Jean Piaget Symposia Series – serie

This volume in the JPS Series is intended to help crystallize the emergence of a new field, "Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience," aimed at elucidating the neural correlates of the development of socio-emotional experience and behavior. No one any longer doubts that infants are born with a biologically based head start in accomplishing their important life tasks––genetic resources, if you will, that are exploited differently in different contexts. Nevertheless, it is also true that socially relevant neural functions develop slowly during childhood and that this development is owed to complex interactions among genes, social and cultural environments, and children’s own behavior. A key challenge lies in finding appropriate ways of describing these complex interactions and the way in which they unfold in real developmental time. This is the challenge that motivates research in developmental social cognitive neuroscience.The chapters in this book highlight the latest and best research in this emerging field, and they cover a range of topics, including the typical and atypical development of imitation, impulsivity, novelty seeking, risk taking, self and social awareness, emotion regulation, moral reasoning, and executive function. Also addressed are the potential limitations of a neuroscientific approach to the development of social cognition.Intended for researchers and advanced students in neuroscience and developmental, cognitive, and social psychology, this book is appropriate for graduate seminars and upper-level undergraduate courses on social cognitive neuroscience, developmental neuroscience, social development, and cognitive development.

Until recently, the body has been largely ignored in theories and empirical research in psychology, particularly in developmental psychology. Recently however, several conceptions of the relation between body and mind have been developed. Common among these conceptions is the idea that the body plays an important role in our emotional, social, and cognitive lives.This latest volume in the Jean Piaget Society Symposia Series illustrates different ways in which the concept of embodiment can be used in developmental psychology and related disciplines. It explores the role of the body in the development of meaning, consciousness, and psychological functioning. The overall goal is to demonstrate how the concept of embodiment can deepen our understanding of developmental psychology by suggesting new possibilities of integrating biological, psychological, and socio-cultural approaches.Developmental Perspective on Embodiment and Consciousness explores embodiment in two ways. First, embodiment is examined as a condition of and influencing the particular shape of psychological experience. This sense of embodiment reflects the effort to put the mind back into the body. Second, embodiment is examined as a reflective experience in the sense that the mind forms particular images about the body. This sense of embodiment reflects the effort to put the body into the mind.The book opens with a discussion of embodiment from a meta-theoretical perspective. Then the role of embodiment in grounding conceptual meaning is examined. This is followed by discussions of the role of embodiment in strengthening our understanding of emotions, cognitive development, religious experiences, and social development. Then the role of the body in spatial cognition and the role of language in the development of complex forms of consciousness are explored. The final chapters examine the impact of culture on the conceptualization of the embodied self. The book concludes with an overview of the historical context of the mind-body dualism and a discussion of how the idea of embodiment transcends this dualism.Intended for researchers and advanced students in developmental, cognitive, and social psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, anthropology, biology, and sociology, this new book also serves as a reference for advanced courses on cognition and development.

Among the many conceits of modern thought is the idea that philosophy, tainted as it is by subjective evaluation, is a shaky guide for human affairs. People, it is argued, are better off if they base their conduct either on know-how with its pragmatic criterion of truth (i.e., possibility) or on science with its universal criterion of rational necessity.Since Helmholtz, there has been increasing concern in the life sciences about the role of reductionism in the construction of knowledge. Is psychophysics really possible? Are biological phenomena just the deducible results of chemical phenomena? And if life can be reduced to molecular mechanisms only, where do these miraculous molecules come from, and how do they work? On a psychological level, people wonder whether psychological phenomena result simply from genetically hardwired structures in the brain or whether, even if not genetically determined, they can be identified with the biochemical processes of that organ. In sociology, identical questions arise.If physical or chemical reduction is not practicable, should we think in terms of other forms of reduction, say, the reduction of psychological to sociological phenomena or in terms of what Piaget has called the "reduction of the lower to the higher" (e.g., teleology)? All in all, then, reductionism in both naive and sophisticated forms permeates all of human thought and may, at least in certain cases, be necessary to it. If so, what exactly are those cases?The papers collected in this volume are all derived from the 29th Annual Symposium of the Jean Piaget Society. The intent of the volume is to examine the issue of reductionism on the theoretical level in several sciences, including biology, psychology, and sociology. A complementary intent is to examine it from the point of view of the practical effects of reductionistic doctrine on daily life.

This volume considers previously separate bodies of research on social justice, social equality, and social development. Eminent scholars from a variety of disciplines discuss the latest research to help us understand the relation between social inequalities and social development. In so doing, the book documents the powerful ways that social inequalities frame development and explores the conflicts that arise in the context of these inequalities. It illustrates how people around the world make judgments about these conditions and how they resist or change the practices they deem unjust. By bringing together these perspectives, the editors hope to demonstrate how understanding social development carries with it the possibility of change and social justice.The book considers processes of social development. It examines Piaget’s ideas about morality and relates them to children’s thinking about social rights. An interdisciplinary review of research from developmental, social, and health psychology, social policy, anthropology, and philosophy, follows this introduction. Each contributor examines the historical, developmental, and social processes that influence beliefs regarding social justice and equality and the consequences of living in conditions of injustice. The book considers:Inequalities in educational and health care opportunities.Unequal rights and harassment and their effects on minorities.The hardships and inequalities encountered by women.Intended for researchers and advanced students in developmental, social, cultural, and health psychology, policy, anthropology, and philosophy interested in a world that is socially just.

In this new volume, leading researchers provide state-of-the-art perspectives on how social interaction influences the development of knowledge. The book integrates approaches from a variety of disciplines including developmental psychology, psychopathology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, evolutionary biology, and primatology. It reviews the nature and type of interactions that promote development as well as the conceptual frameworks used to explain the relation between individuals and groups. Social Life and Social Knowledge comprehensively addresses conceptual questions central to understanding human life and development:Is the human form of social life reducible to biological processes?What psychological abilities constitute the specifically human form of social life?What are the processes and contexts within which these abilities develop?How should we conceptualize the links between social life and the development of thought, and how do individuals and society contribute to these processes?The book is intended for philosophers, primatologists, anthropologists, biologists, sociologists, and developmental and educational psychologists interested in social development, social cognition, and developmental psychopathology. It also serves as a resource for courses in social development and those that focus on the intersection between cognition, development, and culture.

This interdisciplinary volume explores art, its development, and its role in the construction of knowledge. Presenting theory and research on artistic development as a cultural and creative endeavor, contributors examine the origins of human art during the Paleolithic cultural revolution, as part of a modern cultural transformation, in the growth of a creative artist, and in developing children. Target chapters expressing the disciplinary perspectives of psychology, archaeology, communications, education, and the performing arts are followed by commentaries from internationally acclaimed scholars of human development. Part 1 explores how cultures harness and exploit the arts to give expression to values, social practices, and traditions. This section traces the emergence of new art forms that arose during social unrest, including the symbolization of spiritual beliefs expressed on the walls of Paleolithic caves, and the racial identity and cultural values expressed in the media of the hip-hop generation. Part 2 examines the journeys of a composer and a group of students to highlight the process of becoming an artist and the role education plays in its development. The book concludes with a focus on the development of aesthetic appreciation and artistic activity in childhood and adolescence, including, for example, how a child’s developing theory of mind affects appreciation for the arts, and how developing empathy and emotional regulation contribute to the cognitive and affective underpinnings of acting in adolescence. As a whole contributors explore the developmental, sociocultural, and evolutionary processes that make the creation and experience of art possible. Intended for researchers and advanced students in both human development and the arts, this book will also serve as a textbook for advanced courses on psychology and the arts and/or special topics courses in cognitive and/or human development.

Changing Conceptions of Psychological Life is an interdisciplinary look at personal constructions of self. This book is a product of the 30th Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society. The contributing authors constitute the original cast invited to speak on the theme of how individuals come to construe psychological lives--their own and others. Their concerns are how our sense of ourselves emerges developmentally, culturally, and historically, and the implications such constructions have for personal, social, and political change. Together, the authors compose an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars well regarded for their work on topics as diverse as adolescence, language, aging, romance, and morality.Creating a level of discourse about selves and mind--and how they have been and should be studied--the volume is broken down into four parts; Part I includes work that is principally concerned with elevating the position of our experience of ourselves in constructing who we are. The next section focuses on the corrections presumed to exist between the conceptions of self and the conceptions of mental life. Each chapter offers additional information on the dynamics of temperament, attachment, personality, and regulation. Part III is concerned with cultural contexts that frame developing conceptions of self and mental life. Finally, the last section situates conceptions of mental life directly and dramatically in the social contexts of their making.Readers will find in these pages a programmatic effort variously attuned to selves and minds as dynamic and structured, present and represented, felt and known, non-languaged and storied, and embodied and theorized. The volume is suitable for certain upper-level undergraduate and graduate seminars dealing with clinical, cognitive, cultural, and developmental matters and sought out by active researchers and practitioners in the field.

Language, Literacy, and Cognitive Development addresses the impact of language and literacy on cognitive development.Top researchers examine the cognitive significance of the growth in children's ability to express themselves symbolically, whether that involves communicating linguistically, mathematically, logically, or through some other symbol system expressed in speech, gesture, notations, or some other means.The book contributes to refining and answering questions regarding the nature, origin, and development of symbolic communication in all its forms, and their consequences for the cognitive development of the younger child at home and the older child at school.

This interdisciplinary volume explores art, its development, and its role in the construction of knowledge. Presenting theory and research on artistic development as a cultural and creative endeavor, contributors examine the origins of human art during the Paleolithic cultural revolution, as part of a modern cultural transformation, in the growth of a creative artist, and in developing children. Target chapters expressing the disciplinary perspectives of psychology, archaeology, communications, education, and the performing arts are followed by commentaries from internationally acclaimed scholars of human development. Part 1 explores how cultures harness and exploit the arts to give expression to values, social practices, and traditions. This section traces the emergence of new art forms that arose during social unrest, including the symbolization of spiritual beliefs expressed on the walls of Paleolithic caves, and the racial identity and cultural values expressed in the media of the hip-hop generation. Part 2 examines the journeys of a composer and a group of students to highlight the process of becoming an artist and the role education plays in its development. The book concludes with a focus on the development of aesthetic appreciation and artistic activity in childhood and adolescence, including, for example, how a child’s developing theory of mind affects appreciation for the arts, and how developing empathy and emotional regulation contribute to the cognitive and affective underpinnings of acting in adolescence. As a whole contributors explore the developmental, sociocultural, and evolutionary processes that make the creation and experience of art possible. Intended for researchers and advanced students in both human development and the arts, this book will also serve as a textbook for advanced courses on psychology and the arts and/or special topics courses in cognitive and/or human development.

This volume juxtaposes two different domains of developmental theory: the Piagetian approach and the information-processing approach.Articles by experts in both fields discuss how concepts of development and learning, traditionally approached through cognitive-developmental theories such as Piaget's, are analyzed from the perspective of a task analytic, information-processing approach.

A presentation of current work that systematically explores and articulates the nature, origin and development of reasoning, this volume's primary aim is to describe and examine contemporary theory and research findings on the topic of deductive reasoning.Many contributors believe concepts such as "structure," "competence," and "mental logic" are necessary features for a complete understanding of reasoning.As the book emanates from a Jean Piaget Symposium, his theory of intellectual development as the standard contemporary treatment of deductive reasoning is used as the context in which the contributors elaborate on their own perceptions.

Discussing the future value of computers as tools for cognitive development, the volume reviews past literature and presents new data from a Piagetian perspective.Constructivism in the Computer Age includes such topics as: teaching LOGO to children; the computers effects on social development; computer graphics as a new language; and computers as a means of enhancing reflective thinking.

This volume is the result of a symposium titled "Constructivist Approaches to Atypical Development and Developmental Psychopathology."What emerges from the work included here is a record of innovative extensions, refinements, and applications of the concept of constructivism.The chapters not only demonstrate the compatibility of constructivism with investigations of atypicality, but also the generation of a constructivist perspective for a wide array of problems in developmental psychology.

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.

In this volume leading developmentalists address the question of how children's thinking develops in context by drawing on the theories of Vygotsky, Gibson, and Piaget.Analyses of the ecology and the dynamics of behavior have become popular, emphasizing the particulars of people acting in specific environments and the many complex factors of human body and mind that contribute to action and thought. This volume brings together many of the current efforts to deal with development in this richly ecological, dynamic way.The research reported demonstrates that recent years have produced major shifts in approach. Activities are studied as they naturally occur in everyday contexts. Children's active construction of the world around them is treated as fundamentally social in nature, occurring in families, with peers, and in cultures. Behavior is studied not as something disembodied but within a rich matrix of body, emotion, belief, value, and physical world. Behavior is analyzed as changing dynamically, not only over seconds and minutes, but over hours, days, and years.

This volume marks the 20th Anniversary Symposium of the Jean Piaget Society. Some of the American contributors were among the first to introduce Piaget to developmental and educational psychology in the United States, while some of the international contributors worked with Piaget to develop his program of genetic epistemology and continue to make significant contributions to it.Within this volume the possibility of Piaget's paradigm is reviewed not only as the stuff of normal science, yielding fascinating empirical questions that linger within it, but also, and more importantly, as the stuff of revolutionary science, with continuing potential to comprehensively structure our thinking about developmental theory.The constructive contribution Piaget's theory has for developmental theory emerges as four central themes in the volume:understanding the intentional or semantic aspect of mental life without abandoning the Piagetian assumption that is rational and committed to truth testing;examining mental life and its development as a dialectical relation of function and structure--a relation Piaget introduced in his study of the developmental relation between procedural and operational knowledge;exploring new and interdisciplinary perspectives on equilibration as the driving force of constructive adaptive processes;understanding social and historical forces in individual and cultural development--not necessarily as forces antithetical to Piaget's perspective but as forces that take on new meaning within his framework which avoids erroneous dichotomies such as the distinction between subjective and objective knowledge.

It is widely recognized that a person's values will profoundly affect what that person attends to, thinks about, and remembers. Yet, despite this, psychologists have only begun to study and think about the deep connections between values and knowledge.This volume explores this important area in psychology by offering an overview of what is known about the developmental role of valuation in the acquisition of knowledge, and also by examining a range of new ideas for understanding the intricate connection between evaluation and thinking. More specifically, the text:provides a historical overview of philosophical and psychological theories relating the values and knowledge;reviews the importance of values for infants and their caretakers in the origins of both cognition and social relations;offers a provocative view of how the differences among families in their values may have profound affects on psychological development;explicates the development of a personal sphere within which one strives to shape one's own values;emphasizes the heterogeneity of valuation inherent in every culture and how conflicts of values are likely to be common and important to human development;presents eye-opening research on social-cognitive limitations of average people in respecting the points of view of others; andsummarizes and critiques Piaget's theory of the role of values in development.For practitioners in the fields of developmental and social psychology, and education, this volume will introduce a number of important and current issues, from multiculturality and gender to the differential roles of temperament and upbringing in development. The emphasis is placed squarely on developing individuals and how they shape themselves in a world that is structured by values as well as by facts.

This book and the symposium on which it was based were designed to cross the boundaries of subdiscipline and theoretical orientation to address four critical issues in understanding development: explanation of change and development; the nature and process of change; forms of variability in performance; and the promotion of change through application.The chapters suggest that change and development in target systems from cells to selves, may not be explainable, assessable, or promotable without careful reference to the context (social and otherwise) of the system, and that the process of change and development may involve variability of the system in addition to periods of stability. Together the chapters harken back to the spirit of the grand theory.Instead of proposing a grand theory, they provide an excellent foundation for considering the importance of an individual's (or particular group's) context and variability, and discussions to facilitate thinking about what still needs to be worked out.

Based on the 25th Anniversary Symposium of the Jean Piaget Society, this book represents cutting-edge work on the mechanisms of cognitive, social, and cultural development. The authors-anthropologists, biologists, historians of science, paleontologists, and psychologists-believe that a rebirth is in progress relating to the study of these mental developments. This volume seeks to illuminate this rebirth.The varied findings and approaches reported reveal that contemporary comparative research on mental development is in a phase of differentiation and integration. Far from being global and fused, this comparative study is a flowering field of diverse disciplinary approaches, empirical phenomena, scholarly topics, and theoretical perspectives. It focuses on the comparative phylogeny, ontogeny, and history of mentation-most notably on the comparative onset and offset ages, velocity, extent, sequencing, organization of thought, symbol, and value development. The world's leading authorities on the subject discuss the implications of the study of evolution for our models of the ontogenetic origins, development, and history of mentation, as well as determine the constraints that evolution imposes on mental development.Bringing the current interest in primate cognition to bear on studies of cognitive development in humans, this book will be of interest cognitive developmentalists, primatologists and comparitive psychologists.

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? andWhat accounts for the novelties that are the products and producers of developmental change?These questions are situated in a historical context, Piagetian theory, and contemporary researchers attempt to trace how they draw upon, depart from, and transform the Piagetian legacy to revisit classic issues such as the child's awareness of the workings of mental life, the child's ability to represent the world, and the child's growing ability to process and learn from experience. The theoretical perspectives covered include constructivism, connectionism, theory-theory, information processing, dynamical systems, and social constructivist approaches. The research areas span imitation, mathematical reasoning, biological knowledge, language development, and theory of mind.Written by major contributors to the field, this work will be of interest to students and researchers wanting a brief but in-depth overview of the contemporary field of cognitive development.

In this volume, the reader will find a host of fresh perspectives. Authors seek to reconceptualize problems, offering new frames for understanding relations between culture and human development.Contributors include scholars from the disciplines of philosophy, law, theology, anthropology, developmental psychology, neuro- and evolutionary psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, and physics. To help organize the discussions, the volume is divided into three parts. Each part reflects an arena of current scholarly activity related to the analysis of culture, cognition, and development.The editors cast a wide but carefully crafted net in assembling contributions to this volume. Though the contributors span a wide range of disciplines, features common to the work include both clear departures from the polemics of nature-nurture debates and a clear focus on interacting systems in individuals' activities, leading to novel developmental processes. All accounts are efforts to mark new and productive paths for exploring intrinsic relations between culture and development.

Language, Literacy, and Cognitive Development addresses the impact of language and literacy on cognitive development.Top researchers examine the cognitive significance of the growth in children's ability to express themselves symbolically, whether that involves communicating linguistically, mathematically, logically, or through some other symbol system expressed in speech, gesture, notations, or some other means.The book contributes to refining and answering questions regarding the nature, origin, and development of symbolic communication in all its forms, and their consequences for the cognitive development of the younger child at home and the older child at school.

Among the many conceits of modern thought is the idea that philosophy, tainted as it is by subjective evaluation, is a shaky guide for human affairs. People, it is argued, are better off if they base their conduct either on know-how with its pragmatic criterion of truth (i.e., possibility) or on science with its universal criterion of rational necessity.Since Helmholtz, there has been increasing concern in the life sciences about the role of reductionism in the construction of knowledge. Is psychophysics really possible? Are biological phenomena just the deducible results of chemical phenomena? And if life can be reduced to molecular mechanisms only, where do these miraculous molecules come from, and how do they work? On a psychological level, people wonder whether psychological phenomena result simply from genetically hardwired structures in the brain or whether, even if not genetically determined, they can be identified with the biochemical processes of that organ. In sociology, identical questions arise.If physical or chemical reduction is not practicable, should we think in terms of other forms of reduction, say, the reduction of psychological to sociological phenomena or in terms of what Piaget has called the "reduction of the lower to the higher" (e.g., teleology)? All in all, then, reductionism in both naive and sophisticated forms permeates all of human thought and may, at least in certain cases, be necessary to it. If so, what exactly are those cases?The papers collected in this volume are all derived from the 29th Annual Symposium of the Jean Piaget Society. The intent of the volume is to examine the issue of reductionism on the theoretical level in several sciences, including biology, psychology, and sociology. A complementary intent is to examine it from the point of view of the practical effects of reductionistic doctrine on daily life.

Changing Conceptions of Psychological Life is an interdisciplinary look at personal constructions of self. This book is a product of the 30th Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society. The contributing authors constitute the original cast invited to speak on the theme of how individuals come to construe psychological lives--their own and others. Their concerns are how our sense of ourselves emerges developmentally, culturally, and historically, and the implications such constructions have for personal, social, and political change. Together, the authors compose an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars well regarded for their work on topics as diverse as adolescence, language, aging, romance, and morality.Creating a level of discourse about selves and mind--and how they have been and should be studied--the volume is broken down into four parts; Part I includes work that is principally concerned with elevating the position of our experience of ourselves in constructing who we are. The next section focuses on the corrections presumed to exist between the conceptions of self and the conceptions of mental life. Each chapter offers additional information on the dynamics of temperament, attachment, personality, and regulation. Part III is concerned with cultural contexts that frame developing conceptions of self and mental life. Finally, the last section situates conceptions of mental life directly and dramatically in the social contexts of their making.Readers will find in these pages a programmatic effort variously attuned to selves and minds as dynamic and structured, present and represented, felt and known, non-languaged and storied, and embodied and theorized. The volume is suitable for certain upper-level undergraduate and graduate seminars dealing with clinical, cognitive, cultural, and developmental matters and sought out by active researchers and practitioners in the field.

Based on the Annual Symposium of the Jean Piaget Society, Biology and Knowledge Revisited focuses on the classic issue of the relationship between nature and nurture in cognitive and linguistic development, and their neurological substrates.Contributors trace the history of ideas concerning the relationship between evolution and development, and bring powerful new conceptual systems and research data to bear on understanding the problem of experience-contingent brain development and evolution. They focus on processes of phenotype construction - which fill the gap between genes and behavior - and demonstrate that evolutionary psychological models of innate mental modules are incompatible with what is known about these processes. This book presents exciting new approaches to the development and evolution of cognitive and linguistic abilities.Returning to the broad evolutionary theme of a previous meeting, the symposium focused on specifically constructivist approaches to neurogenesis and language acquisition, and their evolution. It was organized around ideas about the relationship between development and evolution raised in Piaget's books. Research in this arena has yielded cutting-edge insight into behavioral influences on brain plasticity.Two of its subthemes run throughout - a critique of modularity models popular among evolutionary psychologies and the prescient yet flawed nature of Piaget's critique of the modern synthesis of evolution. As a result, Biology and Knowledge Revisited is intended for developmental psychologists, psycholinguists, biological anthropologists, evolutionary psychologists, and philosophers of science.

Until recently, the body has been largely ignored in theories and empirical research in psychology, particularly in developmental psychology. Recently however, several conceptions of the relation between body and mind have been developed. Common among these conceptions is the idea that the body plays an important role in our emotional, social, and cognitive lives.This latest volume in the Jean Piaget Society Symposia Series illustrates different ways in which the concept of embodiment can be used in developmental psychology and related disciplines. It explores the role of the body in the development of meaning, consciousness, and psychological functioning. The overall goal is to demonstrate how the concept of embodiment can deepen our understanding of developmental psychology by suggesting new possibilities of integrating biological, psychological, and socio-cultural approaches.Developmental Perspective on Embodiment and Consciousness explores embodiment in two ways. First, embodiment is examined as a condition of and influencing the particular shape of psychological experience. This sense of embodiment reflects the effort to put the mind back into the body. Second, embodiment is examined as a reflective experience in the sense that the mind forms particular images about the body. This sense of embodiment reflects the effort to put the body into the mind.The book opens with a discussion of embodiment from a meta-theoretical perspective. Then the role of embodiment in grounding conceptual meaning is examined. This is followed by discussions of the role of embodiment in strengthening our understanding of emotions, cognitive development, religious experiences, and social development. Then the role of the body in spatial cognition and the role of language in the development of complex forms of consciousness are explored. The final chapters examine the impact of culture on the conceptualization of the embodied self. The book concludes with an overview of the historical context of the mind-body dualism and a discussion of how the idea of embodiment transcends this dualism.Intended for researchers and advanced students in developmental, cognitive, and social psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, anthropology, biology, and sociology, this new book also serves as a reference for advanced courses on cognition and development.

Children's play is a universal human activity, and one that serves a significant purpose in personal development.Throughout this volume, which is an extension of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society, the editors and contributors explore assumptions about play and its status as a unique and universal activity in humans.As a whole, Play and Development delves into three lines of research concerning this topic: examining these assumptions from an ethological perspective, exploring the view of research that shows play to be socially and culturally constructed, and looking at varied applications of play in the different contexts of childhood.Topics covered in this volume include:evolutionary foundations and functions of playchildren's play as cultural interpretationthe use of imagination in children's playthe imaginary companions created by children and adultsThis volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers in the fields of developmental psychology and cognitive development, and will be sought out by active researchers and practitioners in the field.

This volume considers previously separate bodies of research on social justice, social equality, and social development. Eminent scholars from a variety of disciplines discuss the latest research to help us understand the relation between social inequalities and social development. In so doing, the book documents the powerful ways that social inequalities frame development and explores the conflicts that arise in the context of these inequalities. It illustrates how people around the world make judgments about these conditions and how they resist or change the practices they deem unjust. By bringing together these perspectives, the editors hope to demonstrate how understanding social development carries with it the possibility of change and social justice.The book considers processes of social development. It examines Piaget’s ideas about morality and relates them to children’s thinking about social rights. An interdisciplinary review of research from developmental, social, and health psychology, social policy, anthropology, and philosophy, follows this introduction. Each contributor examines the historical, developmental, and social processes that influence beliefs regarding social justice and equality and the consequences of living in conditions of injustice. The book considers:Inequalities in educational and health care opportunities.Unequal rights and harassment and their effects on minorities.The hardships and inequalities encountered by women.Intended for researchers and advanced students in developmental, social, cultural, and health psychology, policy, anthropology, and philosophy interested in a world that is socially just.

In this new volume, leading researchers provide state-of-the-art perspectives on how social interaction influences the development of knowledge. The book integrates approaches from a variety of disciplines including developmental psychology, psychopathology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, evolutionary biology, and primatology. It reviews the nature and type of interactions that promote development as well as the conceptual frameworks used to explain the relation between individuals and groups. Social Life and Social Knowledge comprehensively addresses conceptual questions central to understanding human life and development:Is the human form of social life reducible to biological processes?What psychological abilities constitute the specifically human form of social life?What are the processes and contexts within which these abilities develop?How should we conceptualize the links between social life and the development of thought, and how do individuals and society contribute to these processes?The book is intended for philosophers, primatologists, anthropologists, biologists, sociologists, and developmental and educational psychologists interested in social development, social cognition, and developmental psychopathology. It also serves as a resource for courses in social development and those that focus on the intersection between cognition, development, and culture.