Piaget, Evolution, and Development (Jean Piaget Symposia Series) - Hardcover

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 global and fused, this comparative study is a flowering field of diverse disciplinary approaches, empirical phenomena, scholarly topics, and theoretical perspectives. It focuses on the comparative phylogeny, ontogeny, and history of mentation-most notably on the comparative onset and offset ages, velocity, extent, sequencing, organization of thought, symbol, and value development. The world's leading authorities on the subject discuss the implications of the study of evolution for our models of the ontogenetic origins, development, and history of mentation, as well as determine the constraints that evolution imposes on mental development.

Bringing the current interest in primate cognition to bear on studies of cognitive development in humans, this book will be of interest cognitive developmentalists, primatologists and comparitive psychologists.

Melanie Killen (University of Maryland) is Professor of Human Development and Associate Director of the Center for Children, Relationships, and Culture at the University of Maryland. She is co-editor (with Daniel Hart) of Morality in Everyday Life: Developmental Perspectives, co-editor (with Jonas Langer) of Piaget, Evolution, and Development, and editor of Children's Autonomy, Social Competence and Interactions with Adults and Children. Her research area is social and moral development, including social reasoning about group inclusion and exclusion, implicit biases about groups, and cultural influences on development.

Jennie Lee-Kim (University of Maryland) is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland. Her dissertation is on how Korean-American children evaluate parental expectations regarding boys' and girls' peer activity preferences.

Heidi McGlothlin (University of Maryland) is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland. Her dissertation is on children's implicit racial biases and the role of social experience on these types of biases.

Charles Stangor (University of Maryland) is Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland. He is co-editor (with Neil Macrae and Miles Hewstone) of Stereotypes and Stereotyping and co-editor (with Janet Swim) of Prejudice: The Target's Perspective. His research area is intergroup relations, with a focus on stereotyping and prejudice.