David H. Rakison - Böcker

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).

The study of object category development is a central concern in the field of cognitive science. Researchers investigating visual and auditory perception, cognition, language acquisition, semantics, neuroscience, and modeling have begun to tackle a number of different but centrally related questions concerning the representations and processes that underlie categorization and its development. This book covers a broad range of current research topics in category development. Its aim is to understand the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that underlie category formation and how they change in developmental time.The chapters in this book are organized around three interrelated themes: (1) the fundamental process by which infants recognize and remember objects and their properties, (2) the contribution of language in selecting relevant features for object categorization, and (3) the higher-level cognitive processes that guide the formation of semantic systems. The volume is appropriate for researchers, educators, and advanced graduate students.

The study of object category development is a central concern in the field of cognitive science. Researchers investigating visual and auditory perception, cognition, language acquisition, semantics, neuroscience, and modeling have begun to tackle a number of different but centrally related questions concerning the representations and processes that underlie categorization and its development. This book covers a broad range of current research topics in category development. Its aim is to understand the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that underlie category formation and how they change in developmental time.The chapters in this book are organized around three interrelated themes: (1) the fundamental process by which infants recognize and remember objects and their properties, (2) the contribution of language in selecting relevant features for object categorization, and (3) the higher-level cognitive processes that guide the formation of semantic systems. The volume is appropriate for researchers, educators, and advanced graduate students.