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...

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...

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? and
...

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....

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...

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.

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...