time, and both contribute to developmental cascades and are their product. Oakes and Rakison present an overview of this developmental cascade perspective as a general framework for understanding change throughout a lifespan, although it is applied primarily to cognitive development in infancy. Issues on how a cascade approach obviates the dichotomy between domain-general and domain-specific mechanisms and the origins of constraints are addressed. The framework is illustrated utilizing a wide range of domains (e.g., attachment, gender, motor development), and is examined in detail through application to three domains within infant cognitive development (looking behavior, object representations, and concepts for animacy).

Developmental Cascades: Building the Infant Mind

Topically organized and written in a conversational tone,Infancy: The Development of the Whole Childunites cutting-edge theories and research to illustrate the development of the whole child from birth to age three.

Infancy: The Development of the Whole Child

LoBue, Vanessa

Casasola, Marianella

Parenting & Relationships

Sage Publications, Inc.

Infancy

Thousand Oaks : SAGE Publications, Inc

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Oakes, Lisa M.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Oakes, Lisa M.