Cognition in Children

Human cognition is a central topic in psychology. Cognition in Children tracks the development of key areas of cognition such as learning, memory, reasoning, problem solving and knowledge representation from infancy through childhood. The perspective adopted is that infants and young children have an innate bias to learn about causal relations and acquire causal explanations of everyday phenomena. This causal bias helps them to develop appropriate frameworks for organising their memories, to pick out relations which are the key to understanding the physical and biological worlds, and to reason logically according to causal principles. The emphasis is on experiments and what they can tell us about cognitive development. The author aims to provide a selective, but representative, review of some of the most interesting current work in cognitive development, grouped around themes that are familiar from adult textbooks of cognition.