Hasil Pencarian  ::  Simpan CSV :: Kembali

Abstrak :
Only humans learn concepts like atom, integer, and democracy. But by all appearances, these abstract ideas are not present in the initial human state when babies are born. Other concepts like object, cause, or agent may be present early in infancy, if not innately. This volume explores the controversial science of human conceptual development, a traditional battleground for debates surrounding human nature. Are humans born good and tainted by an imperfect world? Or do we need to teach children to be moral? Could a concept like freedom be woven into the human soul, or is it a historical invention, constructed over generations of humans? What does it mean for a concept to be innate? Or for a concept to change? Are humans fundamentally different from other animals in how we think and reason about the world? The growing science of conceptual development seeks to explore these issues by targeting two specific questions: (1) Which human concepts constitute innate, core, knowledge? and (2) How do humans acquire new concepts, and how do these concepts change in development? This volume, written almost exclusively by developmental psychologists, documents key advances in case studies that address these questions, including ground-breaking science on language, moral reasoning, causal explanation, and human representations of objects, number, events, color, space, time, and other minds.

Abstrak :
Developmental psychology is a vast and fragmented discipline that is in dire need of a theoretical framework for thinking systematically about development. This book offers an integrative theoretical framework for thinking systematically about what happens during life span development and how life span development happens. Systems theory provides an overarching approach for conceptualizing the functioning and development of the whole person in terms of multiple and interrelated individual, social, and cultural processes. It is argued that much of what develops during development is cultural action in relation to others and that such action involves interrelations among varied domains of functioning (e.g., perception, cognition, emotion, language, social interaction, self/identity). Based on organismic-developmental theory, this conceptualization posits that development occurs in relation to cultural expectations and that action undergoes differentiation and integration during development. This conceptualization of what happens during development explicitly distinguishes between change and development and emphasizes dynamic developmental processes rather than static milestones. It is then creatively synthesized with sociocultural theory to explain how development happens through individual, social, and cultural processes. Varied examples from diverse cultures are used to explain central theoretical points and to illustrate how to use the theoretical framework to think systematically about human development. By embracing complexity and variability, the books conceptualization of action and development provides ways to address some of developmental psychologys most vexing issues and opens up exciting new directions for investigating the dynamics of human action and development.