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(More customer reviews)Traditionally, scientific psychologists have written articles, not books. Recently, this situation has changed. I believe the appearance of books on scientific psychology reflects the maturing of our field--the emergence of a body of knowledge with the coherence and depth to provide the makings of a book.
I am excited by the change, and really proud to be a part of it. I hope readers will share some of my fascination with how children come to be able to function in the spatial world.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Making Space: The Development of Spatial Representation and Reasoning (Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change)
Spatial competence is a central aspect of human adaptation. To understandhuman cognitive functioning, we must understand how people code the locations ofthings, how they navigate in the world, and how they represent and mentallymanipulate spatial information. Until recently three approaches have dominatedthinking about spatial development. Followers of Piaget claim that infants are bornwithout knowledge of space or a conception of permanent objects that occupy space.They develop such knowledge through experience and manipulation of theirenvironment. Nativists suggest that the essential aspects of spatial understandingare innate and that biological maturation of specific brain areas can account forwhatever aspects of spatial development are not accounted for at birth. TheVygotskan approach emphasizes the cultural transmission of spatial skills.NoraNewcombe and Janellen Huttenlocher argue for an interactionist approach to spatialdevelopment that incorporates and integrates essential insights of the classic threeapproaches. They show how biological preparedness interacts with the spatialenvironment that infants encounter after birth to create spatial development andmature spatial competence. Topics covered include spatial coding during infancy andchildhood; the early origins of coding distance in continuous space, of codinglocation with respect to distal external landmarks, and of hierarchical combinationof information; the mental processes that operate on stored spatial information;spatial information as encoded in models and maps; and spatial information asencoded in language. In conclusion, the authors discuss their account of spatialdevelopment in relation to various approaches to cognitive development in otherdomains, including quantitative development, theory of mind, and languageacquisition.
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