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From William James to Sigmund Freud to Jean Piaget
to B.F. Skinner, scholars (and parents!) have wondered how children
move from the blooming, buzzing confusion of infancy, through the tumult
of childhood and adolescence, into adulthood. Does development occur
continuously over time or in a series of dramatic stages? Is development
driven by learning or by biological maturational processes? What is the
nature of experience, and how does it generate change? The study of
development has always been organized around these big questions. And
answers to these questions have a profound influence on daily life,
forming a framework for how parents think about their own children, and
influencing both national policy and educational curricula.
This
book defines and refines two major theoretical approaches within
developmental science that address the central issues of
development--connectionism and dynamical systems theory. Spencer,
Thomas, and McClelland have brought together chapters that provide an
introduction, overview, and critical evaluation of each approach,
including three sets of case studies that illustrate how both approaches
have been used to study topics ranging from early motor development to
the acquisition of grammar. They also present a collection of
commentaries by leading scholars, which offer a critical view from both
an"outsiders's" and an "insider's" perspective. The book is unique in
the range of its treatment--it begins to delineate how developmental
science can incorporate advances within neuroscience and computational
modeling, and brings the new ideas of connectionism and dynamic systems
theory into sharper focus, clarifying their usefulness and explanatory
power.
Features
- The book combines introductory chapters, detailed case studies, and commentaries from leading scholars in the field.
- There is a strong focus on the processes and mechanisms
underlying developmental change. Thus, the book should be relevant to a
broad readership in developmental science.
- Commentaries are included from researchers within this domain of
expertise as well as from outside this are. This includes non-modelers
as well as researchers from other theoretical traditions (e.g.,
developmental systems theory/developmental psychobiology).
- Has a strong interdisciplinary component with ties to computer science, neuroscience, education, and cognitive science.
About the Author(s)
John P. Spencer
is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Iowa and the founding
Co-Director of the Iowa Center for Developmental and Learning Sciences.
He received a Sc.B. with Honors from Brown University in 1991 and a
Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Indiana University in 1998. He is
the recipient of the Irving J. Saltzman and the J.R. Kantor Graduate
Awards from Indiana University, the Early Research Contributions Award
from the Society for Research in Child Development, and the Robert L.
Fantz Memorial Award from the American Psychological Foundation. His
research examines the development of visuo-spatial cognition, spatial
language, working memory, and attention, with an emphasis on dynamical
systems and neural network models of cognition and action. He has had
continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health and the
National Science Foundation since 2001.
Michael S. C. Thomas
is a Reader in Cognitive Neuropsychology at Birkbeck College,
University of London, and the director of the Developmental
Neurocognition Lab at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development. He
is part of a team awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and
Further Education in 2006. Dr. Thomas received his B.Sc. in psychology
from the University of Exeter, an M.Sc. degree in cognitive science from
the University of Birmingham, and a D.Phil. in Experimental Psychology
(on behavioral and computational studies of bilingualism) at the
University of Oxford, UK. His research focuses on language and cognitive
development, and specifically neurocomputational explanations of the
variability seen in typical children and in children with developmental
disorders. His work combines behavioral methods, computational modeling,
and structural and functional brain imaging (see
www.psyc.bbk.ac.uk/research/DNL/).
James L. McClelland
received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of
Pennsylvania in 1975. He served on the faculty of the University of
California, San Diego, before moving to Carnegie Mellon in 1984, where
he became a University Professor and held the Walter Van Dyke Bingham
Chair in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. He was a founding
Co-Director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, a joint
project of Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. He served
as Co-Director until 2006, when he moved to Stanford University, where
he is now Professor of Psychology and is the founding Director of the
Center for Mind, Brain and Computation.
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Product Details
- Hardcover: 416 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press
(June 17, 2009)
ISBN-10: 0195300599
ISBN-13: 978-0195300598
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