Understanding Cognitive Development

2015-03-19
Understanding Cognitive Development

PDF Understanding Cognitive Development Download

  • Author: Maggie McGonigle-Chalmers
  • Publisher: SAGE
  • ISBN: 1473918154
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 536

Understanding Cognitive Development provides a fresh, evidence-based research perspective on the story of children’s cognitive development in the first ten years of human life. Starting with a brief survey of the key theoretical positions that have come to define developmental psychology, the textbook then focuses on the different cognitive abilities as they emerge throughout early development. Uniquely, it examines these in terms of their interdependence; that is how skills such as perception, memory, language and reasoning relate to one another. This holistic treatment allows students to see the many important intersections in this critical phase of human life development. This textbook employs a novel design that will be of immense help to both students and instructors and is intended to be read at two levels: at the first level, it provides a fully referenced explanatory account of experimental research on cognitive development with complete attention to the needs of students who have never been exposed to experimental methodology nor studies in cognitive development before. At the second level, and mapped directly onto numbered sub-sections within the text, the author uses illustrative panels designed along the lines of PowerPoint presentations to summarise studies and key findings, employing lots of pictorial material together with bullet-points to give vividness and texture to the material covered. These panels are replicated on the accompanying companion website in PowerPoint for lecturers and students to make further use of in teaching and revision. Revision points are provided at the end of every chapter. Rich in academic coverage, including a widespread database of the most important empirical research in the field, this textbook will be essential reading for students of cognitive development and developmental psychology across psychology and education.

Understanding Piaget

1980
Understanding Piaget

PDF Understanding Piaget Download

  • Author: Mary Ann Spencer Pulaski
  • Publisher: New York : Harper & Row
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 280

Topics include a profile of Piaget, the beginnings of intelligence, the preoperational child, formal operations, etc.

Perceptual and Cognitive Development

1996-06-17
Perceptual and Cognitive Development

PDF Perceptual and Cognitive Development Download

  • Author: Rochel Gelman
  • Publisher: Academic Press
  • ISBN: 0080538622
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 454

Perceptual and Cognitive Development illustrates how the developmental approach yields fundamental contributions to our understanding of perception and cognition as a whole. The book discusses how to relate developmental, comparative, and neurological considerations to early learning and development, and it presents fundamental problems in cognition and language, such as the acquisition of a coherent, organized, and shared understanding of concepts and language. Discussions of learning, memory, attention, and problem solving are embedded within specific accounts of the neurological status of developing minds and the nature of knowledge. Research advances and theoretical reorientations are updated in the Second Edition; the revision focuses more attention on the cognitive and biological sciences and neuroscience Illustrates how the developmental approach can yield fundamental contributions to our understanding of perception and cognition as a whole Discussions of learning, memory, and attention permeate individual chapters

Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8

2015-07-23
Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8

PDF Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 Download

  • Author: National Research Council
  • Publisher: National Academies Press
  • ISBN: 0309324882
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 706

Children are already learning at birth, and they develop and learn at a rapid pace in their early years. This provides a critical foundation for lifelong progress, and the adults who provide for the care and the education of young children bear a great responsibility for their health, development, and learning. Despite the fact that they share the same objective - to nurture young children and secure their future success - the various practitioners who contribute to the care and the education of children from birth through age 8 are not acknowledged as a workforce unified by the common knowledge and competencies needed to do their jobs well. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 explores the science of child development, particularly looking at implications for the professionals who work with children. This report examines the current capacities and practices of the workforce, the settings in which they work, the policies and infrastructure that set qualifications and provide professional learning, and the government agencies and other funders who support and oversee these systems. This book then makes recommendations to improve the quality of professional practice and the practice environment for care and education professionals. These detailed recommendations create a blueprint for action that builds on a unifying foundation of child development and early learning, shared knowledge and competencies for care and education professionals, and principles for effective professional learning. Young children thrive and learn best when they have secure, positive relationships with adults who are knowledgeable about how to support their development and learning and are responsive to their individual progress. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 offers guidance on system changes to improve the quality of professional practice, specific actions to improve professional learning systems and workforce development, and research to continue to build the knowledge base in ways that will directly advance and inform future actions. The recommendations of this book provide an opportunity to improve the quality of the care and the education that children receive, and ultimately improve outcomes for children.

Culture and Cognitive Development

2015-01-28
Culture and Cognitive Development

PDF Culture and Cognitive Development Download

  • Author: Geoffrey B. Saxe
  • Publisher: Psychology Press
  • ISBN: 1317728084
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 259

Researchers examining children's mathematics acquisition are now questioning the belief that children learn mathematics principally through formalized, in-school mathematics education. There is increasing evidence that children gain mathematical understanding through their participation in out-of-school cultural practices and that their mathematics only occasionally resembles what they learn in the classroom. Culture and Cognitive Development presents the latest research by Dr. Geoffrey Saxe on this issue. In examinations of the mathematical understandings of child candy sellers in an urban center in northeastern Brazil, Dr. Saxe finds sharp contrasts between mathematics as practiced in school and in real-world settings. In this unique research project he presents a penetrating conceptual treatment of the interplay between culture and cognitive development, filling a void in current research literature. Subjects examined include: the interplay between sociocultural and cognitive developmental processes the differences between math knowledge learned in and out of the classroom the ways math learning in the classroom is modified by children's out-of-school mathematics and, correspondingly, how practical out-of-school mathematics use is modified by formal education

Understanding Other Minds

2013-08-22
Understanding Other Minds

PDF Understanding Other Minds Download

  • Author: Simon Baron-Cohen
  • Publisher: OUP Oxford
  • ISBN: 0191668796
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 520

This book comprises 26 exciting chapters by internationally renowned scholars, addressing the central psychological process separating humans from other animals: the ability to imagine the thoughts and feelings of others, and to reflect on the contents of our own mindsa theory of mind (ToM). The four sections of the book cover developmental, cultural, and neurobiological approaches to ToM across different populations and species. The chapters explore the earliest stages of development of ToM in infancy, and how plastic ToM learning is; why 3-year-olds typically fail false belief tasks and how ToM continues to develop beyond childhood into adulthood; the debate between simulation theory and theory theory; cross-cultural perspectives on ToM and how ToM develops differently in deaf children; how we use our ToM when we make moral judgments, and the link between emotional intelligence and ToM; the neural basis of ToM measured by evoked response potentials, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and studies of brain damage; emotional vs. cognitive empathy in neuropsychiatric conditions such as autism, schizophrenia, and psychopathy; the concept of self in autism and teaching methods targeting ToM deficits; the relationship between empathy, the pain matrix and the mirror neuron system; the role of oxytocin and fetal testosterone in mentalizing and empathy; the heritability of empathy and candidate single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with empathy; and ToM in non-human primates. These 26 chapters represent a masterly overview of a field that has deepened since the first edition was published in 1993.

Neuroscience of Cognitive Development

2012-06-26
Neuroscience of Cognitive Development

PDF Neuroscience of Cognitive Development Download

  • Author: Charles A. Nelson
  • Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
  • ISBN: 0471785105
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 192

A new understanding of cognitive development from the perspective of neuroscience This book provides a state-of-the-art understanding of the neural bases of cognitive development. Although the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience is still in its infancy, the authors effectively demonstrate that our understanding of cognitive development is and will be vastly improved as the mechanisms underlying development are elucidated. The authors begin by establishing the value of considering neuroscience in order to understand child development and then provide an overview of brain development. They include a critical discussion of experience-dependent changes in the brain. The authors explore whether the mechanisms underlying developmental plasticity differ from those underlying adult plasticity, and more fundamentally, what distinguishes plasticity from development. Having armed the reader with key neuroscience basics, the book begins its examination of the neural bases of cognitive development by examining the methods employed by professionals in developmental cognitive neuroscience. Following a brief historical overview, the authors discuss behavioral, anatomic, metabolic, and electrophysiological methods. Finally, the book explores specific content areas, focusing on those areas where there is a significant body of knowledge on the neural underpinnings of cognitive development, including: * Declarative and non-declarative memory and learning * Spatial cognition * Object recognition * Social cognition * Speech and language development * Attention development For cognitive and developmental psychologists, as well as students in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive development, the authors' view of behavioral development from the perspective of neuroscience sheds new light on the mechanisms that underlie how the brain functions and how a child learns and behaves.

Understanding Cognitive Development

2016-09-17
Understanding Cognitive Development

PDF Understanding Cognitive Development Download

  • Author: Barbara Landau
  • Publisher: Psychology Press
  • ISBN: 1134933967
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 427

The papers in this volume examine the state of the art in key areas of developmental cognitive neuroscience, focusing on theoretically driven research on cognition and its development. The past decade has seen an increasing number of empirical papers on the relationship between brain and cognitive development. But despite the clearly burgeoning interest in this topic, there is a relative paucity of work motivated by deep theoretical questions about the nature of cognition and its development. Many papers are still in the mode of reporting brain-cognition correlations with a focus on regional activations during brain imaging - a useful approach, but one that is limited with respect to its contributions to understanding the structure of cognition and its development. The papers in this special issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology consider a number of domains and mechanisms in cognition, including language, number, space, faces, reading, memory, and attention, and represent the wealth of approaches and techniques that can be used to shed light on the nature of cognitive development in brain and mind. These include cross-species comparisons, studies of development under experiential deprivation or genetic differences, classical developmental experimentation, and imaging techniques such as NIRS and fMRI which have recently been applied to developmental questions. The combination of solid theorizing together with a broad range of approaches allows a critical but constructive look at the latest findings in the field relevant to answering enduring questions about cognition, its development, and its realization in the developing brain.

Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development

1992-01-30
Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development

PDF Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development Download

  • Author: Frank C. Keil
  • Publisher: MIT Press
  • ISBN: 9780262610766
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 352

In Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development, Frank C. Keil provides a coherent account of how concepts and word meanings develop in children, adding to our understanding of the representational nature of concepts and word meanings at all ages. Keil argues that it is impossible to adequately understand the nature of conceptual representation without also considering the issue of learning. Weaving together issues in cognitive development, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, he reconciles numerous theories, backed by empirical evidence from nominal kinds studies, natural-kinds studies, and studies of fundamental categorical distinctions. He shows that all this evidence, when put together, leads to a better understanding of semantic and conceptual development. The book opens with an analysis of the problems of modeling qualitative changes in conceptual development, investigating how concepts of natural kinds, nominal kinds, and artifacts evolve. The studies on nominal kinds document a powerful and unambiguous developmental pattern indicating a shift from a reliance on global tabulations of characteristic features to what appears to be a small set of defining ones. The studies on natural kinds document an analogous shift toward a core theory instead of simple definition. Both sets of studies are strongly supported by cross cultural data. While these patterns seem to suggest that the young child organizes concepts according to characteristic features, Keil argues that there is a framework of conceptual categories and causal beliefs that enables even very young children to understand kinds at a deeper, theoretically guided, level. This account suggests a new way of understanding qualitative change and carries strong implications for how concepts are represented at any point in development. A Bradford Book

The Thinking Child

2013-09-02
The Thinking Child

PDF The Thinking Child Download

  • Author: Pamela May
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1136329064
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 106

What characteristics do children need to become motivated to learn? How do children’s experiences and relationships affect their cognitive development? How do you provide learning experiences that meet the developmental needs of every child in your care? The Thinking Child thoughtfully discusses the key principles of children’s cognitive and intellectual development alongside descriptions of everyday practice. It clearly explains the cognitive strategies that children use to learn new knowledge, the development of cognitive milestones such as symbolism, memories and the imagination, metacognition and creativity along with research into how the brain processes information. Throughout the book, the author considers the key characteristics of effective learning and shows how play is one of the primary mechanisms that children use to access new knowledge and to consolidate their emerging ideas and concepts. These characteristics are then applied to integral aspects of early years practice to show how pracitioners can: motivate children to learn new knowledge about themselves and the world around them; help children to develop their own ideas creatively and use this knowledge as a base to learn new things; reflect on their own teaching methods to encourage children’s engagement, motivation and creativity through effective observation and planning; engage with parents and carers to help support children’s learning at home whilst maintaining the values of the family; celebrate the uniqueness of each child and provide learning experiences that are appropriate for individuals with particular learning needs, be they physical, emotional or cognitive to ensure that every child has an equal opportunity to succeed. Emphasising the importance of understanding the theory that underpins children’s cognitive development, this accessible text shows practitioners how they can use this knowledge to provide learning opportunities that nourish children’s thinking and creative skills.