ELLIOTT M. BLASS Fifteen years have passed since the first volume on developmental psychobiology (Blass, 1986) appeared in this series and 13 since the publication of the second volume (Blass, 1988). These volumes documented the status of the broad domain of scientific inquiry called developmental psychobiology and were also written with an eye to the future. The future has been revolutionary in at least three ways. First, there was the demise of a descriptive ethology as we had known it, to be replaced first by sociobiology and later by its more sophisticated versions based on quantitative...

The previous volume in this series (Blass, 1986) focused on the interface between developmental psychobiology and developmental neurobiology. The volume emphasized that an understanding of central nervous system development and function can be obtained only with reference to the behaviors that it manages, and it emphasized how those behaviors, in tum, shape central development. The present volume explores another natural interface of developmental psy chobiology; behavioral ecology. It documents the progress made by developmental psychobiologists since the mid-1970s in identifying capacities...