George Butterworth

Developmental psychology is concerned with the scientific understanding of age-related changes in experience and behaviour, not only in children, but throughout the lifespan. The task is to discover, describe and explain how development occurs, from its earliest origins into childhood, adulthood and old age. To understand human development requires one not only to make contact with human nature but also to consider the diverse effects of culture on the developing child. Development is as much a process of acquiring culture as it is of biological growth. This book reviews the history of developmental psychology with respect to both its nature and the effects of transmission of culture. The major theorists of the late 19th and early 20th century (Piaget, Vygotsky, Bowlby) are introduced to provide a background to contemporary research and the modern synthesis of nature and nurture.

The study of cognitive development in children has moved through three identifiable phases in the last twenty years ... Work on cognitive development has recently entered a third phase, in which theorists are beginning to stress an inextricable link between contextual constraints and the acquisition of knowledge. Moreover, the physical context is being reunited with the social, within the thought process. The contemporary view tends to be that cognition is typically situated in a social and physical context and is rarely, if ever, decontextualized ...