One of developmental psychology's central concerns is the identification of specific milestones which indicate what children are typically capable of doing at different ages. Work of this kind has a substantial impact on the way parents, educators, and service-oriented professionals deal with children; and, therefore one might expect that developmentalists would have come to some general agreement in regard to the ways they assess children's abilities. However, as this volume demonstrates, the field appears to suffer from a serious lack of consensus in this area. Based on the premise that...

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...